She came into my room to ask a question. I forget what it was, but let’s say it was something about an incorrect grade — a not uncommon event but one that can easily be fixed.
I told her I’d fix it.
She smiled and said, “Thank you.” She always smiles. And she always says thank you.
As she left the room, she turned around and said, “Write it down, Mr. Hasan.”
They so know.
Two students were working on an assignment. They hovered over the handout, holding yellow pencils and talking in hushed voices.
“See, you divide by a fraction right here,” one said.
“But that’s the hard way,” the other replied after a moment’s delay.
You see, fractions are a mystery to most of them. Their understanding of numbers consists of three categories: integers, decimals, and fractions, and they seem to think these are distinct concepts.
The sight of fractions causes many of them give up. And division by fractions is a flagrant abomination.
“That really is the hard way,” the second student repeated.
“Yes,” the first conceded, “but I like to do things the hard way.”
Correction: division by fractions is an abomination to most of them.
yellow+red
arms+hands
voice+words
How amazing was that?
REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque (via: Times of San Diego)
“I did the assignment,” she said in an email.
She’s pretty good at keeping up with her grades. And when she sees something that she thinks is wrong, she lets me know. I depend on that.
“Thanks for letting me know,” I replied.
I checked Google Classroom, suspecting that I might have forgotten to copy her Google Classroom score into our grading system.
(The life of a teacher is peppered with such manual interventions to compensate for school district budgets that can’t afford to pay for “seamless integration”. After all, why pay for expensive automation when inexpensive teachers can do it by hand. And teachers are so accustomed to doing whatever’s necessary, that they just deal with it. And so we log into one system, open a PDF file, copy what we see, log out, log into another system, and paste in what saw. Log out. Dang, I’ve digressed…)
I brought up the assignment and clicked on her name. There was nothing there.
“I don’t see your assignment.”
“Well I remember doing it.” No doubt she did.
Here’s the thing of it (and this I thought only to myself)…
There is a difference between doing it and turning it in. And, there is a difference between clicking the turn-in button and confirming that is got turned in. (As in: don’t close the browser window until your credit card purchase has completed.)
“Make sure you turned it in,” I suggested.
A day later, her assignment appeared in Google Classroom.
Objectively, there are many steps to remember. Many things that can go wrong. Some students get it and some don’t. Many must throw up their hands and give up.
Get a laptop. Get a hotspot. Turn them on. Log in. Get them to talk to each other. Did you sync with the campus network first? Get the Google Classroom code. Were you on Zoom that day? Check your Google Classroom to-do list. Open the assignment. Read the PDF. Solve the problems on separate sheets of paper. Take pictures of all your work. Attach the pictures to the assignment. Click the turn-in button. Make sure the turn in succeeds.
Yep. Many steps.
I am reminded of an old video about a medieval monk help desk technician explaining the new “book” system that was replacing the old “scroll” system. A struggling monk throws up his hands in exasperation.
If you haven’t seen it, you really must. It captures the challenges that many of our families are facing. (It also captures perfectly the life of a help desk technician.)
He stood gazing at the bulletin board outside our classroom.
It’s covered in drawings and descriptions that some of the kids drew and wrote. Of Deep Space Network antennas and black holes. Of Chicxulub crater and pyroclastic flow and the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain. Of kabuki and syncopation and the Royal Drums of Burundi. Of the Pillars of Creation and multiverses.
Perhaps he was wondering where the math was, or perhaps he got it.
That was the other day. On the next, the school went into quarantine. Students testing positive. Students in contact with them. Faculty testing positive. Faculty in contact with them. Staff testing positive. Staff in contact with them. So on that next day, they distributed laptops and hotspots to all the students during the last period of the day and sent everyone home not to return for a week and a half.
Today there was no one to admire the bulletin board.
Was that the wrong dream for this particular day?
On a day of dreams of freedom and peace. Of casting aside manacles and chains. On this day of struggle. Of black and white. Of justice. Was this the wrong day for that dream?
You might say so. That the day should not be stolen. Should not be repurposed for Covid or Zoom complaints, as legitimate as they might be.
But I say it was a fine day for it. Because dreams of freedom and dreams of peace, dreams of overcoming, these dreams will never come to pass as long as our children are isolated. The dreams we dream on this day in particular, demand that all our children come together again.
Oh, Rachel Martin and Kwame Alexander in the morning. I haven’t felt this way about words on the radio since John Ciardi’s.
We woke up to Rachel and Kwame’s challenge this morning. How about this…
I dream a world where all
my students walk into our room.
I dream a world where we
come together and no longer meet in Zoom.
Doggerel yes, but sincerely felt. These students are the pulse of my life, and I so miss seeing them all together.
“Mister,” said a disembodied voice from the monitor on the wall.
This rarely happens. So few remote students speak up. Certainly none as loudly.
“It’s Yolanda!” a student in the front row said.
“Go ahead, Yolanda. What’s up?”
“Mister, is that because…”
She proceeded to ask a question related to simplifying square roots. It was a fine question — the best of the day. Perhaps everyone else was wondering the same thing.
“That’s a good question,” I said. “Think of it this way…”
A few minutes later, she asked another good question. And a few minutes after that, yet another.
Oh, I so hope that she keeps this up. Maybe it will be contagious.
A message popped up. It was from a student who has recently gone remote again. Many students are going remote again — some because their families are no longer willing to accept the risks, others because the school is doing contact tracing on kids testing positive. But I digress.
A message had popped up. The subject said “Test”, and since we recently had a quiz, I took a look. There was some kind of matrix with filled in bubbles.
Wait. What?
Down further there were a few measures of (not too many) notes.
Clearly meant for some other teacher, right? Maybe not, since I had recently been talking to band and choir kids about music and math (counterpoint, Bach, syncopation, … throat singing).
“Did you mean to send this to me?” I replied.
“Sorry. I meant to send it to Mr Davis.”
Whew. I was worried she was subtly testing me and that I had failed.
The bell had just rung. The students were settling in. Sixth period is always a little rowdy at the beginning, and this day was no exception. Suddenly one of the students was shouting.
“Mr. Hasan! What are these letters?”
The others looked over. He was holding the class notes up with both hands.
“They’re … curly.”
“Ah yes,” I said.
And with that, they met alpha, beta, and gamma.
© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License