jumpingfish

As Trudy tossed and turned in the pre-dawn hours of the morning, as Charlie wandered around the house dazed and confused, as Miss Izzy tried unsuccessfully to sneak outside to bark at the night creatures, as BBC played on the radio, I was repeatedly falling back asleep. Because… well my wheels are weary.

After the sun had risen and Trudy had made coffee, I pulled myself out of bed.  I slipped into my sandals, looked out onto the backyard and announced, “There’s only one thing I’m going to do in the yard today.” (Only one thing, because there are many first-year teacher things to do today, before next week begins.)

I got the pitch fork from the garage, and I went to consolidate our two compost piles into one, both of them having cooked down over the summer to about half their original 3 foot height.

I pitched the decay from one pile into the other, periodically slapping at the fire ants nipping at my toes. We’ve had a lot of rain, lately, and the pile was wonderfully moist, and frankly mostly finished. Still, I tossed fork-load after fork-load onto the other pile… and then stopped. There was something in the original pile.

I bent over and picked up three Giant Stag Beetle grubs. 

I have mentioned these before. The larvae look exactly like a june bug grub but larger — much larger. If you’re not comfortable with bugs and critters, these are the stuff of nightmares: wet-looking, soft, curled up, with wiggling legs and nasty looking mandibles. They fill the palm of your hand.

I set the grubs on a board and I walked to the screen door. Trudy was in our almost-finished kitchen/dining room putting away dishes in the almost-finished cabinets. 

“Hey Trudy?”

“Hey David?”

“Come look at this.” 

She walked to the door and looked out. 

“Wow!” she said.

Trudy is a cheerleader of critters and bugs, and it’s been a few years since we saw evidence of these. So it was indeed a moment to celebrate: we had not just one grub, but three. She went to get her camera and came out to document the occasion.

Meanwhile, I returned to pitching loads of leaves, but progress was slow. With every fork-load, I found two or three more grubs.

As Trudy walked back into the house, I announced, “We have at least a dozen!” Minutes later, it was two dozen. And then it was more than three.

It was a veritable beetle bomb!

1. Scientists and Mathematicians

I write ‘x’ and ‘y’ on the board in blue.

“Scientists,” I say, “care about these x’s and y’s. They care about what they mean. Given the current time (x), how fast is the rocket going (y)? Given the distance downstream from the dam (x), how many fish are in the river (y)? Given the amount of pesticide (x), how many bees are there (y)? To scientists these meanings of ‘x’ and ‘y’ are at the heart of what they do.”

“But mathematicians?” I say, pausing and looking out at the students. “…not so much.”

“Of course, we will have word problems where ‘x’ and ‘y’ have a particular meaning. Of course, the math only matters if we use it. But as mathematicians, we study the relationship between the x’s and y’s without focusing too much on what they mean.”

“Today we’re beginning to look at linearly related x’s and y’s. Soon we’ll have x’s and y’s that are related quadratically and exponentially and logarithmically. For the rest of the year, we’re going to ask, “How is ‘y’ related to ‘x’? And for that, we don’t really need to know what ‘x’ and ‘y’ mean.”

“Scientists, on the other hand, care deeply about what they mean.”

I stop.

“That makes me think of something…”

2. A Video Clip

“The word ‘scientist’ makes me think of ‘laboratories’. And ‘laboratory’ makes me think of Frankenstein.”

I switch the projector from my document camera to my laptop. 

“How many of you have seen the black and white Frankenstein movie?” I ask.

In all of my periods, only one student raised her hand. (When that particular period was over, I heard her explain what the movie was about to one of her friends as they left my classroom.)

I explain how the story was originally a book by Mary Shelley and how it is a story about creation and the meaning of life and what it means to be human. Then I expand Youtube to full screen.

Thunder is crashing. Lightning is flashing. Victor Frankenstein is standing in his lab coat staring at the ceiling where his creature is exposed to the storm. He lowers the gurney back into the laboratory. The camera zooms in on the creature’s hand hanging limply to one side.

A finger moves. I hear my students gasp. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what comes next. 

Dr. Frankenstein stares closely at the moving fingers.

“Look,” he says. “It’s moving,” whispering so quietly that I have to repeat it to the class. (Since my classroom audio isn’t working, I use my laptop audio which is hard to hear.)

“It’s alive,” he says, clenching his fists and shaking with excitement. And then he shouts (and this is the classic part)…

“It’s alive. It’s alive! It’s alive!!”

At that point, I pause the video. I don’t think the students know what to think. 

“This is a classic scene,” I tell them. “You should know it. And better yet, when one of your friends discovers something (maybe in a science project) or gets excited about something new, you can say…”

It’s alive. It’s alive! It’s alive!!

The median score on the first test was not good. It revealed the extent to which many of my students just weren’t getting what I was trying to teach.

I was convinced that I was doing something fundamentally wrong, despite reassurances from all the other math teachers that this is a common reality we are up against, that it wasn’t my teaching. Hearing that helped, but it seemed obvious to me that I had to do something.

So Friday, we didn’t move on to inequalities. Instead, we spent a third day on absolute values — this time, done differently.

“Here’s what we’re going to do today…” I told the kids. I explained how we were going to work problems together as a class, with each of them coming up to the board to contribute.

As you might imagine, they looked at me in horror. Then I told them how we were going to do it. 

We’d start with the last problem on the sheet they had been working on (mostly unsuccessfully) the day before. One by one, we’d set up each of the problems, working backward thru the list. Our focus was going to be on the set-up part of the problem: we weren’t going to completely work them but rather set them up so that the solving part left undone was something they already knew how to do.

I listed the steps in our (new) set-up process on the board. They were tiny steps.

“The first step,” I explained, “is to copy the problem onto the board. One of you will do that. The others should check that they copied it correctly. And that’s it for that step.”

“The next step is to draw a wide horizontal line and a vertical line under it. Someone else will do that — which is kind of like “art”. And that’s it for that step.”

“The next step is to draw a circle…”

“The next step is…”

Then I proceeded to explain the other microscopic steps. I pointed to the list of steps I had written on the board in the morning. I explained how they would help each student at the board, how none of them would be alone when it was their turn, how we would back them up, how this was not a math performance, how it was a group project.

“We are doing this together,” I said.

Then I called on one of them randomly to kick things off. Then another for step two. Then another. And another. Sometimes the students would raise their hands to volunteer (often for the steps that involved drawing lines, but later for more substantial stuff). Sometimes they would call on the next person themselves. And sometimes the student I called on was too shy to come forward, so I just asked them to tell me what to write from their seats.

It worked. Magnificently.

The classroom was loud. The kids laughed. When they volunteered, they jumped out of their seats. Some of them began to work the problems in little groups so they could be ready in case I called on one of them. They got to choose their own whiteboard marker colors. They got to choose how large (or small) to write. They got to turn and ask for help.

And in each of the six periods that day, with only a few exceptions, every student came to the board (some of them several times) to work on math.

It was a good third day of absolute values.

It’s late at night. I had a cold brewed coffee in the late afternoon as I graded papers. It was after 3:00. Caffeine after 3:00: not a good idea, he says, with nary a wink of sleep coming over him.

It’s an hour before midnight. The full moon is rising and marching with Mars across the sky. A hot wind in blowing in the parched leaves of the Walnut, Ash and Oak trees. 

I’m wide awake. So I might as well tell you a story…

On Friday, I taped numbers to the desks at school. I did this to better connect the faces and names of my 150 students. Black numbers hand-drafted on white squares of paper with a blue border. (The border was a flourish that I had added on a whim, because I have a wonderful big-brush pastel blue marker.)

I put white card stock underneath the white squares when I drew the blue border around the black numbers. And after brushing four borders on 30 squares, the card stock was a randomish mishmash of pastel blue lines and dots and miscellaneously shaped marks where the brush had marked beyond the edges.

At the end of sixth period, I put the marked up card stock under the document camera. The image projected on the screen.

“Here is my modern art for the day,” I said.

There was momentary silence, and then one of the boys in the room said, “It speaks to me.”

That is my story. The moon has advanced beyond the periphery of the canopy of the Walnut tree. The caffeine is still speaking. It’s going to be a long night.

So the first week of school was pretty good.

Sure, there were a few heads down on the desks. And I did collect some phones and ear buds and a book that a student had in their lap. But there was nothing that pushed the limits. Push-the-limits events — belligerence, aggression, cursing… — have been my big question marks. And I didn’t have to deal with any. 

We all know that that day will come. But not having to deal with it at the outset was terrific. What’s more, I actually caught myself with a smile on my face on the way out of school on day one. That counts for something, eh?

The only downside was something that all teachers will understand: my feet are so sore!