{"id":5374,"date":"2019-03-10T10:19:17","date_gmt":"2019-03-10T16:19:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/?p=5374"},"modified":"2019-03-10T10:23:47","modified_gmt":"2019-03-10T16:23:47","slug":"draw-tell-keep-trip-confess-teach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/2019\/03\/10\/draw-tell-keep-trip-confess-teach\/","title":{"rendered":"Draw Tell Keep Trip Confess Teach"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes I draw cartoonish stick figures on the notes we write in class. Stick figures pointing up at a table and saying, “Hey, we did that last week.” Stick figures holding a figure in the air and saying, “Yes! That’s right.” Stick figures pointing at a logarithm and thinking “Yuck!” in a big red thought bubble off to the side as an explicit acknowledgement that logarithms look weird. <\/p>\n

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Sometimes I tell stories from when I used to develop software. Stories of working in Houston on space projects. Stories about Mission Control and about programming languages. Stories about raising a son when I only got to see him every other weekend, as an explicit acknowledgement that teachers aren’t perfect and that life is hard.<\/p>\n

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I keep a notebook for each period. A notebook with a table of contents that has page numbers and dates. A notebook that has a banner at the top of each day’s work, summarizing what we’re doing that day. A notebook that students can take pictures of or get from classmates if they miss class. A notebook that shows indirectly what it means to be organized, what it means to think clearly, what it means to communicate.<\/p>\n

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Sometimes I trip over myself in class. The students giggle, and they see that I couldn’t care less. When students get up to sharpen pencils while I’m making a few announcements at the beginning of class, I smile and roll my eyes slightly and tell them to go ahead and sharpen their pencils, because heck, “They’re sharpening a tool that they’re about to use to follow my lead,” and why would that upset any teacher? To teach humility.<\/p>\n

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Once, I confessed that I like to spell the word, through, as “thru” but that I’d never do that in the classroom. And I step back and look at the word on the board and ask “What’s up with that -gh!?” and explain my pseudo-history of English when Anglo-Saxon germanic merged with Norman french and how the German word for “through” is “durch” and I walk them through a pseudo-linguistic derivation: durch<\/em> → thurch<\/em> → thruch<\/em> → thru<\/em> at which point I widen my eyes in mock shock and put my hand over my mouth. And some of them chuckle. To demonstrate the value of understanding even little things.<\/p>\n

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And every day of course, I teach them some algebra. Because that’s what I was hired to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes I draw cartoonish stick figures on the notes we write in class. Stick figures pointing up at a table and saying, “Hey, we did that last week.” Stick figures holding a figure in the air and saying, “Yes! That’s right.” Stick figures pointing at a logarithm and thinking “Yuck!” in a big red thought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5374"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5374"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5378,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5374\/revisions\/5378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}