On a dime

It's truly amazing how quickly things can change, on a dime, as the old saying goes. This week has proven that.

Monday was one of the most frustrating days of the year. The High Level Task was a difficult one -- it would have been difficult for a class of high-achieving, non-apathetic, English as a First Language students -- and it drained me. It drained my energy, my patience, and our class time. Just going over the directions took forever. I wanted them to repeat the directions to me, in their own words, to make sure they understood what to do. So we spent a LONG time on each step of the directions. Then we did a couple of example steps, so they would know how they were supposed to record their explorations.

Finally, I gave them the green light to start the task with their groups. With most groups, you would have thought I had merely handed them the paper and said, "Go."

Most of the class (BOTH classes) were utterly clueless. They didn't know what to do, they were moving their token the wrong way on the 1,000 scroll, they were either not recording things at all, or recording them the wrong way.

I was majorly frustrated.

Then on Tuesday, something clicked. The kids were participating. They were telling me correct answers. They were showing their work on the paper. We seemed to have achieved something.

Wednesday was great, too. It was a review day for the Unit 1 post-test. We went over place value, pictographs, number forms, greater than and less than, number patterns. The kids were telling me how to show their work. They were creating and labeling pictographs. They seemed completely set for today's test.

Then Bam, they must have hit another dime. I was again majorly frustrated today, this time with their efforts on the test. Granted, some of the kids did a great job, but in the case of my morning class especially, I was mentally screaming as I walked around the room seeing kid after kid filling in answer bubbles with absolutely no work shown. The second question was a pictograph - something we had JUST done so well on the day before - and only a handful of students were labeling the pictures before choosing an answer.

Even when I made a big deal about NOT just choosing an answer choice without showing any work, I still had kids who just filled in a bubble and then waited for the next question.

If looks could kill, I'd have multiple counts of manslaughter against me today.

Thankfully, they can't, so I just have multiple fragments of a major headache.

Bad Mood Bear

Why is it that I always seem to be in the worst moods on days after I've had a substitute? I was totally upset with my homeroom before 8:00 this morning, and my afternoon class didn't fare much better.

An extremely large part of this stemmed from the fact that almost none of the kids seemed to have done what they were supposed to yesterday, a day that I was out of the classroom attending a training. We have been working on a packet of 2-step word problems all week long, and their task yesterday was to complete the last 2 pages. There were 3 problems on each page, making a total of 6 problems to complete.

This was very nearly ALL that I had left for the substitute yesterday, meaning that the kids had nearly 2 hours to complete these 6 problems. Granted, they were two-step problems, where the answer choices were incomplete number sentences (ie, 24+35-17) that they had to solve first. In class Monday-Wednesday, these problems took the kids 10-20 minutes each to complete.

Give that parameter, I could understand a few kids not quite finishing the last problem. But aside from the four kids in my homeroom (NONE in my afternoon class) who finished all 6 problems, hardly anybody else was even close to finishing the two pages! Most of the kids didn't even finish the FIRST page! A couple of kids didn't even do ANY of the problems on those pages, because they didn't follow directions, instead working on another page.

The sub had posted directions on the board with the correct page numbers, so I know that the kids had been told what they needed to do. Also, except for a few kids who had been pulled for eye exams, nobody spoke up to tell me anything like, "The sub didn't tell us what to do!" or "The sub made us play games and color all day long!"

On top of all that, there were 3 kids in my homeroom and 2 in my afternoon class who did not bring completed homework. I've written at length about homework on this blog, and even gotten advice and strategies from other teachers. I know I should probably adopt the attitude of "any homework turned in is gravy," but I am not to that point yet. Especially with this one.

Our school's policy is to give math homework on Tuesdays and Thursdays every week. This Tuesday, I passed out a homework with 5 two-step word problems on it. I told the kids that I knew these problems took a lot of time and that I was going to be very nice and give them extra time. That this homework was due not on Wednesday, but on Friday. That there would be no homework on Thursday. That they had 3 days to complete all 5 problems.

I then stressed that this was important practice for the test we'd be having Friday (today). That there would be no excuses at all accepted for not completing it and bringing it on Friday. That they needed to do ALL 5 and show all the work, the way we've been practicing. That anyone who DID, would have a chance to win the plants we've been observing in science. That anyone who did NOT, would get a code in their conduct folder, would get a zero in the gradebook, would lose recess and have to clean the cafeteria after lunch for 2 weeks, would have to explain to our assistant principal why they had not done the homework.

I thought I had gone fire-and-brimstoney enough for all of them, but I still had those 5 come unprepared this morning. 2 of them had done some of the problems, but not all. The other 3 claimed to have done the homework at home, but that they had forgotten to bring it. Crazily enough, they all had their homework FOLDERS, just not the homework. I asked how often they bring a lunchbox with no food in it, but I think the sarcasm was lost on them.

One of the boys also initially told me that he did the homework but forgot to bring it. He then changed his story to say that his pencil had broken and that he therefore could not finish the problems. According to his sob story, he only had that one pencil at home, and his one and only pencil sharpener was in the shop as well.

At lunchtime, I took these 5 kids down to the assistant principal's office to make good on THAT promise. She asked them when I had given them the homework, and none of the kids could even tell her that! I asked them what days I assigned math homework, and they looked at me cluelessly, before beginning to guess. Wednesday? Thursday? Saturday?

Yeah, the kids with the broken pencil and sharpener said that I give them homework on Saturdays. I almost asked the AP if she still REALLY needed me to turn in my forecast of who would be passing TAKS.

She then asked the kids one at a time what their excuse was. There was the forgetting. There was blaming the mom. ("I gave it to my mom to look at, and she didn't give it back to me!") One kid stated matter-0f-factly, "Because I was too lazy." I almost cracked up at that one.

I don't think I've ever signed so many conduct folders in one day. Only 3 kids escaped with no code today. Should have been 4, but one of the kids who DID his work yesterday didn't get his conduct folder signed last night!

I suppose if there's any silver lining to this, it's that I saved on candy. I give a piece of candy to everyone who didn't get any codes each week. Last week, I gave out around 20 candies. This week, 3.

Bring on the weekend.

Words escape me

Today was NOT the greatest Friday in the world. By 8:20, I had already put one kid in time out in another classroom, ripped up one kid's homework and thrown it across the room, and taken two kids down the hallway to the phone to call their parents.

I've had better mornings, to say the least.

My rage just continued to simmer all morning long because of my homeroom's seeming apathy about their education. We've been studying number forms this week. Standard form, expanded form, and word form. For most of the 3rd graders, this is the first time they have been required to know how to read a 4, 5, or 6 digit number. On Tuesday, we went over expanded form, and Wednesday and Thursday, we went over word form.

Expanded form never ceases to frustrate me. It is, quite possibly, the absolute SIMPLEST type of problem in all of 3rd grade. It involves adding, every question has plus signs in it, to remind you to add, just in case you forgot, and mostly, you are adding zeros!! A typical question is "What number is represented by 300,000 + 20,000 + 500 + 40 + 8?"

Year after year after year, I have kids that stumble all over these problems, merely because of the fact that they refuse to actually add the numbers. They would rather cherry pick the first digit off of every "piece" and string those numbers together. For the above question, I would get a ton of answers that read 32,548. (Or worse, 3,2548)

I pull my hair out, grind my teeth, and stress out big time while I plead and cajole and try to convince them that if they would just stack these numbers up vertically and add them, they would get the right answer every time. I am usually successful in this endeavor during the day or two that we practice expanded form in class, and sometimes I can get the kids to do it on their homework for that night. When the test rolls around, all bets are off.

Going over the word form strategy on Wednesday and Thursday, I felt I was making some progress. It's overwhelming at first for the kids to see these large numbers and even larger strings of words. But I have a strategy called "Three easy boxes" where we chunk the numbers and words into 3-digit groups, and when the kids do this, they are almost always successful.

Yesterday, I worked with small groups for the first time this year. I was pretty pleased with myself, as time management and small groups are among my weak points that I'm trying to improve on. The kids I worked with got it, and they were telling me all the steps while they did three easy boxes on the number words and turned them into standard form. Before each class dismissed, I passed out the homework, and we did a couple of example problems so that they kids would know exactly what I expected to see.

So this morning, I was incredibly disappointed to find that ONE out of my 15 homeroom students had done her homework correctly. I have 17 in my homeroom, but 2 were absent, so I have no idea if they did it right. And I don't mean that the other 14 wrote down the wrong numbers, I mean that the other 14 didn't try to turn the words into numbers at all. They just bubbled in answers.

Some of the kids hadn't even done the work on the problems that I did in class.

One girl had done nothing BUT the 2 problems that we did together in class, and she said, "Oh, were we supposed to do the other ones?" I had to struggle very hard not to use adult language. Instead, I marched her down to the phone. Call number 1.

I told the kids that I had planned on giving them a little inside recess at the end of the class, but that instead, that time would be used at the beginning, for them to work on their homework, doing it the right way. After about 15 minutes, which involved the second call and placing the third kid in time out in another room, we went over most of the homework problems, which involved doing the strategies of changing words to numbers over and over and over. Over and over and over, I kept saying, "This is what I expect to see on your tests. THIS is the work I want to see BEFORE you fill in a bubble."

When the test started, it was as if I had never spoken a word about it. I walked around and had to stop by about 8 kids' desks, noticing that they had filled in bubbles for questions 1 and 2 without showing a lick of work. No stacking and adding, no three easy boxes, NOTHING.

I understand that these kids are babies at the beginning of the year. Understanding that is not the same as liking it, though, and I was in a terrible mood for the whole morning.

The spelling test went just as poorly, but I won't even go into that.

My afternoon class walked in, and as they did their calendar activities, I started glancing at homeworks to check their work. The first I flipped over looked just like the morning class's. My heart sank. The next one I flipped had all of the work completely done. So did the next, and the next, and the next. Out of the 15 kids in the afternoon class, only 3 had NOT done their work correctly.

After wanting to punt my morning class through the nearest uprights, I just wanted to hug this second class.

I still had a lot of the same issues during the test. For some reason, there is a major disconnect with 3rd graders between work in class and work on tests. But I was a lot more pleased and proud of the 2nd group.

The other high point of my day involved a nice little piece of evidence that I now have in my possession.

One of the kids in the morning class told me that he was going to do the homework the way we practiced it in class, but his mother had told him not to do it that way. I explained that since she wasn't present in class to see how we did things, that HE would have to be the one to show her how we did these problems. He kept saying that she told him not to do it that way. I kept telling him that if she said that, he needed to tell her, "This is the way Mister Teacher says we have to do it."

Eventually, he said, "She said not to listen to the teacher."

Oh, really?? I asked him to repeat it, and then I repeated it myself to be sure. "Your mom actually told you not to listen to your teacher?"

He nodded his head. So I went and got a piece of paper and told him to write that down, explaining the whole time that I wanted to be able to show that paper to his mom when we sat down to talk, and that I wanted to be able to show that paper to the principal and assistant principal when they asked about his work.

Most kids would back away from a claim like that at this point. But my munchkin persisted, and wrote down his statement.

Should be very interesting next week to actually talk to his mom and verify or shoot down this claim.

Feeling the Monday blahs

At least I hope it is just the Monday blahs. I have felt really down today. Maybe it is partly because I am recovering from a cold. Maybe it is partly because I feel sore all over (either from volleyball or pulling weeds?). Maybe it is because I didn't sleep well last night.

But I think it is mostly due to the fact that I came into my classroom - after being absent on Friday - to find chairs in disarray, desks with papers falling out, a whole box of kleenex gone, a bottle of hand sanitizer broken and empty...

And then I have the kids that just beat me down this year. The kids who fail the tests, who don't do their homework, who don't pay attention, and who just don't care. I know that there are always kids who struggle, but I think part of my mini-depression is that we have spent a solid 2 weeks on subtraction and regrouping, and I had 6 kids who absolutely BOMBED the test. Despite the fact that I worked extensively with these kids in small groups, and they could do it when they were with me, they just didn't care enough to do it the right way on the test!

I feel like the average to high kids in my class are really getting gypped because I am always having to slow down to get one of these lower kids back on track, or just onto the track in the first place. Yet I am not quite at a point where I just want to leave these low kids to totally fall behind.

I'm just frustrated. Incredibly frustrated. And unlike previous years, I am having a lot of trouble finding the humor in daily activities with this group.

I also saw the future of some of my kids today after work. I stopped by Subway, and the guy making my sandwich made me think of how some of my kids are going to be in about 10 years. This guy didn't have a clue as to what he was doing. I had to point out that he hadn't put enough slices of turkey on the bread, and he seemed to be having trouble counting out the tomatoes. Thankfully, someone else was working the cash register.

Maybe Tuesday will be kinder and gentler...

Practice like you play

Am I showing my age by titling my post with that old adage, "Practice like you play?" I mean, do kids nowadays just not GET that, or do they not HEAR it very often except from old fogies like me?

I probably don't use those actual words too often in class. After all, the kids tend to hear the word "play" and think "run around outside like chickens with their heads cut off" as opposed to "taking the TAKS test." However, I emphasize the meaning of the words all the time.

For as much good as it seems to do...

I find it very frustrating when we've spent an entire week of our lives going over the steps for labelling a picture representation of a fraction ( ?/total ), practicing it in class, honing the skill, doing it on homework and classwork, and then when we take a test and there is a fraction question, the kids just pick an answer without drawing a picture, without labelling an existing picture, oftentimes without even circling (and thereby acknowledging recognition of) the word "fraction!!"

I have tried pleading with them.

Me: Please, if you want to do your best, you need to do it the way we've been practicing, NOT by closing your eyes and doing eeny-meeny-miney-moe!

I have tried scolding them.

Me: If you're not going to do the steps and strategies that we've learned and practiced in class, what was the point of last week??

I've tried giving them analogies. (without burdening their brains with the actual word "analogies)

2 of my favorites are as follows:

The Baseball Coach --
Imagine if I was your baseball coach, and you were on my team. I've spent all this time teaching you the right way to hold the bat, the right way to stand at the plate, the right way to swing and hit the ball so that you get a homerun every time. All of that practice, and you know exactly what you need to do to get a homerun.

But then when we have our first game, you decide to stand with your back to the plate, holding the bat by the wrong end, swinging it like a golf club (I of course pantomime all of this).

You MIGHT get lucky and hit the ball. Probably not, but you might. But you certainly aren't going to do your best and hit a homerun that way.


The Piano Teacher --
Imagine if you were taking piano lessons from me. Every day, we've practiced how to play a song, where you put your fingers on the keys, how fast you need to play, how to move your hands. After practicing so much, you know exactly what you need to do to play the song beautifully.

Then, on the day, of a big recital in front of your family and a big crowd, you decided to sit down at the piano and start pounding the keys with your elbows (again, pantomimed, with cacaphonous sound effects).

Why would you do that on the day when it counts, after practicing the RIGHT way for so very long??

Every time I tell these stories, the kids laugh and tell me, "No, Mister Teacher, that would be silly! Why would anyone do that??"

Yet, getting these kids to show their work on a test (or even homework sometimes) -- work that we have practiced for days, weeks, or months -- is like pulling the back teeth of a narwhale!

I feel like this is where so much of the frustration of teachers comes into play. The teaching is great, the imparting of wisdom is great. I enjoy showing the kids how to figure out a certain type of problem, and what strategies can make it even easier.

I just don't get why it is so incredibly difficult to get them to actually do these simplifying steps on their own!

The noticably less than Amazing Race

I had a frustrating day.

Not so much that I threw a marker across the room or kicked the lockers -- but I definitely thought about it. More than once. In fact, at one point, I did actually walk out of my room and offer up a silent Edward-Munch-like Scream in frustration rather than literally kick the lockers out in the hallway.

What has me so frustrated is my afternoon class's apparent apathy towards all things school related. I feel like I should bring in a crate of Zyrtec tomorrow, because my kids seem to be allergic to thinking.

Oh, but they certainly like to race to be first! When I ask an open-ended question, oh how they race to be the first to answer. Nevermind whether or not the answer is in any way, shape, or form reasonable -- all that matters is that they were first.

"Is 3 smaller than 10?" I'll ask.

"YES!!" 1 or 2 of them will shout. 5 or 6 will then do their best parrot impersonation and shout the same thing.

When I look at them strangely and ask again, incredulously, most will change their answer to "NO!" but I can see the furtive look behind the eyes of the front-runners that tells me they are thinking that they're the bomb now, they got their answer out first.

And then I have the kids that like to race to be done with their work first. They whip out answers to all the problems, then sit there staring at me, as if to say, "What else ya got?" Usually, when I go look at their answers, there are several mistakes, but these kids would never know it because they don't ever look at what they've written down.

I would tell them, "Great job, kiddo! You're so awesome at being first that I think you'll be in my class again NEXT year!!" but I feel like irony is lost on them.

Besides, they'd probably like the fact that they would be the first in the class to be retained...

Calgon, take me away!!!

Only four days into the new school year, and already I am flustered. Maybe I just forget every year exactly how hard it is to get the ball rolling once again, or maybe I just didn't prepare well enough over the past few weeks, or perhaps, like the Grinch, my heart is just three sizes too small. I kind of doubt it's the last one though.

But at any rate, I find my patience being greatly tested. I thought that the first week or two of school is supposed to be the "honeymoon period," but if what I have seen so far is GOOD behavior, then I'm very worried about what the future holds.

I have 21 kids in my morning class, and 18 and my afternoon class. A rather large number of these kids can be classified as "challenges." And the majority of them don't seem to be anywhere near the point of shaking off the summer stupor. The math work that we have done so far this week hasn't been difficult in the least, yet I've had to cajole even the simplest responses out of most of these kids.

For instance, when we tackled our first word problem on Tuesday, we read the problem together as a class, and then I asked, "Who can raise their hand and tell me one of the important numbers and units we see in this problem?"

Three hands were slowly raised, while everyone else blinked in confusion as if a flash-bang grenade had been thrown into the room. Actually, I take that back. There were only a few looks of confusion. There were a lot more kids who were just dully staring at me with a look in their eyes that clearly said, "Just call on someone who's raising their hand, and leave the rest of us alone."

I'm talking no effort whatsoever here. To a question that basically amounts to, "Say the number that you see printed before you." I couldn't help but think about the old Saturday Night Live Celebrity Jeopardy skit where the fake Alex Trebek would throw up his hands in desperation and shout, "Just say any number, it doesn't matter what it is!"

It's incredibly frustrating. And I go to school every day wanting to be the fun, inspirational teacher who gets the kids excited about math and who always has a fun, hands-on activity planned. Along the lines of a Ms. Frizzle. But then I get bogged down in the enforcement of the rules. When I have to literally repeat everything that I say 3 to 7 times because everyone is not listening, and as soon as I break eye contact with one kid, they tune out. When it takes us 45 minutes to read one page out of the science book, because nearly every time I call on someone to read, they don't know where we are because they weren't following along in their book. When I state, for the fifth time in under 10 minutes, "I need you all to read along with your eyes in the book while someone is reading out loud. I don't want to see anyone looking around the room, playing with their pencils, or looking at me while someone else is reading" -- yet as soon as the reader begins again, there are no less than four children staring into space.

Man, this has just turned into a complaining rant. I think that I'm an effective teacher, but I'm not a great classroom manager. Maybe if I taught somewhere where I had a class of kids who actually followed the rules, with only one or two behavior problems, where I could spend most of my time actually teaching, I would feel more confident in my abilities. But sometimes I just feel like I'm slogging through quicksand, wearing concrete boots.

One concrete example of the lack of problem-solving capacity that I am already facing this year, and then I'm out of here. One of the girls in my afternoon class came into my room bawling yesterday. I escorted her out into the hallway and away from the class to give her some room and some time to compose herself while the rest of the class got settled in and started on the bell ringer activity. Then I went back out to talk with her about what was going on.

She told me that she was crying because she had gotten in trouble for talking in the hall. I asked her, quite rationally I thought, what she could maybe do to prevent that from happening again. She stared at me, dumbfounded. I prompted her, "Do you have any ideas?" She just gave me that minuscule shoulder shrug that seems to speak volumes. "You got in trouble for talking in the hallway, right?" I asked her. When she nodded, I continued, "So what do you think you should do so that you DON'T get into trouble again?"

Nothing. She had absolutely no answer for me. And it's not like she was being sullen and refusing to speak. She really and truly didn't have any clue on how she could avoid getting into trouble for talking in the hall.

The really sad thing is, this girl seems like she is one of the brighter kids in my class…