ChiSny's Blog

Stuff We Like

2010-09-28T21:43:00.000-07:00

These guys are really amazing. If you haven't had a chance to see their stuff, you're missing out.

Two roads that too often run askew, math and pop culture, intersect here. Their data analysis is both clever and accessible. If you don't find their insights interesting, well, I don't want to find myself talking to you at a cocktail party.

I finally worked their material into a lesson plan. It came from their latest post. I posted stuff black people like on the board, and asked my students to guess what it was showing. I got some interesting guesses. I explained how these guys run a free online dating service so they can research dating trends. I told them this was from an article called "The real stuff white people like"...They chuckled. I told them they were looking at the things that were most likely to come up in the profiles of black males. I asked them what they noticed. Within minutes, we were talking about font size. They were polishing their estimating and proportional reasoning skills. I was asking questions like how many times more likely a black male was to list Lupe Fiasco to Busta Rhymes. We examined the trends in the races represented in my class.

I asked what this had to do with math. One of my classes played right into my hands: 'NOTHING!'
I told them I'd prove to them it has everything to do with math. I gave them an index card, asked them to write a survey question down about interests, hobbies, or something fun. I got a lot of good questions, ones that I wouldn't have thought of on my own. I turned it into an online survey. I found out surveymonkey doesn't offer all of the features we'd need, unless I forked over some chedda. I found a place where I could get all that stuff for free.
They will take the survey. They will look at their individual class results compared to the results for all my students. We'll use proportional reasoning. We'll create a poster. Hopefully they'll be fresh. I'll have wall decorations for the year.

The Excitement of Teaching

2010-09-14T18:59:00.000-07:00

Teaching is the girl that can't help breaking hearts. When she gives you her number, you don't wait two days to call. You rehearse what you will say, but the words still come fumbling out your mouth. And she doesn't call you right back. Just when you've given up hope, her name shines through on your caller ID. You drop everything to see her for just few minutes. Teaching is high maintenance. She needs you to be there for her all day long. She doesn't need anything in 3 days, she needs it in 5 minutes. When she has a problem, everything else in your life gets put on hold.
She may be high maintenance, but she's not a gold digger. She'll take one hand knit scarf over 5 diamond rings. She prefers a homemade meal and a late evening stroll to a fancy dinner and a night on the town any night of the week. When you try to be conservative with teaching, when you start taking her for granted, you end up sleeping by yourself. She likes risks.
She's a roller coaster. She has you singing Love you Madly one day, and It ain't me Babe the next. She's a rose that will prick you the second you think you have her in your grasp. With teaching, there's no silver lining; no fairy tale ending. You bust your hump for her all day long, and then lay awake at night wondering about her. If she likes you, resistance is futile. You can try to get out, but she'll just suck you back in, somehow. She's like a Catch-22 squared.

But she always keeps you on your toes. She makes you feel alive. She turns your logarithmic curve of self-discovery exponential. And she takes you on a great vacation every summer. And most of all, when you look back on the time you spent with her, you might question every move you made, but you regret none. If you've ever felt trapped by the monotony of a risk-free relationship, you love the passion and excitement she brings to the table. Yup, I'll take teaching over my old corporate gig even on her worst days.

When I was in High School

2010-01-17T08:52:00.000-08:00

When I was a Senior in High School, in 1997, it cost about $600 for a clunky old cell phone that couldn't even fit in your pocket. Computers sold for twice as much as they do now, and they were a small fraction as powerful. Digital cameras -- did they even exist back then? And TI-83 graphing calculators, which we were all required to buy, cost around $99. As far as I know, these things haven't become more powerful. And they definitely haven't gotten cheaper. What gives? No competition, not a big enough market for it? These things should cost $20 by now, like the MP3 player I bought 3 years ago for over $100. You can't tell me that their production costs haven't declined substantially, nor that Texas Instruments' bottom line depends on their profits from these things. There are substitutes that actually offer more, available for free download all over the internet. There's even an I-phone app for one. Writing a grant for these things now seems like a waste of my time and money. I guess my to-do list just got shorter.

Teaching like a deer trapped in headlights

2010-01-12T18:26:00.000-08:00

The 20% problem scares the living begeezins (sp?) out of me. It definitely hits him, and I was on the fortunate tail of the distribution. And yet, when I plan a lesson on...say...polynomials, for example, I feel like I have no idea how to counter tradition. Sure, my organization and scaffolding gets better with each go round. And my bag of tricks grows incrementally each time I check my google reader (i.e. polydoku). And each year my class goes a little faster and a whole lot deeper, but it still scares me.
I start out by giving notes, and follow it up with practice. I show my students what a polynomial is and what it isn't. I show them standard form, leading coefficient, degree, and graphical implications. We look at factored form and we add subtract, multiply, divide and blah blah blah polynomials. I'm doing the only thing I can think of to get them ready for the questions they'll see on the standardized test. But it's all very traditional. And when they show up to Thursday morning's class with memories of Tuesday's class, almost as blurry as mine of my 1st or 21st birthdays, I know I didn't reach them. And I don't know what to do, so I do it all over again the following week.

Y2KX

2010-01-01T08:10:00.000-08:00

It's Y2KX. On New Year's Eve, lodged up in the Rocky Mountains, some of my siblings, their significant others and I sat around and stated goals for the new year. I had 2.

1.) Finish my teaching credential. And do it soon. I have a student teacher for hell's sake, I'm in my 3rd year teaching, and I am still working with an 'intern' credential. I've wasted enough money on this thing, now I just need to waste a little more time.

2.) Start blogging. I believe I said, in an effort to make my goal specific and measurable, I want 15 posts by the end of the school year. That's not much, less than one per week.

Why is that important? Blogs have shaped my professional development, more than anything, namely my teacher credential program and my school's efforts. I started by reading Dan's precious resource, and I've also added Kate's and Dan(2)'s to my regular reading list. There are others too, that regularly offer resources for my class and push me to be a better teacher, but the bottom line is that it's time I started doing one of my own...It's not that I feel like I have much to contribute, but I keep having this feeling like (pardon my sports cliche) I'm standing on the sidelines of this edublogosphere game. So here I go.

Cool schools

2009-02-18T17:21:00.000-08:00

Despite my disgust with my own online credential curriculum, I find this idea of a new university, a virtually free university, founded on the idea of social networking, to be pretty intriguing. I don't know if it's the beginning of the end, like Jeff, but I think this new mode could serve a variety of learners who felt detached from the classic, professor-centered academic institution. For a long time I've felt like our system teaches us that intelligence can be singularized to one dimension (or at most two verbal reasoning and math) and furthermore I just don't think many of my college professors were any good at teaching. And I don't think they cared about that either. Or maybe they didn't have time to care about that because of the immense pressure on them to be published in journals whose audiences barely exceed that of this blog's. Read the NYT interview with UoP's visionary here.

The more you get people around the world talking to each other, great, and the more they talk about what they’re learning, just wonderful...But I’m not at all sure, when you start attaching that to credits and degrees and courses, that it translates so well.
How will they test students? How much will the professors do? How well does the American or British curriculum serve the needs of people in Mali? How do they handle students whose English is not at college level?
-- Philip G. Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College

It just doesn't seem like this guy wants anything to change, which isn't surprising, since he was a beneficiary of the system. What do you think? Can't students decide what they want to learn, won't that spark curiousity and creativity, and wouldn't a social network provide a far broader range of expertise than any university ever could? Which pushes us to think harder, a test or an online discussion with curious peers? We could work out accountability somehow.

I'm worried our higher education system exists primarily to serve professors. I think that a 21st century, online university, built around social networking could allow professors to spend more time doing what they want to be doing...research..and less time doing what, judging by their boring lesson structure coupled with unenthusiastic delivery, they apparently only do out of obligation...teach.

Boring Curriculums...

2009-02-10T20:05:00.000-08:00

(I know it should technically be curriculae, but I'm exercising my poetic license, or whatever)

I finally found a way to give meaning to an assignment from my credential program tonight. One of my semester's final tedious tasks, of which there have been quite a few, got returned to me with the instructions to format in APA and expand on my response to question 6b (Explain what you considered as you formulated ideas regarding personal and/or professional implications.) . The final, somewhat watered down version goes:

b. I started thinking about how this observation will affect my classroom. The first obvious answer is that I would replicate this specific activity in my classroom. From there I thought longer and harder about the general things I observed that I'd like to introduce too, because those are important too. I also reflected on those things too. By those things, I mean the things I stated in 6a. I also spent a lot of time struggling to answer this question and feeling like it was either badly worded, or too indirect for me. I thought more about how I don't like these meta-cognitive questions, and about if they are really bad or just really challenging in a good kind of way, but how silly it is that such an introspective question could ever be measured by an extrinsic rubric. But my mind was getting off-topic when I wrote that, and it only made me more and more angry with my credential program, which is constantly sucking my time away from things I'd rather be doing, and that I need to be doing, to do things like cite sources in APA format, or expand on a thinking process that I handled as effortlessly as I thought I could get away with (and regretfully undershot). Then I got back to thinking about the question at hand and thought about how much I have to learn from this teacher, and how far-reaching the effects of this observation may ultimately be. For starters, I thought of adding reflective writing and group roles to my class because I'm at the point in my professional development where I need to double the amount of actually implementing the things I've only previously talked about.

I added what's in bold, and would like to spend more time re-thinking and re-wording but I can't do it last night. It's been a long day with what promises to be a long night, but for a brief moment I was finally excited to articulate something to whomever I'm supposed to be writing this stuff to. It's the first time I've actually cared about what I'm saying or trying to say. There has to be some kind of analog to my classroom, it must have something to do with quantity vs. quality.

$10 Laptop?

2009-02-07T08:22:00.000-08:00

Can they really do this? Wouldn't it be a good model for education enhancement.

It seems like it's only a matter of time before everyone's sporting either a laptop or a cell phone with web capabilities and a QWERTY keypad. I know my house has become so laptop dependent that my girlfriend and I often g-chat with each other...when we're sitting in the same room.

What happens to the paper boy?

2008-12-13T12:26:00.000-08:00

Season 5 of The Wire, this article and common sense suggest that the newspaper industry is in decline. Whether or not something might pull up the industry's bootsraps or not, the days of early morning newspaper deliveries seem to be dying. The internet probably started the trend, and blogging seems like its accelerating it. At least you could say, as these graphs do, taken from here and here respecitvely, that the two 'industries' (blogging and newsapers) are trending in opposite directions.

The industry I'm currently concerned how this affects is paper delivery. Now that no one wants a paper delivered to their doorstep in the morning, what can adolescents do to replace that economic opportunity? What made newspapers a good product for daily delivery? It must be that they are a cheap, massively available and continuously expiring physical good. Milk's been done before and it didn't last...But my senses tell me this has to be some kind of an opportunity. Ideally it would be for locally grown, organic produce, or some sort of renewable energy packet. Neither seems sufficient to offset the loss, at least not in the immediate future (especially given one doesn't even exist). I guess I'll have to keep pondering this one, and maybe make a lesson out of it.

2008-12-02T22:09:00.000-08:00

This article's worth reading...Ms. Rhee seems like a real bitch, and maybe exactly what an urban school district needs to get its act together, who knows. The article's an obvious standards debate waiting to happen, but my favorite quote is:

Right now, schools assess teachers before they teach--filtering for candidates who are certified, who have a master's degree, who have other pieces of paper that do not predict good teaching. And we pay them the same regardless of their effectiveness.
By comparison, if we wanted to have truly great teachers in our schools, we would assess them after their second year of teaching, when we could identify very strong and very weak performers, according to years of research.

The amount that's gained from teacher credential programs, measured against the prices paid for them (and there are more than just money), is scary. I can read a Time Article, 4 blogs with lengthy commentary and draft, redraft, and learn to format a blog, but I can't bring myself to work on my credential program work because I know it will be a waste of my time. Go figure.

First Blog

2008-11-18T19:27:00.000-08:00

The best thing I heard all day, and what may turn out to tear the final thread to unleash the "blogger" in me today came from Maggie -- "Mr. Snyder, you're like, here every day. You never miss class."

It was what I've been waiting to hear. It's true, I haven't missed a single period this year. But here's the problem: it's only November...we're just barely a third of the way through the year. And, save for the day I'm taking off Friday because it saved me over $100 on airfare to do so and the day before vacation has historically been about as productive as my friends Lynch and Boska were at their college job when the head custodian asked them to go clean the room with the Student Bar in it, I'm not saying they kids would start calling me Cal, but I'd be defying odds by making it cold through to Thanksgiving break.

I'm not bashing teacher's for missing days...This job is hella hard, and we're squeezed thinner than en empty tube of toothpaste, but that struck me as just one more reminder of how badly urban schools are failing; both students and employees.

What to do about it, is, well, beyond my scope, but if I have any readers out there who'd like to discuss, or even just announce themselves, please, the 'mic' is yours.

Oh, and on another note, the non-linear Mr. Snyder, the guy who is unpredictable and constantly changing was unveiled in today's lesson: