Talking to my Friend About teaching
I chat with my friend about her experience teaching math to 8th graders in Fall 2020.
Note: This was all written prior to yesterday’s coup and is entirely unrelated, so if unrelated-to-news is the content you’re looking for... here! I don’t have anything particularly original to say on what happened in DC yesterday. Will just put out there that we won’t get anywhere if we keep pretending American exceptionalism is real and white supremacy is not. And I thought I had reached the bottom of my disappointment in people only to find there was further to fall.
We’re mixing it up this week! Because this is my newsletter, and there are no rules except the ones I self-impose. I talked to my dear friend Kristine about her experience teaching this semester, and here I present to you our conversation, edited for clarity and length.
We went to high school together, and I still have this weird feeling where I think I can relate to or understand high schoolers because I was recently a high schooler, only to realize that “recently” has become 4+ years ago and I almost certainly cannot relate to high schoolers that well.
I think it’s also easy to feel like you kind of understand school and education and teaching because we did go through school, but there’s such a wide array of experiences and the backend of teaching and administration is a whole different world. This is just my friend’s experience, and obviously does not encapsulate or speak for anyone else’s! Nevertheless, I hope you find this interesting, because it definitely raised points/ideas I had not considered with regards to school and also provided some detail on the remote learning experience that I’d been wondering about. A month or so of Zoom University was a terrible experience in April and mostly Zoom master’s degree isn’t optimal either, so I cannot even fathom what it’s like to be in K-12 trying to learn via Zoom. It also made me reflect on the privileges I had in attending the school I did with the life I have had, and how many are so easily taken for granted, like consistent WiFi and my mom being around to help me with homework. I hope you also take a minute after reading to contemplate how your education shaped you. There’s a lot I feel like I didn’t fully process yet or feel differently about looking back.
A side note to insert here is that I always think it’s weird to think about how for most of my friends a version of them that they’re often embodying but I will never see is their work selves. I hope/assume they’re similar to how I know them and stellar at their jobs but I’ll not know for sure, which is interesting. And there’s a special kind of joy I get from talking to my friends about their work and getting to hear about this new (to me) side of them! I feel like when you’re the one working on the thing, it gets old in a way or at least you’re no longer as aware of what other people find surprising or interesting about your work. Like Kristine thought this was boring but I thought it was cool to hear about culturally relevant math pedagogy and her experience teaching during this weird semester.
In case you missed it, most recently I told you about some words I found and some I am still looking for. Everything can be found here in the “Archive,” which I think is a weirdly official word. Also, if one whole week into 2021 you’ve given up on your resolutions, or if you have not, read Christina’s newsletter on how we could rewrite new year’s resolutions to be less individualistic. Fun fact: we became friends because freshman year I approached her and said “hi I think we’re friends on Facebook” and she didn’t flee immediately, and for that I am grateful.
A few other recommendations I have for you to read this week:
Congressman Jamie Raskin and Sarah Bloom Raskin’s obituary for their son is heartbreaking and devastating and honest
Rebecca Traister’s Interview with Stacy Abrams on her work in Georgia is inspiring and a reminder of the time and energy during non-election years that goes into building an inclusive democracy
Jon Ossoff, Potential New Georgia Senator, Exposed as World-Class Millennial Dweeb in Twitter Scandal by Seth Maxon showing what election celebrations on social media will be like for Millennials and Gen Z
The Lemon Space from Griefbacon on parties of all sorts and the flimsy threshold of the new year
Hard Lessons on Compassion by Chris La Tray, reflecting on how we move forward and have empathy when it feels like people have given up
The Tyranny of Terrazzo by Molly Fischer on the bland and neutral millennial aesthetic
The Wildest Insurance Fraud Scheme Texas Has Ever Seen by Katy Vine, which is exactly as it is titled (thanks Christina!)
As always, I would love thoughts, feedback, memes, donated buildings in my name, good vibes, unprompted proposals of marriage to reject, comments, article links, book/tv/movie/podcast recommendations, etc. You know how to find me, probably.
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What is the year and subject that you teach?
I teach 8th graders. My certification is for math grades 7-12 and it was just the first school that I placed in, and that’s related to TFA’s placement policy… I’m very happy where I am.
I knew that I wanted to teach math. In school, I’ve always been the most comfortable with math. I also think math has the most space to grow in terms of socioemotional teaching for students and weaving in culturally relevant curriculum and pedagogy. I think for English and history, there are certain expectations and bars you have to hit—like if you didn’t teach certain authors, you’d be scrutinized for that. But for math, I think generally fewer people really have an understanding of what culturally relevant pedagogy looks like when it’s really well done. So I thought it was cool to have that open space where I could kind of imagine what I would want to do.
Can you give an example of culturally relevant pedagogy? I’ve never heard that term in reference to math.
When I think of culturally relevant pedagogy in math, I think for one, it’s the idea of envisioning yourself as a mathematician. If you think about Pythagoras, and Euclid, and whoever, a lot of famous mathematicians are old white men.
So it’s about bringing in people like Katherine Johnson, and Gladys West, and different people of color, different gender identities, that have all really contributed to the field of mathematics and showing my students that being “good in math” or whatever that means doesn’t look a certain way.
I think the other way is less explicit regarding identity, but more about figuring out your strengths and seeing math as a wider field than just plugging in numbers and steps. More specifically, it’s about seeing the creativity you can use in math, and the different ways you can use to explain things and approach problems. It’s interesting because I feel like when we were in high school, I never really experienced that.
It’s weird because I’m trying to create something for my students that I’ve never really experienced, but I would also say that I did really well in math. That makes it hard for me to be like “Ok, let me do something different from how I was taught, even though I feel like I turned out pretty well.” That goes to something about the myth of the average learner, and my experience in education, but that’s where I’m coming at with culturally relevant pedagogy.
I watched this great video about the question of how you could add 2 plus 2 to get 12 and kids will ask those questions, and you might just tell them “You don’t.” But then this video started talking about mod arithmetic and if your number line is a circle, that whole idea of 2 plus 2 equalling 12 isn’t as absurd as it might seem.
[The example Kristine mentioned comes at 9:55-ish.]
I was also shown how to do quadratic factoring with number tiles, using visualizations—it blew my mind. Like wow, that is such a cool way to understand the math. It was fascinating.
Do you feel like your students are receptive to these kinds of ideas?
I think in terms of just exposure to different types of people being mathematicians, it isn’t ever ill-received. In terms of creative thinking, I mean, my students are 13 or 14, some are 15; most of them have been in school for 8 years now, and have been really conditioned to do the classic math: “I do, we do, you do,” is something you hear a lot. So it’s like, here are the steps, follow the steps, execute the steps. When I conduct class in an order that is not that way, I’ve learned that I really have to walk them into the shallow end, and we have to sit there for a while together in the uncomfortableness of something new. We’ll do some open middle activities or number talks, small activities that require more creative thinking. Those are 5-minute activities and then we get into actual class. It has been harder than expected, just because it’s something my students are not used to, and I’m not used to. It’s a lot of people new at things kind of bumbling into each other.
Did you have any misconceptions about teaching that have been dispelled through your experiences this semester?
Classroom management. I was just thinking, I’m not sure how much is exacerbated by remote learning. There are five groups. There are the kids who just don’t show up, there are students on my roster I have NEVER seen, never heard from, never anything, and I’ve checked with other teachers in the grade level and we’ve called home, never heard from anyone. Those are one group of kids. There are kids who showed up for 4 weeks, 6 weeks, who just aren’t showing up anymore. They’re not even in class anymore. Then you have to worry about the kids who show up and don’t do well. Then there are the kids who show up, they used to do well, now they’re not doing well. Then there are the kids who do show up and are doing well, but then they need an extra challenge.
So all five groups of these students need something completely different, not even just in the classroom, but the kids who never show up, the intervention they need is obviously very different.
Then you take all these different students, you factor in the fact that some of them, their parents cannot be reached, you just don’t know how to contact them. Others, so about 60% of my students, personally, are Hispanic. Some of their parents only speak Spanish, so the communication barrier with me is just very high.
Juggling all of that with my kids, and on top of that, all the administrative shit that you have to do, my brain doesn't even know how to prioritize. I only have 80 kids, some teachers have 150 kids on their roster. How are you supposed to prioritize who and which group and when? I remember the first two months of school, I just felt like I was failing every group of my kids. It was a very emotionally stressful time.
When you make that call home to students who aren’t showing up, what do you say? Is it just like “Hey so-and-so isn’t in school what’s happening??” Are you supposed to threaten them with punishment? Are there set steps they can take?
For me usually first it’s like, “What’s up? What do you know?” See if I’m missing something. Some of them, their homes don’t have WiFi. At all. And the district hasn’t been great, it’s gotten better, about rolling out hotspots. But if you think about being on Zoom for like 8 hours a day using your hotspot, then having to go on Google Classroom, and then you know my kids are distracted on Netflix, and you think about how much bandwidth that takes up…
And sometimes the parents will say, “I thought my student had been logging on. They told me they’d been logging on for class.” And I’m like, “Oh, that's just not true.”
But something that does happen with Dallas I believe, is if your student is marked unexcused 15 days they get dropped from the system automatically, no warning, nothing, they disappear. So the parent has to re-enroll the child, bring them back to the school, bring paperwork to the school; that’s not even something I have to threaten the parents with, that’s just something that will happen and then they’re going to have to come re-enroll their student, and that’s something a lot of them don’t have time to do.
But it’s hard to threaten them, because even some parents have told me “I can’t get my kid to do what they don’t want to do.” At that point, I’m like “I don’t know what to tell you either, because if you’re their parent or family member or guardian and you live with them and they’re remote and you can’t get them to do it, then how am I, sitting however many feet away through a computer screen supposed to get them to log on and be engaged?” Like, especially if your student decides to turn off their camera and I can’t even see if they’re there. There’s only so much I can do through a screen. And here’s the other thing, because of the way public schools are funded through attendance and head count, we “threaten” to mark them as unexcused if they don’t participate, but we can’t or we don’t, because the school doesn’t want us to. So it’s like a fake stick.
How is it split right now between in-person kids and online?
Each of my classes is roughly 25 students. I teach 3 periods, so I have 3 classes only. My first period I have about 4-6 students in person, and the rest are all online. My second hour, they are the most split. Usually 12-13 in person, the rest of them online. My last hour is the same.
Do you feel like your school has supported you well through remote teaching?
I think it’s hard because so much of what the school does is dictated by what the district decides, so I feel like my principal doesn’t have as much of a say as he’d want to have. I think the district has done a horrible job with rolling out technology. The system within the school to handle technology is very poor.
Like there is no point person or team that handles student technology requests. It all goes through the district, so you have to go onto the district website, navigate their clunky website, to figure out what button to press to submit and figure out what kind of form for the technology. If you need a new charger, if you need a new Chromebook, it’s horribly slow because the district has to process it and then send it to your school. But I’ve also been told the librarian has extra chargers? So I’m like, ok, so I’ll send my kids up to the library. But sometimes the librarian runs out.
Then our school also has a “tech guy.” I don’t know if he handles tech for me as a teacher, or my students? I’ll also text my assistant principal, because I don’t know and she’s my supervisor, but I don't know. There are like 3 people you could go to, but you don’t know who to go to or who the best one to go to is, so I file all these extra things that I waste my time doing.
Has the experience of teaching affected how you reflect up on your own education and experiences as a student?
Most of my teachers spoke very well of me, not to toot my own horn. I used to think that was because I’m me, I’m fabulous, my personality, how could you not like me? I sparkle in the classroom.
Yep, I can confirm, I have seen you sparkle in the classroom.
But now being a teacher, part of me is like, I think the reason my teachers just liked me is because I didn’t cause trouble and I did my work. They probably have no opinion on me as a person, it’s just “she literally just did as she was told.” It is so hard, I have realized, to get some students to do the work. And I have also realized that teachers don’t want to fail students. Like, they say that all the time, I remember teachers being like “I hate grades, I wish I could give you all As,” and I was like lol yeah, but now as a teacher I’m like no seriously. It’s so much work to fail a student. Obviously, because it’s a big deal, but also you don’t want your students to fail, you don’t want your students to not do well, because it reflects poorly on you and if you have any kind of ego or pride as a person, you just don’t want that as a person… a student failing is never good, never something that I want, it’s never a “Haha you failed, I got you.” That’s also why I never understood teachers who try to make you jump through 50 hoops? How do you have time to make all these hoops? I barely have time… I have one hoop, and if my kids can jump through it, I’m like “Good job, you jumped through it.”
I’ve also reflected a lot on my understanding of and personal motivation by grades. Grades are something that some of my students have a hard time being motivated by. Also I realized some of my kids don’t understand grades, like they’ll get an 80% and be ask me, “Is that good?”
Like they don’t understand… I mean to be fair, grades are completely arbitrary, but they don’t understand what that means in relation to others… They don’t understand how far that is away from 0, from a 50. So when I respond, I’m reteaching them about percentages and also conveying my expectations. I don’t even know… I’ll say something like “I always want you to get a 100, so like after an 80, let’s try again.” But if you’ve been performing at like a 70 then an 80 is great, that’s growth. Right? So it’s very interesting because some of my kids will get a 95 and they’re like “Ehh” but I’m like no, that’s very close to mastery. So it’s really interesting because I felt like I always understood grades. Not sure if that’s because of our school, Asian parents, I don’t know.
I think also something interesting is conflating what is worth learning, interesting, and intriguing with fun. Like I think some people think school needs to always be fun, you need to relate everything to everyday life and make it fun.
But sometimes, understanding something like the concept of what a fraction is, yes it’s more understandable if you relate it to everyday life, but you also just need to know what a fraction is. When you divide something by something else into smaller pieces. Understanding that it can happen to a thing, to a number, to a concept. Breaking things down. I think that is intrinsically interesting, even if you have no desire to break things down in your life, but it’s not always fun. I didn’t always expect school to be fun. I think some of my kids have that expectation that it’ll be fun, that it’ll be equivalent to them watching a music video by their favorite rapper. It’s like no, life is not always fun. You have to do work. I think that’s something I took for granted in my own education, that mentality, of not always expecting it to be fun.
I would love to have you as my teacher for a day. I’d be so curious.
Hey you know, you’re always welcome to pop into one of my Zooms.
I’ll turn my camera off and you’ll never know who I am.
They’ll be like, “Miss, who’s that?” I remember one time my grad school internship supervisor popped in to observe and had his camera off; the name [in the Zoom] was distinctly male they were like, “Miss, is that your BOYFRIEND?” and I’m like “No, it’s my very old graduate school supervisor.” But I don’t pick a fight with them, because you don’t ever want to fight with 13-year-olds about who your boyfriend is. It's a time.