Punchy

Today's Lessons:

Third and Fourth Period -- consecutive number problems

Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth -- relative error/percent change problems.

Wednesday is a short day at my school. The year before I came on board (2007), the faculty voted to establish a common professional development period at the start of each Wednesday. Under the prior arrangement, I'm told, you had the teachers working the 3-10 (period) track meet in the morning before their first class and the teachers working the 1-8 track meeting at the end of the day after their last class. Such a schedule, while leaving the school day intact for the kids, created a complexity nightmare for the administration when it came to getting news and information out to the faculty.

Anyway, the new schedule reduces each Wednesday period from 50 minutes to 35 minutes. For the most part, people seem OK with it. The ones who do bitch and moan about not having enough time to get things done on Wednesday are the ones who tend to bitch and moan about anything. All I really know is that the last time they put it up for a vote -- last year -- the faculty overwhelmingly decided to keep the short-Wednesday schedule

Anyway, I happen to like Wednesdays if only for the fact it breaks up the weekly routine and it forces me to break away from the warmup-lecture-exercises teaching model that, no matter how much I try to avoid it, seems to pull me back into its comfortable grip, especially when I find myself perilously short of ideas and/or prep time. Compared to a 90 or even 45 minute period, 35 minutes is a mere eyeblink. From a mathematical perspective, you've got just enough time to introduce a compelling problem or two and then make sure everybody gets a fair shot to work it out. If you keep your energy up, you can move desk to desk, making on the fly observations, answering panicked questions, rescuing the clueless, bawling out the lazy and when it's all done, and the bell sounds, you retreat to a neutral corner for the next group.  

Stick and move, stick and move, as they say. 

In general, the kids respond well to the increased tempo -- just so long as you don't go to the well too many times. A few weeks back, the work on Wednesday went so smoothly -- almost every kid in the room gave me something decent -- that I decided to go with the same exact teaching strategy on Thursday. Sure enough, the plan backfired after two or three periods, an indicator that I myself was probably getting bored with the approach and projecting that boredom onto the kids.

Which is the point of this post: following routine has never been a strong suit of mine. That seems like a fairly innocent thing to admit, except that, when you're a teacher, routine can be very, very powerful ally. In fact, if I could boil the first five years of teaching down into a single sentence it would be: Learn to love routine.

Not that I follow that advice, but my transition from novice to semi-experienced teacher neatly correlates with my increasing attention to routine. At times when I find things crashing out of control, a few minutes of thoughtful reflection leads me to the inevitable observation that I haven't been following my well-established routines. It could be something as dumb as handing out an assignment from the right side of the class instead of the left. Whatever it is, the kids lose track of where they need to be in the classroom and the next thing you know we're all getting majorly pissed off at each others' incompetence.

Put a little more simply: Routine is a form of non-verbal communication. When you find yourself using your voice way too much, repeating yourself ten million times just to get students to use a pencil instead of a pen, say, you know you're breaking away from routine. Conversely, when you find kids doing stuff you didn't even ask them to do, you know you did something right in terms of setting up the classroom routine.

Anyway, I bring this up only to note that certain elements of my daily routine have been falling apart this week. For example, today I went to pick up my 3rd period attendance folder from the attendance office only to find out I never returned the folder the day before. How the hell did that happen? I wondered to myself, seeing as how turning in the green 3rd period folder is my excuse to go downstairs to check the mailbox and do other routine tasks. Then I remembered: I'd walked past the attendance office yesterday, forcing myself to double-back (routine break No. 1) and I'd given a test to my Third and Fourth periods (routine break No. 2). As a result, I hit my fifth period break without the usual pile of student work samples to review (routine break No. 3). Sure enough, with my own non-verbal cues to head downstairs, I totally blanked out when it came to turning in attendance, thus putting myself in hot water with the attendance ladies this morning. To make matters worse, I also forgot to sign the attendance sheet during our faculty meeting (which, although basically a faculty party on this, the last Wednesday before Christmas, is still an event demanding mandatory attendance).

Which is basically a long way of saying I've been feeling a little punchy lately. I'm sure it'll pass, seeing as how most of it boils down to holiday distractions and dwindling sleep reserves. Still, it only helps to add to the awkward feeling that creeps in during the last 2 or 3 days when the first thing the kids say when they cross the threshold of your room is "Hey Mr., do we have to work today?"

Speaking of...I said I'd give a follow up on my decision whether to finish yesterday's worksheet handed out to the sixth, seventh and eighth period classes. Ultimately, I decided to keep it simple and stick with the existing assignment. Apart from limited prep time and (paper), my ultimate justification was the fact that I'd done a pretty good job structuring the assignment so that every kid still had a meaty problem or two left to tackle (I'm fighting off the shopworn term "differentiated instruction" on the off chance that I'm talking to more than just an audience of teachers). As a result, I was able to move desk-to-desk, as per my usual Wednesday pattern, keeping the brains and pens moving. To keep kids from getting too listless, I also passed back the latest tests, making sure to dish out as many loud compliments as possible in the hopes that it would spur additional work. Sure enough, it did -- a case where breaking from the usual routine (passing out tests at the end of the period and keeping the results hush hush) actually paid off.