Good Morning Blog

Myself and a few other teachers were in a parent meeting the other day. During the meeting the parent asked us which, if any assignments their child could still make up. I won't divulge what was said in the meeting. But after the meeting we were standing around talking about the issues of accepting late work and which grade book style we use; marking periods or running total. The decisions about whether, when, and why to accept late work, what type of grade book to use, why, and so many others are all decisions that teachers make or think about every year. They make those decisions based on beliefs that they hold more dearly than they do other beliefs. In education it is supposed to be about the students and their learning. A noble, altruistic goal, to say the least.  Is it about students and their learning? Or is that just something we say? Other factors often creep into the decision making process; funding, job security, politics, etc. At some point, what we...

In my last post, Better Late Than Never , I described why I allow students to complete assignments after the due date. In short, I believe there is instructional value in completing the work even though the due date has passed. But students will get the most instructional value from the assignment when the assignment is completed correctly. And that's what this post is about; why I let students redo assignments. I have seen students receive graded work back and immediately toss it in the recycling bin without so much as glancing past the score they received more times than I can count. If the student was making a mistake that I commented on, they never saw it. If they were doing something especially well that I commented on, they never saw it. I could have drawn funny pictures of cats for all they knew. They never would have seen them. Once the assignment was graded it was over. The students felt there was no more learning to be done. But there was. I made comments about wha...

I knew when I was in the 7 th grade that I wanted to be a Mathematics teacher. I knew I would need to go to college in order to make that happen. I knew I wanted to understand what it was I was going to teach so I would need to pay attention in class and do my homework. And it worked. I am a high school Mathematics teacher. Success! To be totally honest, I don't recall doing that much homework in high school. There are only a couple of instances that I can recall doing homework outside of the school day; studying for a Spanish exam with my brother, and trying to read " Beowulf " in the dimmed lights of the auditorium during play rehearsal. The other stuff must have gotten done. I did graduate. I just have no recollection of doing it. But I'll admit it, I'm not a stickler for due dates. I never had difficulty meeting them, but that was only because of the threat of getting a 0% on something and I wanted good grades. If I could turn in assignments late wi...

I often get the sense that much of what people have come to understand about teaching and learning Mathematics is based on a decades old mentality that students will need to be able to do mathematical calculations with computer-like speed and precision once they enter the workforce. And in order to meet this need, mathematics instruction should look like drilling procedures over and over again so that students become proficient and ready to join the workforce. Here's the problem with that approach; it sounds an awful lot like the goal is to program students to behave just like little math computers. Which shouldn't come as a big surprise. Decades ago, people were already being told about the wonderful world that access to computers would usher in...once they became more readily available, that is. In the meantime, we'll need employees to function in much the same way. That sounds a bit dehumanizing. But here we are, 2018, and computers are everywhere . I'm writing...

This year I have made it a priority to stand outside my classroom door and personally greet each of my students with a "Good morning, Hope" or a "Good afternoon, Nick" as they walk in. The greeting helps each student know that they are welcome in my classroom and that I will do my best to provide them with a safe learning environment. A few weeks after starting this, I started to think about how often I was uttering the words "Good morning" or "Good afternoon" in a given day. It was dozens. And then I started thinking about how many times I would say it over the course of a year. Thousands . Potentially up to 10,000 times in a single academic year. That's a lot. I can't imagine that it is a bad thing for students to hear their teachers personally greet them almost 200 times per year. I also can't imagine that it is a bad thing for students to hear their teachers simply say the word "good" that many times. It just s...