Day 24: the Gear issue.

Snow Chains, for your feet

Enough about math, for a bit.  I'm living, breathing, eating, sleeping, talking, thinking, dreaming math.  Let's talk about gear, cause that is one thing I've done *right* on this venture (huge kudos to my mother's Christmas assistance, Joe's sage gear advice, KK's awesome distance-shopping assistance).  I noticed on the walk in, this morning, despite it being 7º F, that I was comfortable.  Whereas in Portland I was often really uncomfortably cold at 35º or 40º.  I think there's something about it hitting a certain level of dangerously cold that we give in to the urge to attack the cold with good winter gear and get comfortable, whereas if it's just chilly we tough-up and suffer through.  The gear I have is ridiculously good, and I wish I could go back to childhood me and give me gear half this good (did they have "OMNI-HEAT" when I was a baby?).  I'm like a walking advertisement for Columbia Sportswear.  Some highlights:

-My boots plug in.  I use a USB-mini cable (the same one that charges my Kindle, and wow am I starting to sound like a Yuppie)  to plug them into the wall or my computer overnight, and then I can power them on and have little heating elements in my boots keeping my toes warm.  Ridiculous?  Maybe.  When it's -30º with wind chill, I'm willing to be ridiculous.  My walk in is about a mile, and I don't feel a strong need to martyr myself on the walk to prove my manhood.

-My snowpants and parka (and boots) are all OMNI-HEAT, which means the inside is covered in little silver tin-foil looking circles, that result in a fairly lightweight jacket (that doesn't do a lot of warming when you first put it on) or pants or boots, which trap your body heat and heat up incredibly fast.  Less useful for sitting on a cold snowmobile and being whizzed around (where you don't build up body heat).  Incredibly good for walking to work.

-I bought, from a student who made it, a hat trimmed with wolf fur.  It is one of the warmest hats I've ever owned, and comfortable too.  Also, wolf.  That he shot.  Like a wolf wolf.  

-I spent the first week here slip-sliding around on the ice every time it warmed up or got windy enough to blow the layer of snow off the ice.  This is something I remember from childhood, and thought we just have to deal with (take short steps, try to roll with any slide so you don't throw out your back keeping on your feet).  Not so!  Yak-trax, a snow-chain that attaches to your boot, let you walk on ice without sliding at all.  

Overall, having the right gear makes -40º no more unpleasant than 50º, I'm finding.  If anything, more so.  If you give in to the desire to just bundle up because you're dealing with temperatures where frostbite is a clear and present issue, you end up more comfortable than out in the rainy blustery 40º Portland weather in a windbreaker.

Once again, loving life up here.  Had a great birthday, tell you all about it later.  For now just wanted to check in really quickly while my students were plugging away on a practice test.

Day 16: Axioms > Memorization

This is was the library.  I think the books have escaped.

Six days to my birthday!

Today was a bitter cold morning.  Woke up to a blizzard warning, which turned out to mean a cold day with more wind.  Apparently the RealFeel (I want that to be even more absurd, like ReeeelFeelz or something, because this random misspelling / wordmash game of web 2.0 is pretty silly) was somewhere around -40º or -50º.  Which, I mean, is legitimately cold.

Teaching unit conversion to my test-prep class continues to be a success.  They're so used to things being harder that they seem perpetually surprised when it really is that easy.  It is so nice to be able to fix some of the things I see as horribly broken about the way we teach math to high schoolers.  We wait till college to teach so many smart things (like the simple method of unit conversion, or the matrix solution to a system of equations - which I'm considering throwing at one of my classes) and in retrospect you think "that's no harder than the ugly high school solution, why didn't we just start with the elegant one?".  So I'm teaching the elegant one wherever I can.  Less memorization, more axiomatic math.  If you can learn a rule that answers a question rather than memorizing all the answers to the typical forms that question appears in, that's so much better!

Speaking of, I continue to teach one of my classes how to add and subtract on a number line.  Similarly, many of them have learned addition as an "addition table" in their head rather than an understanding of how addition and subtraction move you around the number line.  I'm really trying to break them of that habit and have them work out the solution based on an understanding of the operation rather than consulting a table in their heads - it's easy to see when an error comes from trying to solve addition problems through memorization because you get wild errors.  If someone writes that 4+3 is 8, then they may have just counted wrong.  If they write that 12 - 3 is -15, they're trying to play the consult-the-table game, where the difference between "12 - 3" and "-12 - 3" is only one negative sign, as opposed to the number-line method where "12" and "-12" are 24 apart, thus an unlikely error.

One more class, today.  This class now has 2-variable equation solutions down.  I think I'm gonna give them a day of catch-up and catch-your-breath, then take them into the world of matrices.  Let's get the elegant multi-function matrix-solution down and then tackle the world with that under our belt!

Day 15: Keeping Score

Somebody better fix this so they can keep stuff cold.

Got busy for a few days this week.  Feels like the closer I get to a functioning classroom, the more I'm inclined to stay all hours and tweak lessons and assignments.  I only get an hour a day, there's no homework (cultural thing), and written instructions don't land, so I gotta make time count.  I get an hour a day during which I can either teach to the group and ignore those individuals who aren't lined up with the group in ability level, teach to small groups which has a finer degree of control, but necessarily leaves some groups in the dark while another group's being worked with, or work 1-on-1 for those students who really need things explained in a different or slower way, ignoring the rest of the class.  Spending that time is consuming a commodity I put a lot of stock in.  So I stay here late and obsess over the best use of class time.  Then I lose half a class on Friday so we can meet and discuss the break schedule with the student body.

Volunteered to run the scoreboard for the basketball games this weekend, which ended up being infinitely more enjoyable then I'd anticipated.  I really like the kids.  And every one of the basketball players (maybe 2 exceptions between the boys and girls teams) is in one of my classes, and the classes are small enough that I know them at this point.  So I was rooting hard for our team, excited when they won (we trounced), cheering as hard as you can when you are the official scorekeeper and required to maintain a facade of impartiality, according to the rulebook (which I consumed in the twenty minutes between the first and second of eight games - scorekeeping is hard!).  I learned the intricacies of basketball rules that I had never guessed at when I was a mere player (players, generally, don't have to be concerned with when subs can be buzzed in or exactly when the clock starts up after an out-of-bounds, because they just go when the ref tells them.  Mess that up as the scorekeeper, though, and people get MAD).  

So I finally got my quizzes graded yesterday after all the games, took today as a mental health day for most of the day, and came in late this evening to do a little quick pre-gaming before tomorrow.  I got all the grades updated for the past two weeks, and the burn of the terrible attendance in these parts is showing.  I think for most of my classes I'm spending tomorrow catching up.  Taking stock of where we're at as a class puts a bit of a damper on my charge-forward enthusiasm - when planning it's easy to remember the students who made big leaps, but when you look at the score across the whole class, the pack is not all running with the leaders.  A day of catch up will be boring to my quicker students (and those with better attendance), but it'll save me a lot of headache down the road when I've got to explain to a parent why their little shining-star has an F in math.

It'd be nice to spend a day shoring up the progress we've made over the last two weeks, too.  A couple of my classes have leapt through a lot of material, and I'd like them to recall some of it in a month.

In personal news, a couple boxes came, two from kk and two from amazon, leaving me well stocked in food, with Yak Trax, a big huge box of candy (THANK YOU) and running shoes.  Decided to see if maybe my inability to sleep normally up here (besides the weird daylight, stressful job, odd hours, and too-hot house) might be due in part to the huge cut-back in physical exertion in my life in switching from a job that was at least part load-in/carpentry to a job that's all standing/sitting and talking.  I do tend to be a very active teacher - I pace back and forth in front of the white board, write things on it, move back and forth from desks to white board to answer questions (I've also learned how to write all my numbers upside-down with a great degree of accuracy, to expedite answering questions from the other end of the desk from a student - interesting quirk of the horse-shoe shape I've opted for with the desks), but active teaching is the exertion of very very lazy carpentry.  So maybe running, shooting some hoops, doing a little working out, might be the way to get myself to sleep at night?  We'll see.

Goals for this week: build more connections between the unit we're learning and other concepts / the world; learn some Yupik numbers, and set expectations for quiz day in advance so it isn't a surprise.

Day 9:Solutions to problems.

Weekends mean getting out during "daylight" hours, so I get to see what this town looks like with some light on it.  Looks... snowy. 

Problem solved!  Here's the process I've been on today:

Basic math skills (familiarity with numeric computation, +/-/x/÷ of integers and fractions) are not on par with grade level, nor at a comfort level that allows me to proceed further with a math curriculum.  It's very difficult to teach the methods of solving a two-variable system of linear equations when cross-multiplying two simple fractions brings the conversation to a standstill.  The solution to this, in my experience, is math drills.  Spend a couple minutes at the start of every lesson just drilling math computation way below the learning threshold (if you're working algebra, drill basic integer multiplication; if you're learning how to combine fractions with different denominators, drill integer addition, etc.), so I set out today to produce some worksheets for speed drills at the start of lessons.  There's a problem inherent in that, though, and it seems to be cultural.  If I give everyone a copy of a worksheet, I will get back a class average of what the kid with the best grasp of numerical computation could do, multiplied by some ratio of how fast people can copy off of her spreading outward away from her desk.  It's not a widespread acceptance of cheating, to my eye, it's more like a lack of cultural understanding of the idea of cheating.  Somewhere along the way in my schooling experience (and most of the schooling I've run into in the lower 48) it is stipulated between educators and students that the point of school is to do your own work, copying is cheating and invalidates the point of the lesson, and while students still choose to copy off work due to laziness or whatever, it's done with an understanding that it is working at cross purposes with the educator.  Here it doesn't seem like anyone's internalized that idea.  So when I'm constantly asking people to put their eyes on their own paper for a quiz I'm not met with "oh you caught me cheating", I'm met with a frustrated lack of comprehension of why I'm not letting them work on it in a better way - by working with someone who's better at it.  I'm clearly just being obtuse and difficult by not letting them work on it in the most efficient way.

Far be it for me to try and effect some massive cultural shift in these students, or single-handedly get major buy-in to the Western educational process.  Instead, the solution seems to be (and this worked for the quizzes on Friday) to just produce many versions of any worksheet, so no person is sitting near someone else working on the same material.  We've all seen this in schools where cheating is a problem, on major individual tests.  The onus of work that puts on me, however, is huge.  To do speed drills with 40 students a day means writing up 40 individual worksheets every single day.  I'm willing, but would prefer to spend some of my out-of-school time working on the actual lesson plans and the material I'm *teaching*, not the material they're behind on that I'm remediating.  So I sat down at the computer today, and wrote up a python script that generates, based on random numbers, any number of worksheets with simple +/-/x/÷ problems using positive or negative integers or fractions, based on user prompt.  I fire this program up, tell it I want to work on adding fractions with different denominators ranging from 1 to 12, and I have 8 students in the class, and it spits out 8 pdfs of different worksheets using LaTeX (so they actually look like math worksheets, not some MS Word garbage with fractions formatted like an English major would format them) that I can print off and distribute.  Tomorrow we'll see how passing your sheet to the left and having your neighbor check your answers with a calculator goes over... but for the moment I have the material to drill computation with.  I'm feeling pretty proud of that.  Now, of course, spending the day working this solution up has put me a day behind on lesson planning for the week, but tomorrow I think I'll have my hands full going over the quiz and giving them an opportunity to correct their work and turn it back in for partial credit - not a single student aced the quiz (I think I had an 80%?) which is my problem, not theirs, I overshot my estimation of comprehension based on the first week, but at least the first step in reaction to that is to remediate exactly what they missed on the quiz.  So that'll take me through the day tomorrow, and tomorrow after school I figure out where I want to turn this ship this week.

The nautical metaphor feels really apt out here.  I've been adjusting the throttle all week, and the quiz was a big throttle-adjustment signal.  But now that I think I'm dialing in the speed, I've gotta get a clearer idea of the heading.  Do we just keep plowing ahead towards that beacon of calculus like most high school math classes (if you look at any high school math curriculum, it's one big steamship burning for calculus, taking detours to the probability and statistics islands, with a quick stop off at analog clocks and measuring or whatever silly state standard got passed off on the math department), or do I loop back and do a thorough trawl through the poorly-charted waters of intro algebra?  Is less progress learned more fully more useful to these students?  The number of students I have even considering college as an outside possibility is incredibly low, so it's hard to see what the actual benefit to a calculus-leaning curriculum would be at all...

More to come soon.

Day 8: Quiz Day not a success.

The old high school - every time I brag about how nice our facility is, I just go walk by the old one and think about how lucky it is I came when I did.

Yesterday was quiz day.  Rough day.  The students here didn't take well to being quizzed, and made me pay for it.  Also, the Internet's being wacky, so dunno when this post is gonna go up.  I have work cut out for me, so more when I get some work done.

Day 7: Exhaustion sets in

Teacher entrance, a.k.a. "you made it in"

Goal for the week was in at 7AM every day (an hour to set up, prep, get my head wrapped around each class's plan for the day, half an hour of see-if-students-stop-by, then class starts).  Actual times in: Monday, 7AM; Tuesday, 7:08; Wednesday, 7:15; Thursday, 7:34; Friday, 8:02.  If you look at Akiachak's position in Alaska, it really ought to be in the next time zone over (Alaska's one big time zone).  So while we still have a little sun at 5:30pm, 8am is as pitch black as midnight.  Mornings aren't easy.  It's really cold, I've been up late grading and making quizzes, and the walk in isn't something you get all excited about and want to just leap out of bed and tackle.  Goal for next week is to figure out mornings.  Today the snooze button and I went far enough that breakfast was out (bad idea, bad bad bad idea) and the morning shower almost didn't happen (side effect of bundling for winter: daily shower is not optional).  This has to change.  Dunno if it's leaving a little work for the morning so I get to bed earlier, or going for a walk in the evening so I don't lie in bed feeling all cooped up and stir crazy instead of sleeping.  Time to start experimenting.  But first: quiz day!

Day 6: Meetings about meetings.

This is the view over my shoulder leaving school at 9pm.

It's not a bad cold.  I, in many ways, feel warmer outside here than I did in Portland - there's none of that in-your-bones soaking-through all-consuming cold that 30º in Portland brings with it.  It was -2º last night, but the dry, crisp, windless, powdery-snow-filled cold felt more 'brisk' than 'freezing'.

Yesterday was a staff meeting, this morning was a staff meeting.  One forgets, when considering education as a career, how far the bureaucratic nonsense has intruded into the daily lives of teachers.  It's easy to remember the standardized testing, value-added scores, constant assessment and curriculum direction, institutionally mandated guidelines covering everything from how to present information to how to handle conflict to what you do and don't have to report to administration; that's all apparent to anyone who follows the news.  But the degree to which your daily life is taken up with meetings and discussion about those things, that part is easy to forget.  I mean, until you're living it, then you get constantly reminded.  How is anyone supposed to teach anything while being constantly taught/refreshed/assessed/reminded/adjudicated/instructed/retrained/etc. on how to teach?

Day 5: Settling in to routine.

This is pot number 4 for the day, currently brewing.  It's 1PM.  Sounds right?

Finally found a job where I can literally make and drink coffee at a rate commensurate with my desire for caffeination.  I have a hotplate on my desk, a mug on the hotplate, and an ever-filling french press to fill the mug with.  Hot coffee, perpetually at my fingertips.  It's amazing how well you can do without the necessities in life, provided you have the little luxuries (to quote Pitch Black).  5 of 6 classes are dialed in and on a path to learning some math, one frustrating class just won't land.  I thought today I was certainly bracketing their ability level (I had way overshot the first day, was clearly still mildly ahead of them the second day, pulled way back looking for something too easy so I could start zeroing in on the material that's just challenging enough for them) but it turns out I overshot again.  So I'm starting to feel like a real jerk (how much has it got to be not fun to have someone just keep handing you material you can't do, walking you through a couple problems on the board, then leaving you to rot in a stew of "can't do this"?), and a downright incompetent teacher.  Sounds about right for my prep period, which falls between the aforementioned unbracketable class and my dream last class of the day. So I get to stew for an hour, then end on a positive note.  

Last night I saw a team of sled dogs pulling a (running) snowmobile.  You wanna talk about your weird mix of pre- and post-industrial?  There it is.  I wish I'd had my camera.  Gonna start taking the camera on my walk home (would've yesterday, but the TSA finally decided that after delaying my bag, unpacking it and repacking it in such a way that everything broke, stealing 3 bags of fruit snacks (or losing?  But I think stealing), and putting no less than 3 notices informing me it was inspected in my bag, that they'd send it along to me; so I was hiking home with 50 lbs of checked luggage and didn't have room for the camera), and hopefully I'll snap a pick of the bizarre daily village life here.  But I don't know how it's gonna top a sled dog team pulling a self-powered vehicle.

Day 4: Still haven't seen the sun.

Looking at it, you could almost forget it's in the middle of nowhere.

Correction: the Middle of Nowhere is the regional hub where our mail goes.  Second day of school, and yesterday was another 7am to 9:30pm day, here I am back at school before 8am, and I still haven't left the school during daylight.  Getting an operational math curriculum spun up out of scraps and notes isn't exactly an easy task, but yesterday went very well.  Of my 6 classes, 3 of them I had right on target, 2 I'd leapt a little too far for them to follow me, and one of them I hadn't leapt far enough.  Stayed late last night rewriting course plans for the three misses, and today we'll find out if I've course-corrected them onto a more reasonable path.  Walking around this school is a surreal experience.  You know, intellectually, that this is a little aircraft-hangar-looking school in the middle of nowhere, and at the same time it's one of the nicest high school facilities I've ever been in.  Fully outfitted gym, card-locking doors, clean floors, nice undented lockers - it's a bizarre combination.  Maybe makes you feel a little less frontiersy despite the remote location?

Day 3: First day of school!

I'm so clever.

You know, we all joke so much about "first day of school" when referring to starting rehearsals, starting tech, meeting new coworkers, etc. - it's really kind of strange to be nervous about the actual first day of school, in a literal sense.  I was here till midnight last night throwing lesson plans together, and I'm ready to throw any of 'em in the wastebasket the minute it seems like they aren't working.  There's a lot of pressure to succeed here, and while the last teacher left me with tons and tons of notes, the details of exactly what's been taught, what's understood, and what needs remediation with a subject as detail-oriented as math leave me a little blind here.  I lay awake last night till 4am teaching in my head, trying to balance the overwhelming amount of information I want to convey with the fact that high school students don't wanna listen to me yak for 60 minutes straight.  Now here I am, 15 minutes till class starts, agonizing over whether I'm actually covering useful material today, whether I skipped a major step for any of the classes, whether I'm remediating too far back, or not far back enough... 

Close eyes, hold breath, leap.

Day 2: Meet your Classroom

Regardless of what you may have learned from A Noble Failure, they *do* do that anymore.

The blackout curtains in my room mean business.  Went to bed at 8pm or so when the internet cut out on me and all the travel-exhaustion hit me at once.  Woke up feeling like it was 6am or so, pitch black in my room.  It was noon.  So gotta watch out for that one.  Booked it over to the school, got my school keys, started forensically excavating from the last teacher's notes, work-handed-back, gradebooks, etc. where my class was.  This guy I'm taking over from has given me everything I need to succeed.  I could kiss him.  He went so far as to have every student write me a "Dear New Teacher" letter.  I have 50 letters from adorable kids telling me they like hunting and fishing and their favorite kind of math is the "easy kind".  Set up the classroom to my taste (I'm a desks-in-a-U more than a rows kinda guy), cleaned the blackboard, and then spend 7 hours typing up lesson plans and worksheets for tomorrow.  This is the hard day.  Tried to zero in on where each group is and where they're going, but we'll find out tomorrow if I've leaped too far or not far enough with any of them.  Here goes nothing!

Day 1: the smallest plane

This was my taxi to Akiachak.

Day 1: Travel travel travel.  Alaska airlines lost my bags somewhere between Seattle and Anchorage.  Switched to smaller and smaller planes, as per usual, with the above as the final leg of the trip.  Which made Alaska Airlines' attempts to negotiate how my bags would get to me out here.  Needless to say, they don't operate that last leg of things.  And my cell phone doesn't work out here.  So I'm trusting them to work out amongst themselves how to book my bags a courier flight and get them picked up at the airport and driven in to Akiachak.  We'll see, I guess.  All things considered, flying in a plane with one other passenger and a pilot in crystal-clear weather over the expanse between Bethel and Akiachak was one of the most exhilarating, moving, beautiful things I have ever experienced in my life.  Status: worth it.