Atama sagemasu

Which, in Japanese, means literally, "I lower my head." You say it when you watch someone do something amazing; it's meant to convey admiration. I said this to myself after watching Ms. Lee wrap up my math lesson today.

I had designed a place-value game for one of my classes last semester, and tried it out while she was out last week. It needed some work, but she wanted to see it, so we tried it again today. We went over how I would introduce it, and they remembered playing it, so it went smoothly. I played with our odd student (we have 25 kids), everyone else in pairs, and she walked around to see them play.

I was about to do a share at the end of the class, and she asked if she could take over. Of course! I said. And she went to work.

She did something that I know you're supposed to do, and somehow I never manage to get as concrete I should: she modeled the way you score the game on the sheet I designed. This may seem like a detail, but it's how the kids "show their work" and they were all over the map with their recording methods, this time and last time. She managed to explain how to score it, get them to explain to themselves why and how to do it this way, and had the class doing a little mental math at the end to boot. Her words were well-chosen, and the demonstration was just right.

She also had a few great suggestions (and in hindsight, perhaps obvious!) improvements to the scoring sheet, and ways you could customize it for what you want to teach (20's, 100's, counting by 5's or 25's and so forth).

I realize how far I have yet to go until I can be pitch-perfect like that. But in the meantime, I think the penny finally dropped on modeling. I hope I can hang on to the "aha" moment long enough to try it out properly!

Knocking something down when you didn't mean to

Much as I feel reasonably competent in the classroom, there are some times that, as a student teacher, you're bound to do or say something which, in hindsight, doesn't work out very well. It's not thoughtlessness, it's just an accident- lack of context, no foreknowledge of potential consequences. (Sort of like my student who knocked over the Empire State Building- see below- she didn't mean to.)

To make a very long story short, Ms. Lee had to be out a bit last week. As a consequence, I did some minor supervision of the class on my own (with the principal's knowledge) and I worked with a few substitute teachers. I wound up taking some flack for several decisions I didn't make, from both parents and other teachers, which is fine- I am perfectly willing to take one for the team. But I did mention a few things to Ms. Lee in passing, not to lay blame but just to say, if anyone comes to you with this, here is some context.

In particular, one of the substitutes did something that I thought was a bit unprofessional. Ms. Lee seemed to agree, and said she'd mention it to the person in the front office who manages the substitutes. Case closed, right? No- I heard about it the next day from both the sub (who confronted me angrily in our classroom) AND the person who schedules the subs. At this point, I got a bit defensive. My intention was not to get anyone in trouble, and this is supposed to be about the kids. I felt attacked for exercising what I thought was my best judgment, and Ms. Lee didn't disagree.

Working with substitutes can be very fraught. They are "responsible for the class" in a legal sense, but the ones I've worked with have, to a greater or lesser degree, been willing to let me take the lead in what actually gets taught on a given day, so that they are in effect my "assistant for the day." This suits me fine and I would imagine takes some of the pressure off of them.

But as student-teachers, we are not supposed to be taking responsibility or making decisions. We are also insulated from the avenues of responsibility and accountability to a fair extent; everything we do is filtered through our cooperating teacher. Should the sub "get in trouble," really? I don't know; it's not my decision. This is what I told the sub: I couldn't personally get you in trouble even if I wanted to, which I didn't.

I think I will chalk this one up to no good deed going unpunished, and hope that it ends there.

If you can go to a garden, go

We went to my community garden today, as part of our science unit on plants. PSOhYes has a garden, but we went to see the composting, mostly. There was also still a lot to see, even in mid-October, as a lot of things like pumpkins had not been harvested.

Can I just tell you how excited these kids were? They ran up to me saying things like "I did SIX sketches and I want to do six more!!!!!!" And you know, even if they stopped after two, they were still running around looking at the pumpkins and the other plants, looking for snails, wondering why the mosquitoes were not as bad in the sunny, open parts of the garden- they could not have been more engaged.

I had one of my fellow gardeners, who works a lot with our compost, come to talk to the students for about 15 minutes about compost, what goes in and where we get it, what comes out and what we do with it, and what happens in between. He found them some worms to play with- very exciting!- and some intrepid kids put their hands on the steaming, partially-cooked compost. The steam coming off of that pile got a big "Ooooh!" as well.

It was, all in all, a really stellar field trip, and we really didn't have to do much except set them loose and make sure they understood the rules. Some kids even contributed to the compost pile with scraps from their lunch!

Here is an excellent example of some of the sketching they did today:

Falling down on the job

It was bound to happen sooner or later. I've been teaching one lesson a day for the last two weeks, and inevitably, one of them didn't go well.

As you know, we've been working on the compass rose. We've been team-teaching this unit because I am not there every day. Yesterday Ms. Lee wanted them to finish a bird's-eye view map of the classroom that they did, and we also had some compasses and maps to work with. We wanted them to finish their maps first, to reorient them to the four directions, so first they were to correctly mark the compass rose that we'd pasted onto each of their maps with N S E & W (it was a small map).

Then, we gave them compasses and had them try and line up their compasses with the compass roses on their maps. These are not very high quality compasses; they don't work well, and we had an interesting discussion about why it might be that they were not all pointing to north (magnets in the room? Metal in the building? Force field of the microwave and refrigerator in the northernmost corner messing up the manetic field? Fascinating).

Finally, we had five maps of the greater NYC area, one for each table, and we were going to have them work with the maps and find places north, south, east, northeast, southeast, etc., of Brooklyn. So, three transitions, and no clear "lesson, then work" flow, which made it tricky.

Now, mind you, they were also doing all of this at their table seats, and they are not used to being at their table seats for whole class discussions. For some reason, calling out and chatting with neighbors is a huge problem at their work seats, while it's not, so much, when they're on the rug- this I attribute to conditioned behavior. They are used to being quiet on the rug, and being free to talk while working, at least some of the time.

That said, they LOVED the maps. So much that some groups were not able to share well, and goodness knows they were not able to be quiet and listen to each other in a discussion-type format. It was great for the kids who got it, and knew what they were doing; less so, naturally, for the ones who were trying to figure out the directions still.

Ms. Lee totally had my back on this. She walked around and helped me make sure everyone was getting access, and that the kids who were struggling with the directions were getting a little guidance.

I had not really thought through the discussion part, I confess, and it took me by surprise that they were so exuberant. I tried, on the fly, to think of a way to change the dynamic so it wouldn't be so chaotic, but I couldn't think of anything that wouldn't shut off their enthusiasm. So I soldiered on, shushing them as questions were asked and answered, and, in the words of Ms. Lee, tried to appreciate that "there was engagement, there was learning," even if it was a little chaotic.

In retrospect, we could have used the ELMO for this and done the entire discussion on the rug rather than the groups having maps (although I rather like that they could actually hold it). One advantage of this venue is I could have traced with a pointer the vector of the directions, and some kids could have described their thinking, in a way that would be very visual as we worked on the questions together, and I think this might have helped my strugglers.

Alternatively, I could have designed a simple worksheet that they could work on in groups ("find two places northeast of Brooklyn," "find one thing on the map that is not a city that is south of Brooklyn," this kind of thing). I would have had to walk them through it and read the questions out, but it would not have been any less chaotic than what we had already going on. We could have come back and discussed what each group came up with.

So, you live and you learn. Thank goodness Ms. Lee is not the type to dwell. She told me not to be so hard on myself. We'll have another chance to look at the maps when we start the unit on New York City, and I can use what I've learned then.

Second-graders are not spatial

At least, many of them are not. We've been working on teaching the four directions and how to use and create a compass rose on a map. They are making their own big compass roses, including the four directions and the "in-between" directions (NW, SW, NE, SE).

Some of them had problems figuring out how those should be arranged. Even when I told them "northeast is between north and east" (which is not very conceptual), they still mixed it up. Some of them put a few points at southwest, and none at northeast. Sigh.

These same kids also struggled with the notion that north didn't move, even if they did.

We started with looking at real maps and talking about maps and what they can do. We gave them a worksheet that helped them practice where the four directions are, and provided clip boards so they could orient themselves towards north, which was marked in one corner of the classroom (and yes, it is actually north). They didn't use the clip boards- which we thought would have made it easier for them, but alas, no.

We also did a kinesthetic activity, using both arms to point N-S, W-E, and one arm to point to a direction as fast as they could, then change their orientation (for example, turn 180 degrees) and find it again.  Some students really struggled with this.

Interestingly, one student (who *did* get it) was standing in front of the corner marked "north" and when I would say "point north" he would point at his nose. I had him turn his body all the way around while still pointing north, while the other students watched. He had fun with it, but I got a lot of blank stares, too. Argh!

We have real compasses, and next week we'll use them along with a bird's-eye view (another stumper, for some kids- what do you mean the desk is just a rectangle?) map they each did of the classroom, to put the compass rose on their maps and mark it themselves. The science teacher, from whom we borrowed the compasses, warned that "they don't work very well." I took the whole tray to see if they all pointed the same way. Hmmm... not really!

We'll see- it will be interesting. I don't think that the students' getting it or not will hinge solely on whether these compasses are perfectly accurate. They DO know about compasses and the magnetic field that makes them work, so if they notice they are not working perfectly, it will be a good chance to have a discussion about why that is.

They can also practice being good scientists by sharing compasses and trying to reproduce results, which is an important part of the scientific method.

And maybe later this year, some of my little sweeties will suddenly be struck with the ability to conceive of a bird's-eye view, and a constant, like north, outside of themselves and the direction they are facing.