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.