Moneymoneymoneymoney

My students worked with money today. It was kinda neat-- we put a lot of coins on a tray and gave one to each table (I won't even tell you how much change Ms. Lee has in her closet). They were to sort the coins, look through them, become familiar with the different types, their characteristics, names, how much they're worth. Then they partnered for a game where they had to close their eyes and match the coin their partner gave them by feel. It was a good sensory experience, I think.

Interestingly, I had designed a place-value game called heads or tails that I did with the class a bit earlier this semester. It used 20 pennies, but for more advanced students I gave them 20 nickels or 20 dimes and let them count the value of the coins. They didn't seem to have a problem doing this, so I just assumed they had already learned about money.

For that lesson, and for this one, they were quite excited to be playing with real money and were VERY engaged. I partnered with one girl whose father is from Africa and mother is European, and they spend summers overseas. She and I played on the rug, near where the values and names of the coins were displayed. She clearly was not familiar with what they were called or how much they were each worth. We have several kids in the class who are expats, and I wonder whether they, too, only have a vague notion of US coins?

It would not surprise me. I grew up in Japan and I remember learning about US currency in a math workbook at school. It mystified me for a long time why a nickel was bigger than a dime. Made no sense.

Anyway. They loved it. I guess enthusiasm for math is good at any price (even the price of possibly fostering an obsession with money!) so I have noted this: math games with coins are sure to be a hit.

Noticing

Disclaimer: this post  has nothing to do with teaching. I had a very interesting moment this morning. Went into the deli across the street which is run by Arabic-speaking people. They had a radio tuned to an Arabic-language station, as they often do, and there was a news broadcast. I couldn't understand it, of course, but for three words: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and jihad. 

In front of me were two women making purchases. One was telling the other about how she'd just had another baby, how it was 5 months old but only 7 lbs 5 oz (to give you some perspective, my child was 15 lbs at 5 months) and the father is in jail. 

All judgment aside, all political or social opinions aside, this is why it's so interesting to live here: you can't escape the world and its pressing issues, writ large, writ small. It's all around you; it's your neighbors and the people you  do business with. 

I don't intend at all to start a discussion about single motherhood, overcrowding in jails, or the Israel-Palestine conflict, which, sadly, has flared up again. Just, as we say in education, noticing. 

On the Same Team

Just had a great parent-teacher conference today. I didn't participate in many, but Ms. Lee was awesome about letting me give input and talking about the process of grading and so forth. She asked me to be present for the one today, because I had been working very closely with this student, who has a hard time working independently. 

The student had been in another class for first grade, and we'd gotten the impression from his previous teacher and special education coordinator that they were perhaps resistant to evaluation for possible services: the family doctor could find nothing wrong and said that perhaps the teacher "didn't know how to deal with boys." We were apprehensive, to say the least. 

Ms. Lee's method is to let the parents speak first. The mother said that they would begin the evaluation process in early December, and she had found a doctor that would take their insurance. I suspect that this may have been one thing that prevented them from doing it before. I didn't know that insurance would even cover such evaluations. File that away. 

Long and short of it is, they were very afraid that their child would have to leave the school, depending on the outcome of the evaluation, and were relieved that this was not the case- there are inclusion classrooms at every grade level at PSOhNo. 

They also seemed to feel that previous discussions had not been very collaborative. Both we and they shared the things we'd noticed, and we talked about the ways we were working with their child, what was working, and what the plan was going forward. The parents were quite obviously a. grateful that we were trying things and b. willing to take time and find ways to support this student's development in working independently. 

They hugged us both at the end of the conference and thanked us for being so open, and I think both Ms. Lee and they felt it was a best possible outcome for the conference. I am really proud of how well it went! It was the only conference we were at all concerned about, and it was a slam dunk. 

Democracy in action

Today was our first day back at school after the hurricane. The neighborhood around PSOhYes is completely normal, except shops extra-full of people who can't get to Manhattan, but of course we all know that not far away, things are terrible. 

I was very impressed with the all-hands meeting the principal held today. It went for about an hour, and she led a quite democratic process of soliciting ideas and discussion about what we should do on a number of fronts, including what the staff would like to do about helping affected colleagues (everyone was in favor of immediate cash collection), what the greater school community, including families and the PTA can do for the broader relief effort, how teachers can talk to students about what has happened and perhaps teach into some aspects of it, and what kinds of aid activities the students can get involved in right away to help out. 

Long story short, there was a read-a-thon planned that will now be devoted to the relief effort, and will be promoted as such as soon as it can be arranged. That, along with helping affected colleagues right away, were the "now" action items. Other initiatives to follow. 

The principal really gave people a chance to be heard while still being very much in charge and keeping the meeting on track (it could have gone on all day). Many teachers were also aware of the fact that immediacy, while not the primary concern, is important: when it takes a long time to decide what to do, the message they get is "something terrible happens and we do something, sometime, maybe." I thought this was an important point to note. 

My daughter took away from this that "the train is closed" and now we take the bus to school, but she's only four. I'm interested to know what my students think about what is going on in New York right now... 

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: