Five is a Handful

Sometimes, you need a little Moxie. One of my colleagues brought some back for each of us from a trip to Maine. A little research reveals that we’ve had Moxie since 1884 with nary a pause: it’s “the oldest continuously produced soft drink in the US.” Oddly, Moxie came up in my comments today, too, but this one’s a parenting blog. Go figure.

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After reading a review in this week’s New Yorker, I’m totally psyched to pick up Peter Carey’s new novel, His Illegal Self. You may know Carey from the True History of the Kelly Gang or possibly Oscar & Lucinda). It’s a little weird to quote from a book I haven’t yet read, but I cannot resist a book with lines like this: “Plans have changed, she said, getting all busy with a cigarette.”

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And speaking of reading, it’s all about the brain, senses, learning right now: This is Your Brain on Music, The Emperor of Scent, and this article about how the brain perceives number, and how we learn to do things with numbers (more New Yorker for ya):

Dehaene’s work centered on an apparently simple question: How do we know whether numbers are bigger or smaller than one another? If you are asked to choose which of a pair of Arabic numerals—4 and 7, say—stands for the bigger number, you respond “seven” in a split second, and one might think that any two digits could be compared in the same very brief period of time. Yet in Dehaene’s experiments, while subjects answered quickly and accurately when the digits were far apart, like 2 and 9, they slowed down when the digits were closer together, like 5 and 6. Performance also got worse as the digits grew larger: 2 and 3 were much easier to compare than 7 and 8. When Dehaene tested some of the best mathematics students at the École Normale, the students were amazed to find themselves slowing down and making errors when asked whether 8 or 9 was the larger number.

Plus, Oliver Sacks has a new one out about sound and the brain, and Donald Plaff is investigating how the golden rule may be (somewhat) hardwired into our brains (this would have been a neat lecture but who can make it from the Bronx to Battery Park by 6:00 pm? Not me). But there’s a larger post in all this, because “Scent” was one of those life-changing books.

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I’m taking my enrichment cluster kids to a violin-maker’s studio in March. We’re also going to Sony WonderLab.

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My LEGO kids unbuilt the mission models which took us so long to build. It wasn’t destructive, just the outcome of days and days of play, of stealing pieces for other projects. Which would be fine except we’re entering an exhibition/tournament in early April, and suddenly we need to build what we unbuilt. And the pieces are all mixed together with pieces from previous years. Live & learn?

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Nevermind that last bit, the REAL #5 is this:

Home remedies: Ennui

1. Best old book?  I wasn’t reading grown-up books before 1992, so it’s all old to me before that.  Kafka comes to mind as an avenue to explore.  Who else?  Generally more interested in non-fiction than in novels, though a short story collection or novel that is breathtakingly well-written could be an exception.  I’m going to give Jane Austen one last chance, since she’s perpetually hip and that must say something.  Please leave W. Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens off the list.  Bonus points for the marginally obscure.  Balzac, for example… not unheard-of obscure, but not widely read for fun, either.

2. Cultural criticism and recent history.  I love Joan Didion.  Who else should I be reading?  Think essays and journalism.

3. Non-fiction that makes you want to read the stuff in the endnotes (footnotes, bibliography, what-have-you).  The history of NYC stuff was good this way: one book made me want to read the next.  I’m looking for doors that I haven’t opened yet, and I’d like there to be interesting hallways or chambers behind them…

4. The periodicals conundrum.  I’ve chosen sleep (and, on the subway, Gnarls Barkley, and cheesy R&B, and old-but-new-to-me punk in the iPod) over reading anything for the last few weeks..  The last thing I really need is the guilt that comes of dozens of sheets of glossy paper arriving weekly, bi-weekly, monthly in my mailbox.   But lord, am I hungry for bite-size neuron snacks… at the moment, I get nothing.  Rejected New York Magazine after four issues (they sent me more and are still trying to bill me, but really I just wanted the trial subscription).  Probably replacing Glamour with Bust or suchlike.  Atlantic, Harpers’, & New Yorker are usually interesting reads, but what else is out there?

5. The blog that is NOT related to education that you can’t stop reading.  Bonus points for the marginally obscure (ie, avoid famous political and fashion and gossip blogs).  Bonus points for blasting open a new corner of the internet.

6. Other???

‘Cause it’s easily one of the hardest things to do…

1. As always about a year behind the trend, my anthem for today, Smiley Faces by Gnarls Barkley:

I want to be you – whenever I see you smilin’
Cause it’s easily one of the hardest things to do
Your worries and fears become your friends
And they end up smilin’ at you
Put on a smilin’ face

2. Snowflakes again, for the fourth time this winter. It’s not sticking but maybe that’s a good thing. On Monday when it started to snow I told the kids snow is worth celebrating and gave them 30 seconds to just gaze at it and talk about it and cheer a little. Today, it was in advisory and the kids all rushed to the windows (open, as usual) after they finished their survey about bullying (it’s happening in the sixth grade), and I started to tell them to sit down and then I just lost my commitment to productivity and order and we all spent another minute or so with our noses pressed to the windowscreens.

3. Three of our sixth grade boys, one girl, all required to stay for afterschool help in reading. I agree to watch them while their afterschool teacher takes the rest of her advisory downstairs. We wait in the hall outside the room where afterschool French is taught, and soon the boys are dissolving in giggles at hearing their ELA teacher speak French. They start imitating accents. I quiet them down and tell them about my kids making fun of my accent in Turkish… But no, they say, we weren’t making fun of French, it’s just that people speaking African sound so funny! More imitations of “African.” We talk about how lucky we are to live in NYC where there are people from everywhere on Earth and we can hear their languages and try their food and see their clothing and get to know them and ask them about the place they come from. More giggling. The French teacher shuts his door. One boy tells a story about the man in the corner store who speaks AYE-rab (Arabic, I interject). Their afterschool teacher arrives and takes them down to her room. I watch as they walk down the hall, each following his or her own wandering, spinning, dancing, trash-talking 12-year-old path. I just shake my head and grin. Over their heads, she catches my eye and grins back.

4. Last week, sitting in my room while another teacher taught her enrichment cluster. She was giving an interests survey so we can plan our next set of clusters based on what students want to try. One question was which deceased person would you like to invite back to life to meet and talk to?

Is Magic dead? Nawww, he’s not dead! I’d invite Shaquille O’Neal! Magic IS dead! But Shaq’s not dead! What about Charles Barkley? I invited Abraham Lincoln! Why? I want to ask him how he got that beard… Yeah, and was he really that tall?

5. Kids and alums can email in stories of teachers in NYC whom they’d like to thank… you can read about the teachers here.  I’m sure none would mind a nice Christmas bonus, but thanks are good, too.

Exuberance

I saw the best concert that I’ve seen in years on Friday, Josh Ritter playing at Webster Hall.  He’s a little bit of a heart throb, which hadn’t really registered with me because I discovered him through a guy’s recommendation, so a big part of the sold-out audience was screaming 19-year-old girls (really, of all ages… I started to feel about one song away from becoming a 29-year-old screaming girl).  But there were also older people, indie guys, couples, so obviously the music speaks to a lot of people and it’s not just popstar appeal.  He came out on stage smiling and never stopped smiling for the whole show, and his (very stylish) band looked like they were enjoying themselves as well.  And I thought to myself, watching people on stage so obviously enjoying the work they do, Can I feel – and show – that kind of exuberance about my work?  Why is it sometimes so difficult to smile at work?  I like what I do and feel good about it, but I want that to show.  I want the kids to know that I’d rather be nowhere else than with them in the classroom building pulleys.  I want to give them a little more space to be kids while still expecting them to do the right thing.  I don’t want to wind up wiggin’ out because I told them not to play with things on my desk and now they’re playing with things on my desk.  Maybe I should put something on my desk that’s meant to be played with.  But really, this isn’t about the kids, it’s about me: I want to be a little happier, a little quicker to smile, I want to work hard and achieve a lot with the kids but I want to have something left at the end of the day for myself.  What I don’t know is if this will require a change in behavior, or just a change in attitude…

Houston, we have a problem.

Gave the first “I-Check” today, which is basically the FOSS program’s name for their quizzes.  I was very curious to see how the kids would do.  Overall, I’m a little disappointed with the scores, although they follow some clear patterns that will help me tailor my instruction.  First, I didn’t put enough emphasis on the vocabulary.  FOSS doesn’t belabor vocabulary, but there are a handful of important words that the kids need to know really well.  Second, making line graphs and interpreting them is very challenging for the students – I knew that, and I think the kids made a lot of progress since the start of the year, but clearly we have room to improve.  So in the next section, I’ll put a little more emphasis on vocabulary and review the essentials of graphing again.  At least now I have an idea which kids have the skills mastered and which need more attention.

The third problem with the quiz wasn’t really my fault – it’s that the vocabulary used in the program, and the way questions are phrased, tends to lose some of my kids who are weaker readers.  For example, there was a question about mechanical advantage that asked what the “benefit obtained” from using a lever is.  And another question asking the students to interpret a graph, was almost exactly what we had spent tons of time on over the last week, but phrased in more sophisticated language, and kids didn’t recognize the question as something they knew.  Instead of saying, “What pattern does this graph show?” it asked about “the relationship between the location of the load and the amount of effort required to lift the load.”  So I’m not quite sure what to do about this problem.  I could adjust my phrasing to echo the language of the quiz, but in the end, kids have to be able to read and understand these questions when asked in a variety of ways.

But none of these things are the problem, the real problem, the capital-p Problem.  It’s a difference in achievement between my regular education classes and my CTT class, which is 40% students with special needs.  That class did much worse than the others – and not just the students with special needs, all the kids.  So the big question facing me is why?  And what do I do about it?

My initial reaction is that we spend a lot more time putting out fires in that class, and things take a lot longer, so we sometimes miss opportunities for consolidation of ideas, for extra examples, for some of the random little things that I do with the other classes that get jettisoned when we’re tight on time due to behavior issues in the CTT class.  The level of discussion doesn’t get as high because there are so many distractions.  I really want them to stay on pace with the other classes, because slowing down certainly won’t help us avoid an achievement gap.  But keeping up the pace is still leaving them behind.

What to do?  That is the big unanswered question.  We’re having a PD meeting Thursday with our CTT mentor, so I guess I’ll ask her.  And of course, I’ll see what my co-teacher thinks.  Frustrating!  This isn’t the point of CTT!

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If I lived downtown, I’d be in Brooklyn at the Mountain Goats concert.  Since I don’t, I have to console myself by just listening to their music in my iTunes.  Have I mentioned how beautiful this song is?  “And an astronaut could have seen the hunger in my eyes from space…”  I love that line.