What interests middle-schoolers?

Recently, the topic was what would engage middle-schoolers.  It's a valid question, spoken to nicely by this quote from Edutopia:

Look at it this way: your teaching every year is like a narrative, and ...if the A-story is the standards-based content, then the B-story is the tween-based content, and there is a huge difference between a middle-school classroom run by a teacher who takes on this added curriculum and a middle-school classroom that doesn't. It's the difference between silver and gray.

I am personally of the opinion that it is not just my job to present things in a context they're interested in, but also to interest them in things they hadn't thought about, heard of, or really considered before.

Apparently someone said, "Middle-schoolers aren't interested in health insurance" and the gauntlet was thrown down!  The good people at Mathalicious offered a free sticker to anyone who taught their lesson "License to Ill" and gave feedback by Thursday, and I couldn't resist.  I'm just hoping the deadline is midnight Central Time, not Eastern.


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We live in a town that was widely impacted by the Federal Shutdown last month, so I thought my students would as least have a little bit of knowledge about current events.  I have two classes doing the regular 7th grade curriculum - one of average-to-below-average seventh graders, one of above-average 6th graders.  I opened each class with questions about why the government came to a grinding halt, and they all could say it was because "they couldn't come to an agreement."  They also readily answered "Obamacare" ... but none of them could articulate what exactly made health insurance such a big deal.

We worked through the math ... expected values, expected costs, who buys?  who doesn't?  very nicely.  More hand-holding with the seventh graders, but nobody quit or grumbled about not needing this or not being interested.  I only have 45 minutes in each class, so I split the lesson over two days.

Day 2 I opened with the promotional video the Mathalicious people had made (apparently you have to be beautiful to work there).  It was basically a re-cap of the math we had done yesterday, with live people, but I thought it would be good to bring everything we'd done back together - without me doing the re-tell.  Sometimes I think students get so bogged down in the calculations that they lose sight of the big picture of what they're doing and why. It was also a quick catch-up for the couple of kids who were absent yesterday.

Then I had them do the final questions - pros and cons of different options (denying care, denying coverage, mandating coverage, etc.) - and I told them I didn't want their opinions, I wanted them to demonstrate that they were thinking about all sides of the issue. I had them discuss in their groups, and then they reported back to the whole group.  I was very impressed with what they came up with.  Both classes came up with pros and cons that weren't addressed in the video/work and really remained engaged.  They were also VERY interested in the social justice aspects.  Sometimes it took a while to come up with the pros for "deny coverage" and "deny treatment" because both seemed so inherently wrong that they really had to work to see the financial side of it. I loved hearing them say things like, "If they can't afford insurance, how can they afford surgery?" or "but it's no good if the hospital goes bankrupt, either..."   They were able to relate to the downside of mandated coverage, and offered how they hate for their parents to tell them what to do, even when they know their parents are right!

I asked them to turn their packets in because I wanted to look at what they'd written down, and one seventh grader asked if they'd be returned because he wanted to keep his.  In the 6th grade class, as they were leaving, a girl said, "Are we going to do more stuff like that?  Because I really liked it." [side note: we do Mathalicious stuff regularly, but this was the first one that had the social-justice-discussion aspect.]

Lastly,  I told them I was hoping to get a sticker for doing the lesson, and they wanted to know what it would take for them all to get one. {big grin}


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 Oh, wait. If you don't know the lesson, this might help:

bugs. and they're brilliant.

So this summer my husband came up with seating arrangements that rotated 28 students through 5 different sets of 4 so that in a week's time, no one sits with the same person twice.  (more here)

It worked great, but after 8 weeks, it was getting tired.  I decided to make new assignments for the 2nd quarter.  But this time, I was downright brilliant.  Instead of having five days' worth ... I kept it to 4.  And I used the 5th group as my worst nightmare.  See, I placed into groups the kids that absolutely could not sit together under any circumstances.  And then I rotated the list and came up with 4 permutations in which those kids were absolutely not together, and still no one sat with the same person twice!   Brilliant, I tell you.  Brilliant.

The other thing I did with one particularly whiny class was that I allowed them to write down the one person they least wanted to sit with and promised them they'd only be together in one group.  Hee hee hee.  Since they only sit with any particular person once anyway.  Get it?  I'm so sneaky...

 I also wanted to shake things up, from the shapes, so I created these bugs.  They look like bugs from a computer game one of my children played many years ago.  Each child has a unique bug with four attributes: number of eyes, number of antennae, number of legs, and body pattern.  I printed them in black and white and let the kids color them, cut them out, and glue them to their INB, with contact paper over it. They turned out so stinkin' cute.

 and I'm happy to share the file if you'd like it ... the bugs, the shapes, or just the org chart for the groups.
beccaphillips72 (at) gmail.com

Why I've only quit once this year ...

I'm very pleased to say that we're a half-day short of the five week mark and I've only come home once vowing not to go back. This is a big deal, really.  Last year I came home almost every day and said things like, "I don't think I"m cut out for middle school," or "maybe I'm not healthy (physically or emotionally!) for a full time job..."  I knew this year would have to be different, or I wouldn't survive.

Here's a fancy student trick:

Know what I love best about this picture?  My quick snap of a fun student trick actually captured some of the things that have been crucial to preserving my sanity this year.  1) the math bag.  The ziploc you see in the bottom right corner that is supposed to come every day stocked with composition book, pencils, a pencil sharpener, and a calculator.  Then I can expect that they have nothing on their desks except their bags.  No digging through pencil cases and book bags, no stuff  all over the place, which leads me to 2) the hooks you can see on the wall.  Everything but your bag gets hung up.  No backpacks, computer bags, purses, or lunch boxes should ever be at the tables.  Now the aisles are clear and I can walk around helping people without risking life and limb.  (Although I did slip today in the creamed corn someone spilled in the hall. Landed right on my ass in a puddle of corn juice.   On the incident report, for "witnesses" I wrote, "the entire 5th period class" but I declined the option to turn the page over and provide a sketch of the humiliation.)

Lastly, I love 3) the bucket and seating assignment.  The bucket has glue sticks and scissors, plus whatever lost and found pencils and pens I find.  It represents the notebooks, which I love, and the group assignments, which I love.  sigh...



Here's another thing that has made this year unbelievably better, represented in an email from a parent:

I made a giant decision to ditch our school's digital curriculum.  I know, I know.  It's risky for teachers to go out on a limb like that.  BUT, I'm still using digital tools provided by the district for formative assessments and daily practice, as well as for summative assessments.  I'm also using the curriculum for pacing, and to gauge my rigor.  I'm just not using the lessons they provided, or the homeworks they provide, or the tests they provide!  If you want to have a private conversation about why not, message me.   beccaphillips72 (at) gmail.com.

Instead, I'm using a whole lot more stuff I'm pulling from the interwebs.  Group work, hands-on stuff, and real-world questions.  Thanks goodness for twitter!  (Too bad we can't access it at school.)  I'm using videos from youtube to get their attention and shift their moods.  I'm also working to find the balance between self-discovery and just telling them.  Because, honestly, sometimes you just have to be told.  I'm sure I'll write an entire post about that struggle, if I find time to breathe.

The best part of the year, though, is that we are ALL - me and the kids - just having more fun.  A student wrote this on my door yesterday.  It says, "Mrs. Phillips classroom - awesomeness in progress"

I couldn't be more pleased.

How I spent my weekend...

This morning my pastor said, "Oh! Your kids are with their grandparents?  So you're on vacation too!"  Well, only sort of.  My husband and I spent the bulk of our weekend in my classroom getting ready for school to start.  I am thrilled, because the job he did was one I couldn't have done by myself, and wouldn't have done as well.

At our school, the students used to be required to leave their back-packs in the hall.  Now that each of them has been assigned a computer, they are forbidden to leave their bags on the floor, or unattended, which creates a whole lot of mess in the aisles.  Even when bags are tucked carefully under chairs and desks, the errant strap inevitably sneaks into the aisle - and trips me every time.     

The other problem with bags in the room is that they are accessible.  Always. So who needs to have their pencils ready on their desks when you can just hunt for one whenever it occurs to you?  Why not try to sneak chips during class if you're hungry?  And look, here's something interesting sticking out of your bag that I'd like to pull out and discuss with you!  {sigh...}

I've decided that this might be the single best space decision I've made.   Ben hung coat-hooks - 35 of them - evenly spaced along two walls.  He even painted them the color he painted the walls last year, and used his open paint-bucket to touch up places that tape and finger-prints had marred the walls.  The space already looks cleaner than it has all week.

I'm supposed to get furniture on Friday, which is good because school starts Monday!

Things I'm thinking:
1) number them, and assign them, so there's no jostling for position when they come in.
2) Leave a couple near outlets open for students who ask if they can charge their computers during class.  They'll be able to plug the computers in while still in their bags, still hanging nicely out of the way!

Any other thoughts or suggestions?


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Edit:  Seven days in, and I conclude that this was in fact the best classroom management decision I made.  I numbered them, randomly assigned numbers, and insist they use them.  I asked the students to gather their math supplies - including an INB - in a ziploc, and the baggie is the only thing that's allowed to come to their desk.  It's working FABULOUSLY.  Far better than I imagined.  I can walk in the aisles, easily see if they leave something behind, and generally manage the "stuff" that they seem to require constantly.

No Banana Hat...

As I trek into more and more group work, I have struggled with a signal to pull the class back together.  (This was the only direct criticism I received from my principal last year, and I want to get it right this year!)  At my school, they clap.  The teacher claps a rhythm, and the class repeats it. Sometimes this repeats with different rhythms until not only is everyone quiet and listening, but everyone is actively engaged.  This works remarkably well in an auditorium full of kids, and is seriously fun to listen to, but never seemed to fit in my classroom.

One of the elementary teachers shared this week that she says, "Class, class!" and they answer with "Class, class!"  and then they are quiet after.  I really like this, except that she is stunningly beautiful and sophisticated and the simple statement really suits her.  I don't think I can pull it off.

I thought maybe a meme.  I'd say, "Who's got time for that?" and they would say, "Ain't nobody got time for that!"  (http://youtu.be/udS-OcNtSWo)   or maybe I'd say, "One man's trash..." and they'd say, "is another man's come up!" (from the Macklemore song "Thrift Shop")    When I shared my idea with our gifted specialist, she cautioned that choosing a particular meme risked isolating subcultures within the population, and would have to change regularly to keep up with how swiftly memes morph - my ideas are already dated, frankly.

She said, "just make sure everybody gets it."  To that end, I've decided to show them a cartoon that has made me laugh since I saw it on a greeting card in college, and I am quite sure none of them has ever seen.  It's by Rupert Fawcett, and I got this image from his Facebook page here. 

I will say, "No banana hat," and they will say, "no dinner."  I think it's just silly enough that it will get their attention, and it does not run the risk of becoming quickly dated, since the cartoon is 20 years old anyway!

Now, all that being said, feel free to chime in with other suggestions.  This is going to be a very important piece of my classroom management, and I want something good.

Book Review: Payne's Framework for Understanding Poverty

One of the things that was most striking to me about last year - compared to my previous experience many years ago - was how completely undisciplined the students seemed to be.  And I don't mean that no one else disciplined them, but that they had no self-control.  A student would walk in to the classroom and, with no recognition that everyone else in the room was actively engaged in something, announce that they were late because they'd been to the bathroom.  Students were constantly touching me, touching my things, picking up stuff off my desk and setting it down somewhere else.  In a perfectly quiet room, waiting for someone to answer, students had no problem announcing that they had a thread hanging from their sleeve, but could probably just break it off with their teeth.  It boggled the mind, what these students took for appropriate behavior.

I had decided about a quarter into the year that I was going to have to add study skills to my list of objectives; I took for granted that seventh graders would know how to do things like keep a notebook, write down an assignment, or look back at examples in order to complete new work.    Somewhere in the third quarter, I realized I was going to have to add a few more:

1) Don't be an asshole.
2) Don't touch my stuff.
3) Don't be an asshole about not touching my stuff.

Seriously, it will be just as important to these kids down the road if I can help them learn appropriate classroom behavior as to learn ratios and proportions.


And then, in May, my principal and I were talking about equity and un-tracking, and she gave me a
book that I wish I'd read a year ago.  A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Dr. Ruby Payne.  It was remarkable.  Truthfully, reading it a year ago might not have done me as much good.  Reading it 
now, I was able to mentally point to students in each chapter.  "Aha!" I said, "That's why she acts like that.." "That's why he says that stuff."


Please don't get me wrong.  While I did grow up very middle-class, I was not isolated from poverty.  My parents grew up in Appalachia, and I spent much of my childhood there.  My husband and I intentionally bought a house in a run-down neighborhood and for the last 14 years I've watched a parade of single parents, welfare recipients, addicts, dealers, and prostitutes move in and then out of the house next door to us.  From each of these individuals and their situations, I have grown in my understanding, and in my compassion for the challenges many people face.

But - for all of my understanding of poverty as it affected (those) individuals - it wasn't until I read this book that I began to identify aspects of the culture of poverty.  The language, emphasis, values, and rules of the culture.  And from there, to understand how the culture affected their behavior and attitudes - and my classroom.

I can't summarize the entire book, and I'm not sure I can even adequately articulate the ways that I have internalized the ways that it has changed my thinking, but it HAS.  The best I can do is to recommend that you read it, too.  If you have even a small part of your population that comes from poverty, it's worth checking out. 

un-tracking. de-tracking. mixing it up.

So here's what happened my first year teaching ... We had 50 seventh graders. The  25 of them were put in the "advanced" math class, 25 of them in the "regular" math class.  Truly, they needed to be in different classes.  They'd been tracked for years, and they were worlds apart.  The advanced class was doing Algebraic topics, the regular class was busy learning positive and negative numbers.  There's no way I could have taught them all in the same room.

This was not good.  Not good at all.  As a result, I had a classroom full of kids who thought they were in the dumb class, didn't think they could learn, and didn't bother to try.  They had no confidence in themselves at all.   If they got home and couldn't do the first problem on their homework, they'd just quit.  They didn't ask their parents, or each other, or message me on Edmodo.  They just quit.

And the classroom behavior.  Oh. My. Heart.  The behavior.   Every now and then I'd leave the room for something, and I'd come back to find whatever adult was in charge completely losing their religion.  The collaboration specialist, the reading specialist, the PE teacher ... all seasoned educators, all defeated by 10 minutes with this one class. I have to admit that I felt relieved when that happened, to know that it wasn't just me.  They even did it with the principal in the room.  I used the word "tedious," and the punk on the front row said, "Did you say titties?"  When he didn't get a reaction, he said it three more times until finally the principal said, "I'd like to thank you all for not taking Jack's bait," and he quit.  And usually some kid's goofy antics DID get at least a ripple of reaction around the room.

I tried EVERYTHING.  I tried classroom dojo, bribery, punishment, positive reinforcement, silent lunch, contacting parents, to no avail.

But ONE thing worked, just a bit.  When we came back from Christmas break, I told them that according to the standards of the Common Core, if they did well enough in 7th Grade Math, they could be placed into Algebra I with the advanced kids.  That they weren't So Far Behind that they couldn't catch up.  Slowly, the tide turned.  Leaders emerged.  Kids identified that they wanted to advance and began to work toward that goal.  A couple started coming back during study hall to work problems.  But - the best part - they started telling each other to shut up and learn.  A few of them began to have hope, and that was all it took.

I'd be lying if I said they turned into a model class.  They were still the toughest crowd of the day, hands down, but it wasn't the unmanageable mob that it had been.  Only a few of them excelled enough to be placed into Algebra I, but I'll take it.  And the rest of them will be in something we're calling "Algebra Lite" on "non-credit Algebra" and we'll keep pushing forward.

All of this got me thinking, though, of what I want to do differently next year.  I realized that ability-tracking the classes left a horde of bad attitudes.  The regular students I've already described, but the advanced students weren't much better.   They were arrogant, were indignant when things weren't easy for them, and generally spent their time waiting for me to give them the algorithm.  Math had always come easily to them, and they were unwilling to struggle any more than the regular kids.  I know I have to completely transform the whole culture next year if I am to reach anyone.

My state did a terrible job transitioning to Common Core, and my district transitioned to a new curriculum the week before school started.  At a complete loss for who should be where, the principal threw all the sixth graders into Sixth Grade math.  The classes were split by ability level, but they were all working out of the same book.  The gift in this is that they're all going into seventh grade math next year.  I asked the principal if she'd consider un-tracking the 7th graders, and she said yes without hesitating.   I love her.

The science teacher is thrilled, by the way, at the thought of un-tracking. Because we have two classes of each grade, his science classes are always composed of the kids who aren't in math.  So his classes are math-ability-tracked as well, and he runs into the same behavior and lack-of-leaders problem that I was having... although not entirely the same because they don't hate science like they hate math.

Road blocks I have considered: The biggest roadblock that I see is that it's going to be a HUGE endeavor to make sure that every student stays challenged on their level.  I truly subscribe to the "deeper, not faster" theory, and want to make sure that any student that has mastered the task at hand is given a deeper-thinking question, not scuttled on to the next standard.  This is going to require serious pre-planning, so the high-flyers aren't allowed to get used to spinning their wheels or goofing off.

Another roadblock I've considered is how to group the kids.  I've decided that there is absolutely benefit to heterogeneous grouping for some things, but there is still a need for homogenous grouping, too.  By the time you get to the end of a unit, some of those kids are going to be pushing deeper, some of them are going to need remediation.  I'm planning to address this by having different seating assignments on different days.  You can read more about that plan here.

The other thing I've thought a lot about is how important it is that the classroom climate support the self-esteem of all learners.  I attended a talk at NCTM Dallas last year and listened to a team talk about un-tracking their 9th grade algebra, and one comment was that while the experiment HAD been beneficial for the lower level students as far as learning and achievement, it had NOT been beneficial as far as self-perception. This I can't exactly explain, since their surveys showed self-perception actually went down for the lower-achieving students.  It is hard for me to look at those children, already defeated by their position in The Dumb Class, and see how it would be possible for them to feel worse.    The only thing I can think is that I will have to be diligent in monitoring their interactions as well as providing activities and lessons that are accessible to every student on every level.  Wish me luck.