Day 30

30 days ago I was boarding a plane on my way home from NCTM.  I was excited and ready to transform my classroom.  I had so many ideas that I couldn't wait to implement.  I had these grandiose visions that I'd come back and transform my students into math enthusiasts.  I couldn't wait to see them excited and eager to do math.

Over the past 4 weeks I've increased discourse, empowered students to discover and work towards learning before direct instruction was provided.  The main topic we’ve covered is surface area.  We have approached the topic by looking at nets, estimating how many post its would fit on a filing cabinet in a 3 Act Math lesson, creating popcorn boxes.  Woven into the hands on activities I've had them working in pairs to solve more traditional problems.  They have demonstrated their knowledge by teaching their peers.  I've seen average and struggling students become leaders as they helped a struggling partner and “taught” their partner how to work out problems.  

Most days I thought had gone great!  I was having fun, and so were the kids.  We had our momentum broken up a few times with state testing, but overall I was feeling great.  I went to work this morning excited for another week, and even more excited to begin lesson planning for a support class I'm teaching during summer school to help students prepare for high school math.  I couldn't wait to plan out all these great hands on, growth mindset lessons.

But as you many suspect, every high meets its equal low.  About halfway through my day, I seemed to dive into mine.  I had given a quiz on surface area, and as I'm looking through them, my scores were low…..VERY LOW.  Several zero percentage per class low.  At first I tried to justify this by looking at the students who did poorly and how much work they had done.  I saw a trend,  most of the zeros hadn't done ANY homework all chapter.  Sigh of relief, this exonerated me, for a minute.  After all now I could pass the blame.  They weren't working, so it's their fault.

The more I thought about it, the more bothered I became.  Wait a minute, at NCTM I had found the magic fix.  My class would be more engaged, so the kids would learn and everything would be wonderful!  But it wasn't.  I was lied to, no I was doing it wrong, see I should have just stuck to my tried and true routine.  I'm obviously not a good teachers.  Throw everything out the window…. Back to what I've always done.  These and many other thought went through my head.  I wanted to cry, then I wanted to scream, then I was just mad.  

Sometimes in the heat of the moment the best thing to do is nothing.  So I went home, played with my little girls and did some thinking.  Where would I go from here?  I had two apparent options:

• Give up, and return the the routine that I have been doing for the past 10 years
• Persevere and keep trying

My gut know that option 2 was the right one, but option 1 was so much easier.  Even as I'm typing this I have this little voice telling me stick it out, stick it out.  After all isn't that what ewe always tell our students.  How often have I told them that math would be hard, but if they stuck it out and kept trying it would get better.  Didn't I owe it to them to follow my own advice.  Don't I owe it to all those kids I'm getting this summer to try and teach them how to be thinkers?

So it was a rough day.  I'm exhausted, frustrated and discouraged, but tomorrow is another day and I'm going to try again.  And even if I only reach one of them, engage one of them, inspire one of me to enjoy math, the. That is one more than I had the day before.

Day 31 here I come.  Are you ready for me, because I'm not giving up!