This is my third post towards Andrew Swan's 20-over-30 September #flipblogs challenge. See my first entry here for some context and a little more information about the challenge. Ok, so I didn’t get this post out before midnight yesterday, but if I blog before and after today’s events, they're still counted separately towards the total 20, right?
When Andrew Swan first put out the 20-over-30 challenge, this interaction happened:
I don’t think this post will be an essay or a literary masterpiece. It will mention being tired. It may descend into a bit of a whine, but I’ll turn it around by the end.
Yawn...
I have a tendency to neglect sleep during the school year. I blame this partly on the odd hours I keep in order to fit work around the parenting of a toddler. At this point in my secondborn’s life, any appearance of paper and pen in my hand stirs up within him an intense desire to also do some writing/drawing himself — usually with THAT paper and pen rather than any alternate option I try to provide, and often even if I’ve previously tried to distract him with something else and then do my work behind his back. The appearance of a laptop on my lap likewise stirs up jealousy that something is on my lap other than him, and will in short order result in his pushing the laptop off my lap and wanting to nurse. And y’know what? Like so many people keep telling me, he’s only going to be small for so long, and I should be making the most of the time I have with him. When I’m being good, this means that while I’m still at work I need to put on the blinders and try to power through marking and course prep as much as possible...but not being a robot, I can’t always switch those energies “full on” during every available working moment. I also find it hard to focus with other people around me, so my shared office spaces that are great for collaboration aren’t always ideal when I need to ignore others, and I only have so much time available to me before I have to go to another math department meeting or pick the kids up from daycare. So yes, I take some work home, and sometimes in the process of putting the small one to bed I’ll crash into sleep at 8:30pm and then get up at an hour like this one to do some work. Sometimes that getting-up-at-odd-hours doesn’t happen and I wonder why I bothered bringing the work home again. Sometimes I’ll try to sleep rather than work, but my brain will race too much to let me rest (hence this wee hour “brain dump” blog post — I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway, especially not if it means failing a challenge!). That’s just part of my reality right now, and I’ve come to be more or less okay with that. It won’t last forever. Timely feedback is important, but I have to do the best I can — and use some smaller check-ins along the way that students can get that feedback on more quickly so they don’t only have to wait on the marking of the bigger things.
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| “Why do you take so long to mark, Miss?” Hey, students, do you want to get your quiz back looking like my planner? No? Then let me enjoy my time with my kid and get your thing marked as soon as I otherwise can. |
Student choice in work groupings
Yesterday, I told my grade 9 classes they could choose to work on the assigned questions on their own or with a partner, and that meant the seating arrangements were up to them — they could each keep their desk in “row arrangement” or move to sit with someone else. While I’m one of those odd introverts who actually likes collaborating with others (just not when I’m marking — see above), I’d hate it if I always HAD to work or even sit with someone else, so in my classes I try to balance my “community is important!” group-building time with the option of some individual work/solo time.
Partway through their work time, I decided to roughly map out what seating arrangements came out of that offer of choice, and I was struck by the difference between my two classes. In this quick sketch, “I” represents an individual student working solo, P represents each student in a partnership (“P” if it ended up being a partnership of 3!), G represents a team that did rotate more or less into their Classcraft team arrangement (though that didn’t necessarily mean everyone on the team was collaborating with everyone else on the team), the “I/P” are students who seemed to work individually but check in with each other (two of the students in one of the morning groups were actually like that, too)...and the C is a student who sat alone but at one point seemed to walk around the whole room discussing the work with several people in the class!
It seems like my afternoon class may be made of more "solos" than my morning class. The situation was not identical, though: the afternoon class was also told we’d have to pack up partway through the period to go to the library (where a librarian helped them set up their Homework Help/Mathify accounts), whereas the morning class has that library trip today. I don’t know if that made anyone in the afternoon class feel it wasn’t worth getting into a partnership because they were going to have their work interrupted in a while anyway. It will be interesting to see if that class’ dynamic is different on a day when we’re in the room for the full period.
Sharing perceptions of students
“Good luck.”
“You’ll never see her.”
“She’ll disappear.”
“She’s got problems at home.”
Wait, are you talking about the kid who’s stayed after school two days so far for some intense help because she needs to know the entire first unit of my grade 11 chemistry course already in order to do well in another course? Because she seems pretty motivated (and available to meet) to me. That being said, is it unhelpful for me to know this is not her first attempt at my course, or that she’s had a tendency to disappear in the past, or that she may have home issues going on? No, I’d argue not. I can use that information to think about strategies I can use to support her, and to monitor her more closely (disappear? Now that I know, not on my watch, kid, or at least not to the extent that I can help it). But I’m glad I did not get this input from my colleagues until after the student had stayed after school those two days, or I may have been more cynical about her ability to profit from that investment of my time. I had one teacher take that attitude with me when I was a high school student (a sore point I should probably release in another post sometime), and I hate it when I find myself drifting into doing it with anyone else. It's still early, so my colleagues' comments may well still turn out to be justified, but I try to keep in mind that I've been surprised in the past by the contrast between my experience and those of others with a particular student -- both positive and negative.
Whoops...I wrote something the length of an essay again. Happy Friday and all that — I think I’ve dumped enough out of my brain to get some rest now before it’s time to start my day.
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