When people find out I am a math teacher, if they don’t tell me how much they hate math and how they were never “good at it” (this comment, BTW, usually culminates with them vomiting on my shoes), they invariably offer that they were good in Geometry and bad in Algebra, or vice versa.

I never ask  people which they preferred in school; for some reason they almost always volunteer their preference.  If you happen to be of this same mind – that you preferred Algebra to Geometry in school or vice versa, consider the following reason why this may be so.

Geometry is very spatial.  Nary a Geometry problem is not accompanied by a figure, usually involving angles, triangles, quadrilaterals, or circles with chords and tangent lines, all chock full of capital letters denoting vertices and such.  True, there may be some algebra involved in the solution of the geometry problem (which, incidentally, is why Algebra generally precedes Geometry in most high school coursework), but  diagrams and figures reign dominant in Geometry.

Algebra, on the the hand, is typically void of diagrams and figures and relies instead on a student’s ability to manipulate symbolic expressions in solving problems.

Therein lies the distinction.  The left hemisphere of the brain is dominant in the cognitive processes using LOGIC, SYMBOLS and LANGUAGE.  The right hemisphere of the brain deals with SPATIAL, CREATIVE, and MUSICAL processing.  That is to say, Algebra and Geometry are processed in different hemispheres of the brain:  Algebra is a left-brain pursuit while Geometry is right-brained.

Of course, some of Geometry requires left-brain logic and some of Algebra requires right-brain spatial/linguistic processing (as in the case of solving word problems).  But on whole, doing Algebra has more in common with writing an English paper than with doing an Geometry problem – at least cognitively.

I myself am a case in point.  I am much more an Algebraist than a Geometer by trade and I am also a writer (not only in the case of this blog, but also for a forthcoming book I am writing that will published by Corwin Press).

I am willing to bet that those folks who liked Geometry tended to pursue artistic careers (sculptures, painters, photographers, architects and musicians) and those who liked algebra tend to pursue left-brain careers (scientists, economists, writers and lawyers).

If you had a preference, which did you prefer in school:  Algebra or Geometry?    dven.

Dr. Ackerman, wounded by the public’s reaction to her slow response to the racially motivated assaults of thirty Asian students, is invisible as groups of 100 or more students from various high schools commit violent acts at the Galleria in Center City Philadelphia.

Additionally, she is now taking heat for appointing a school police officer accused of manhandling students as the person to restore order at South Philly High. In her defense and his, it  may be he is the right man for the job, and that his critics are making unsubstantiated accusations. Time will tell.

In article after article public relations expert Fernando Gallard is quoted as the authoritative source on the school districts reactions to violence, the budget, and measures taken to reduce problems and increase school effectiveness. Ackerman states she is not leaving philly, but how long can Mayor Nutter and Governor Rendell maintain support for her when day after day the newspapers are filled with acts of violence? How long can politicians support Dr. Ackerman when time after time it is made evident she has turned a deaf ear to the problems that truly affect students and their ability to attend a school with a positive learning environment? The superintendent has an air omnipotence about her, but many believe she is impudent and impotent.

Whatever has been done to reduce to violence in schools clearly isn’t working.

Students maintain grown ups let us down. The governor and mayor may soon head that list of grown-ups. By striking in center city Philadelphia, the students have taken the issue of the neighborhoods and brought it front and center. The stores in center city cannot afford crime in their streets any more than neighborhood merchants can. The governor knows that if Center City fails, we all fail. One can only hope that real action will be taken to save our children, and save our city.

( If you read only one thing,  check the very last link and the last line in that article).

The Dean of Students at an elementary school was beaten because she would not release a report card to a parent who came in earlier than what her appointment had been scheduled for. Mind you, I’m not defending the predator, but knowing the neighborhood it occurred in, one should be grateful a parent came in at all. It’s not like the teacher had to pulled out of class at this time to meet with the parent.

The attitude of intolerance comes from high up in administration and filters its way down. The result is violence.

Last week I reported how 30 students were beaten in a racial attack, and the foolish responses of the school district. There is an excellent article in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer detailing the events leading up to the most recent violence. It demonstrates how the children are so right when they say adults let us down.  Adults did let the children down. We continue to do so. We place the school ahead of the needs of the child. This is evidenced by how the Asian children were treated in Philadelphia.

At report card conferences this week I noted how several of my students violently lost their father last year, and also a classmate. Does the school district reach out to these children to promote a healthy recovery? You can argue that’s not the school district’s job. Dr. Ackerman has made that argument. Feeding them breakfast is not our job and we do that now. Dr. Joseph Marshall once said something to the effect of, you can’t get the academics in until you get the emotions get out.

Violence is the wrong to get that violence out. Prevention is the only solution and the School District of Philadelphia has proven history of not being interested.

The second article in today’s paper  demonstrates how the School District of Philadelphia can find the bright side in everything. It’s a must read, especially the last line.  http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/79667417.html?cmpid=15585797

I have a “restricted endorsement for necessarily small schools” in Art. That means that I can’t teach Art in juvenile corrections. I have been moved to the alternative high school this year, where I can teach art with my endorsement, but in lockup, I can’t teach Art because I’m not highly qualified.

What does it take for me to become highly qualified? I need to take the Praxis exam. Problem is, a couple of years ago, I sat on a committee to tweak the Art Praxis exam for my state, and so I am disqualified from taking it for five years from that time. I suppose I can get that restriction waived, but the whole situation is ludicrous.

Highly qualified? I’m a splendid art teacher. My students make super art.

The day I found all this out, I left my classroom and saw Misti working in the commons area. She was struggling mightily with algebra problems. They were not-too-difficult equation problems. I looked over them and said, “Just put the number guys on one side and the letter guys on the other side. You know how to change them positive and negative if they cross the equal mark?”

“Yes,” she said.

“OK. Just put the number guys on one side and the letter guys on the other side, changing positive and negative as needed, and then do the problem.”

“OOOOOHHHH,” says Misti. She gets it and she’s off.

Well, I’m not Highly Qualified in Math. I’m not qualified at all.

Highly Qualified means nothing when it comes to good teaching. It’s another misstep of No Child Left Behind that creates ridiculous situations that can place really good teachers at a silly disadvantage.

So I’m driving down a country road margined with make-shift lots selling Christmas trees every quarter mile and I’m struck by a thought.  The thought is motivated by the all too common experience of dressing a newly purchased tree with a string of lights and realizing that the string of lights runs out before the branches do, leaving either an obvious bare rung of base branches or me having to start all over wrapping the lights. My guess is that we’ve all done this – miscalculated the length of stringed lights with the amount of branches to cover.

What a great query for a secondary math class!  I think to myself.  If I were still in the classroom I would pose this holiday problem to my kids.  It would go like this:

This is not a simple problem.  It involves surface area of a cone, the Pythagorean Theorem, similar triangles, proportions, and solving a simple quadratic.  That’s what makes it such a nice problem to ponder with kids.  Not only is it seasonal but, like all real-world problems solvable with math, there are many different mathematical concepts and skills embedded in it.  I should point out that I would not actually do this kind of math when dressing a tree, but it is a curiosity that can be solved quite accurately using math.  [For those brave enough to try it, the answer appears below.]

I suppose what drives me to write this blog entry has also to do with my concern that, in this day of state curricula and district pacing guides, math teachers just don’t get to ponder real-life math problems or use relevant, timely quandaries to teach this subject.  I suspect many math teachers would not even notice a real-life application unless it was a textbook word problem or  specifically suggested by the district pacing guide.  In our desperate attempt to unify instructional materials (to make them “teacher proof”), we have removed original thinking from our teachers’ lesson designs.  What also gets removed is the spark that can ignite a teachable moment or a higher-order educational experience for our students.

If you’re a secondary math teacher, I encourage you to try this problem with your kids.  I’d love to hear how it goes.  dven.

Answer.  The first string of lights should last roughly 5′ 1″ down the tree, measured vertically from the top.

Today it snowed–a great deal. I almost didn’t make it up the slick hill to my junior high. Here in the high desert of Utah, we don’t usually get this much snow. It’s cold too.

When I pulled into the lot adjacent to my little art building, my usual cadre of kids was waiting for me. As I’ve written in other blog entries, every day a group of kids usually thought to be misfits awaits me for their morning hangout in the art room. We draw, talk, dance, sing and just have an interesting morning together.

It’s better for them than it is in the main building.

So today, they were waiting in the cold for me. One of them rushed up, opened my car door, and offered his hand so I would not slip getting out of the car. Another took the keys and opened the building for me (several doors, several methods). They came into the room and took all the chairs down from the tables (we put them up for the custodian each day to make it easier to sweep). They all waited patiently while I booted the computer, got my morning coffee, and sat down. Then they requested a few songs to listen to, always aware of my taste for mellow.

It brings to mind important questions about education, schools, and learning. We have kids in our classrooms for a relatively short amount of time during a year, during a childhood and adolescence. What remains with our kids? What lasts?

Math test scores? Writing assessment scores? Maybe, for some kids.

For the most part, though, I do not think so. I think that life lessons–such as the ones learned by my little cadre who take care of the art teacher in the parking lot–and deep experiences like band concerts and dance performances–are the things we remember.

I am grateful to be part of it.

Because I can’t make this stuff up, I am just including facts and a few comments in italics. Feel free to add your own. I think this comes from absurdity theater.

The facts:

1. It happened at “South” a large Philadelphia public High School. Two days before the massive beating, students roamed the school form room to room beating Asian students. (Helen Gym’s blog, link posted at bottom. Helen was Philadelphia’s “Citizen of the Year” in 2008 and is a leader in both the education and Asian communities). What does this say about school security and responsiveness?

2. There were 371 violent incidents reported by the school last year alone. During the 2007-2008 school year, the school reported 480 such incidents. (Examiner.com, Minneapolis 12/1/09)

3. The school district had been warned about the school climate and failed to act. “More than 50 Asian students stayed away from South Philadelphia High yesterday, as they will all week – a boycott, they said, of the school’s unsafe conditions and the district’s failure to deal with long-standing violence between racial groups.” (12/8 Philadelphia Inquirer)

4. This year school district officials say violence is down 55%. (Philadelphia Inquirer 12/4/09)  Oops, a retracted statement has appeared: “Officials said last night that they erred last week in saying violence was down at the school. A district spokesman said that through the end of November, assaults were up by 32 percent, to 37 this year, and overall violence was up by 5 percent, with 43 total attacks this year.”  (Philadelphia Inquirer 12/8/09)

5. The school has been branded by the state of Pennsylvania as “persistently dangerous for the past three years.”  (Channel 6 ABC News 12/7/09)

6. Regional superintendent Michael Silverman told the Associated Press the racial tensions “started in the community and came into the school. I don’t know how you separate the school from the community.”

7. The school districts response has been, “”School officials will also evaluate and look at data to know when and where to deploy staff.” (Philadelphia daily News 12/7/09)

8. The school districts response part 2: “”What gets lost in all of this is the fact that the school, the community and the students have worked hard over the past two years to foster that kind of positive learning environment,” said James Golden, the school district’s chief safety executive. “Despite what happened this week, that positive learning environment prevails.” (Examiner.com, Minneapolis 12/1/09)  C’mon, the students are boycotting the school but a positive learning environment exists. What planet do these school administrators live on?

Despite the many absurd statements made by school district administrators in the past week, there is one statement we can agree on: “We never want this to happen again,” Regional Superintendent Michael Silverman said.

Our mayor and school superintendent need to respond. Thus far they have both been silent. Yes the school system is run by the state which doesn’t understand local situations in the neighborhoods affecting school climate. But when 30 students are beaten, doesn’t that require a response from city leaders? Dr. Ackerman, our school superintendent is specifically recruiting African American teachers in a district now mandating African American history classes. These actions are way overdue. But we had better remember America is a melting pot. To avoid mistakes of the past we had better teach multiculturalism and acceptance of diversity.

The state cannot be expected to act, but we can expect our locally elected leaders and  school administrators to do more than just look at the data (as they have said they would do). We can’t change the past, but  this is an opportunity to create the future.  Silence is not acceptable.

For more on this read:

http://youngphillypolitics.com/racial_assaults_south_philly_what_went_wrong

John Dewey said, “Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is not a preparation for life, education is life itself.”

And that, my dears and darlings (which is what I call my junior-high art students), is why No Child Left Behind is just wrong.

No Child Left Behind purports to measure something real, but test scores are only illusion. They are not real; they are a contrived moment where stress-drenched children sitting in uncomfortable chairs attempt to understand oblique prose manufactured by test-writers who maybe never knew a child in their lives.

Think I’m exaggerating? I am a long-time professional writer as well as a teacher. I read–a great deal. What I am telling you is that I’m smart and well-educated, day after day, all my long life. Yet when I open those language-arts tests designed for junior-high and high-school students, some of the questions are so strangely phrased that I can’t understand them myself, much less choose one of the multiple-choice answers, any two or three of which could be understood to be correct.

And math! I like math myself, yet when I crack open one of the math tests, I hyperventilate. Part of the reason is that the tests are designed to make everyone fail at some point; no one can answer everything correctly. How’s that for brilliant pedagogy-via-test-taking: make everyone fail.

It’s not a good way to help our dears and darlings find their way to a rich life of education. No, it’s a direct route to helping them hate the process. Nobody likes to fail. Who can blame kids for turning from the books to the video games, where at least they can progress and excel!

Kids spend their fragile and fleeting childhood years in our care–in our schools, in our classrooms. I propose that we design these classrooms be places of deep, rich learning a la Dewey–not factories for turning out test scores.

Charters Schools fail because they have abandoned the concept they were created for. Charter Schools were conceived to fill a niche role, to provide a service public schools weren’t designed to perform.

An example of a real Charter School is Arise Academy. Arise Academy only takes students who are or were in the foster care system. Many of these children have emotional scars preventing them from succeeding in a traditional school. The majority of children in foster care end up in prison. Arise Academy has been created to stem that prison pipeline and help these children recreate their lives in a positive manner.

Too many charter schools only seek children whose parents are involved, who behave well, and whose test scores are acceptable enough to raise the esteem of the school. The truth is that if every public school in Philadelphia were turned into a Charter School the dropout rate and the test scores would not change. Philadelphia already is successful at educating the children that the majority of Charter Schools take in. Indeed the highest achieving schools in the tri-state region surrounding Philadelphia are all Philadelphia Public Schools. Masterman, Central, Cappa, Carver, Northeast Science, Bodine I.B., do more than compete. Heck, one of our toughest schools, West Philadelphia, has beaten MIT in solar car competitions on several occasions. Another one, Overbrook, has won the state mock trial competition more than once in recent years. They do it with the same students the Charter Schools are recruiting.

Charter Schools such as Arise Academy are a benefit to education. To many other Charter Schools are in the education business to profit off the current environment created by NCLB. The purpose of NCLB was not to fix education, but to destroy public education and the unions. NCLB may be successful in doing that, but it won’t be successful in changing education or improving it for the children who need it most, the children who Charter Schools don’t take in. So what happens in 2014 when public schools close and Charter Schools refuse admission to the children who are too expensive for Charter Schools to educate?

I think I’ve hit on a way to keep the day before winter break begins still focused on learning and away from the hyperactive, cabin fever craziness it can often be.  I may be wrong, but I am willing to try it out.

My students have been begging for a day of reading since the beginning of the school year.  They want to wear their pajamas, drink hot cocoa, and sprawl out on the floor with their books, luxuriating in the time and space to read with no distractions.  Even my most reluctant readers are on board, and the truth is I am happy to do whatever I can to create lifelong readers.

As I was putting December’s calendar together, it hit me:  we should have this Read In the day before break, which is a Thursday half-day.  I have each of my classes for 1.5 hours, which is quite enough time to really sink into a book.  I’ll provide cocoa and tea, and I’ll find some parents willing to donate some fruit and other goodies to snack on.

I introduced the idea to my kids today, and they were thrilled.  We’ll spend our last day together before the winter holidays sprawled on the floor, slurping on cocoa and traveling to the other worlds inside our books.  I can hardly wait, and it’s not because of the two-weeks that follow.