aschanke-phd-blog

[aschanke-phd-blog]

Everyone’s a Hero, Part II

One of my students asked on Tuesday about how I could say I had high standards if I gave any credit for effort.  I’ve been thinking a lot about that.  She is getting her post-bacc and was an engineering student before.  I never enjoyed any of the classes I took with engineers - not because of the content but because of the other students’ mindsets.

I have been wanting to explain to her that grading is a sort of social contract you have with your students.  If you want something from them, you have to give something to them.  And how that goes specifically will depend on each student’s upbringing and who they are as a person.  But, in general, there is no benefit for anyone if you give them nothing for honestly trying.

I think the difficult part is learning to see when an answer is an honest attempt and when it is not.  And, when it is an honest attempt, you have to give them something or they won’t try again.  Students in your upper classes won’t be putting down things that make no sense (in general); it’s usually those in lower classes.  They have historically never done well at math, so a lot of positive reinforcement is necessary to get them to even try.

I don’t agree with treating a student who tried the same as a student who didn’t, even if neither get where I intended the question to take them.  But there is a huge difference in effort that is clearly visible in most cases.  Did they actually do some computations or just write a random answer?  Did they use some solving techniques or just write a single line?  Maybe both students will receive an F for a problem, but I don’t think it should be the same grade.

That’s one of the reasons I dislike the standards-based grading movement.  They want to use 1, 2, 3, and 4 to grade everything.  The 4 is going above and beyond, which is a whole other thing that is impossible to standardize, but the 1s and 2s are what I dislike.  Neither of them got it, but most people who translate these grades into a percentage (being necessary at the high school level, anyway) still have a 2 passing.  It just doesn’t make sense.

Anyway, I am somewhat surprised to find that grading and assessment is something about which I feel pretty passionately.  Maybe that’s what my dissertation should be on.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

Everyone’s a Hero, Part I

Today I taught my methods class about assessments.  I have talked to them about this before, but it’s always sort of a surprise. Mostly, the class is either student presentations or Linda talking.  In both cases, it varies how many students are paying complete attention.  When Linda is talking, some of them become bored.  When another student is, they are usually presenting on something for students to do, and they tend to continue playing with whatever it is during discussions.  When I’m talking, they do all pay attention.

Of course, I haven’t talked for long.  And I’m certainly familiar with speaking while a large number of people are not paying attention (and usually not in the polite way of working on something else!).  So it’s just a bit odd to me to be so much the center of attention.  I think it is because, thus far, I only talk about things that are directly applicable to teaching.  I have recent experience of teaching, and teaching in Wyoming, so I can tell them more about being in the trenches in a way that most of their instructors cannot (or tend not to, at any rate).

I enjoy it, and I am very passionate about teaching in the field.  I don’t want to just resign myself to academia and settle up in some ivory tower.  Which, to be honest, is something I sort of wanted to do when I left teaching.  I was exhausted and really didn’t want to deal with the knitty gritty reality of teaching anymore.

But now that I’m here, I think it would be disingenuous of me to leave behind my peers.  I had so much support from colleagues when I was working, and I want to be able to return the favor.  I want to help future teachers, yes, but I also want to help teachers who are working to continue to grow and learn the best way to teach kids.

Today, one of my student presented on desmos, which is an online free calculator.  It does great things, more than any calculator I ever had.  You can do geometry and graphing.  And it’s free!  We were talking about who would make this and then make it free?  It was a lot of work, certainly.  And there aren’t any ads or anything.

So we were talking about how it can really help with equity, given the expense of calculators.  Students often can’t afford them, and even districts can struggle with the cost.  So this program, which works on any device and all you need is an internet connection, can make a huge difference in education.  And I would like to do something like that.

I mean, I can’t program or anything.  But maybe I should really pursue my idea of writing a curriculum.  It could really affect students at a much larger level than I could, even if I did make an effort to work in classrooms for my whole career.  I will have to look into how to do this.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

My Eyes, Part IV

Last night, we were discussing a reading that ruffled some feathers.  It was all about equity in education, and specifically in math education. The premise was that the math we teach is really just part of the dominant society and the contributions of people besides cis-gender white males should really be included.  That was all fine - I don’t think any of us disagreed.  But the article went pretty hard into how terrible our current system is now because of all the populations who are not seeing themselves in math, and basically called for a system overhaul.  My reading partner and I talked about how the author’s vision of education seemed rather utopian and unobtainable.

In class, we brought up our concerns and then we all had a sort of a-ha moment. We aren’t teachers anymore - this kind of call to action was directed at the education research community, not at teachers.  We do have the power to effect change through our work now in a way that we do not at the classroom level, where we just try to juggle all the mandates that are passed down to us with little interest in our concerns.  It is overwhelming and I was turned off by the article not far into it because I was still thinking like a teacher.

As a researcher, I understand that such lofty goals are not something to dismiss as unreasonable.  It should be our goal to make education a more perfect experience for students - obviously too much work for a single person or even a group, but it is something for which we as a community can strive.

I had not before thought of myself as having moved on, really, from teaching.  I took a survey just the other day and listed my occupation as teacher.  Part of my job is teaching, of course, but not in the same way.  It’s hardly recognizable as the same profession as what I was doing six months ago.  I was struck by the thought that I’d likely never have a classroom again when I took my students to visit the lab school.  But, otherwise, it hasn’t really changed much.

We also talked about how many people in the research community engage in teacher bashing.  Some of whom haven’t even been teachers!  I find that upsetting.  As I move forward in my career, I think spending time regularly in the classroom is very important.  For now, I was considering doing some substituting during the week, probably on Fridays.  It will give me a better perspective on life in public school that I may lose as time goes on.  I also am hoping to teach summer school for some extra cash, and this can get me in the door.  But I think I should try to do my dissertation on something that keeps me working closely with classroom teachers, since that is what I would like to continue doing in the future.  I don’t want to lose sight of what made me come here in the first place.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

My Eyes, Part III

It’s been a LONG weekend, so I’m almost glad to be back in class.  I didn’t write as much of my book review over the weekend as hoped, but I did finish my reading for my final paper and am making my way through.  There is a lot to do before Thanksgiving break, and then mostly presentations for the rest of the semester.  Which is sort of nice.

I graded my students’ grading practices today.  That sounds confusing.  They had an assignment to pick five of 11 middle-schoolers tests and assign points to each question.  We didn’t give them a rubric or anything, so it was intriguing to see how they dealt with it.  I’m going to debrief them on it on Thursday and I’m really looking forward to it!

I talked to Linda about it and she was surprised by my ideas.  I’ve spent a LOT of time refining my assessment grading practices over the years.  I told her I picked a test that many of our students had picked, and was going to show them how diversely they had been graded (where one student was earning anything from a 54% to a 72%).  I wrote notes to myself about what to discuss with them.

There are a lot of ways to make a difference in education, and in math education in particular.  But I think the current emphasis on assessments is unlikely to go away soon, and it is something with which I have the most experience.  I’ve been involved in writing district-wide assessments my whole career, so that is certainly something I could contribute to long-term.

If I wrote my dissertation on assessment, what would I want to study?  Perhaps how to delineate whether you’re assessing FOR learning or OF learning.  Or how to work on phrasing - most math teachers are somewhat less comfortable with language arts.  I’m not sure.  But there are a lot of options and maybe that is what I’d be most interested in exploring.

Assessments are a contract between yourself and a student.  They need to take it seriously, which helps if they trust your grading practices - will they be rewarded for putting forth an earnest effort?  Is it written with the intent of them being successful? (no trick questions, no questions from one page in the 500 page textbook, etc).  Most of our students are struggling with being over-tested and it’s essential that those assessments are meaningful.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

My Eyes, Part II

Today, I interviewed Linda about what’s it’s like to have a PhD in math education.  It was supposed to be 30 minutes, but we talked for close to two hours.  It was a good conversation, though I think I already had a pretty good picture of what her days are like.

Still, it was a pretty good talk.  I wrote a lot of notes and will hopefully start getting my journey presentation ready soon.  I want to be able to check off a lot on my to-do list so I can enjoy my Thanksgiving break a little bit more!  Then I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself, once all my final presentations are ready.  And then over Christmas break.  I suppose I will start some real work toward my dissertation then.

Yesterday, we were talking about an article about how tracking students into advanced classes has a negative effect on girls in particular.  They prefer not to be in competitive environments.  And I think that’s certainly true in my experience.  I mean, I was valedictorian and my best friend was also one, but neither of us were competing against each other or anyone else.  We were competing against ourselves.  I think external competition is something that most women do not enjoy.

The school system was sort of set up to 1) prepare people to live in an agrarian society and do shopkeeper math and 2) separate out those rare individuals who could go to a university.  Now that everyone is sort of expected to go to college (or at least have the option) the vestiges of that old system are problematic.  The grading system is related to that, for example.  Tracking in mathematics is part of that.  Both are designed to weed people out, essentially.

Nowadays, girls tend to be “good at school,” mostly due to our desire to please people (whether that’s socialized or a natural proclivity may be up to debate).  So girls tend to be placed in these competitive environments where they just really want to do well on their own, not interested in being better than someone else.

So I think getting rid of these outdated systems can help everyone feel like success is possible.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

My Eyes

Over the weekend, I had to work on a response paper for my math ed class.  I have turned in two papers to that class thus far.  The first one was Response Paper #1 and the second was the midterm.  I scored a 35/40 on the former and 36/40 on the latter.  Contrasted with my other courses, where my lowest grade thus far was a 49/50, I’m a little perturbed by these results.

One of my friends suggested that, when she writes a paper, she picks a few sources and writes a draft with just those three.  Then she goes back and adds more.  That made sense and I wanted to try it.  So I picked six articles I thought I could relate together and started formatting my paper by comparing three of them.  That went well enough.  However, once I started looking for quotes and references from the other three, it felt a lot like picking a needle from a haystack.  Maybe the first three were too similar and the latter not similar enough, but it made me feel I had to shoehorn in a lot of concepts.

I wasn’t happy with my draft, but sent it to my writing partner anyway.  She sent me her paper, which was more than twice as long as the assignment, mentioning that it was far easier to write a longer paper.  That’s certainly true.  This paper was supposed to only be 2-3 pages and I was having a hard time explaining anything in that short amount of time.  I worked on helping her condense her paper and she suggested I needed to focus mine better.

I am working on my book review, so I thought talking about that book and relating the articles we read in class to it would probably be a lot easier.  The articles had some general parts, but mostly were very focused on an aspect of math ed we needed to learn about.  The book incorporated basically everything.  So I picked their discussion of what changes they have made and was able to salvage quite a few of my references from the original paper and fit them together with my book discussion.  I think it is an infinitely better paper now.  Not sure I’ll get more than a 37/40, but I can hope!

My method for writing a paper is sort of an annotated bibliography where I copy/write down all the quotes I think might be important.  Then I take one source and arrange its quotes by topic, followed by matching up the quotes from the next article or making new categories.  I do this with all of my sources and then I have a sort of outline of the topics to address.

It’s a lot of work, but it works for me.  I was trying not to use that method here and was not successful.  My original paper from the three sources was pretty good, but it was impossible to add other points of view without changing it considerably.  I could have looked for more articles about specifically what I’d written, but that seemed disingenuous to me.  I don’t want to find articles to support what I already have decided, just so I can add more references.  I think I picked a much better way to focus what my paper was about.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

Bad Horse, Part II

I made it more than half way through my first semester of my doctorate program!  Woo!!  I made a list of all the things I need to do before the end of the semester, broken down by week.  I’ll break each week down by day as I get closer.  I have final projects in every class, with presentations for several weeks before.  So I have to complete all of them in advance, which is stressful.  But I think I should have it all done in advance.

I finished the book I’m reading to review and plan on reviewing it this weekend.  I will read over some other reviews first to get a good idea of how to format it.  I’m looking forward to discussing the book, since it’s so good.  I really liked that it had multiple parts, including activities for reflection for the teacher at the end of each chapter, and other activities at the end for addressing your colleagues, students, admin, and parent population.  Which is extremely important.

I got a 90% on my midterm for one class.  My last paper was an 87%, so I’m moving up, but not as far as I’d hoped.  I’ll be spending a little time every day for the next week on the next paper because I’m determined to have an A in the class!  My other classes are 100%.

I was talking to my boyfriend about my grades.  I told him that the school of education had a policy where you needed a 93% to have an A.  He found that to be ridiculous, and I have to agree.  I don’t know why this college did that, but I do know my high school in Indiana upped the percentages because they had too many As.  And too many valedictorians.  So I think you have to have a 94% to have an A, and an A-minus was 92-93, maybe.  It was an artificial inflation and they really needed to actually make classes more difficult.  My brother graduated from there and the transition to college was ROUGH.  My own transition was much easier because then I moved to a different high school in Colorado that actually had high standards for their classes.  I worked much harder, and probably got lower grades.  But they were all above 90%, so I was a valedictorian.  We still had 8 of them, though, so maybe they did things in the future to lower that number, but I don’t know about it.

A lot of education changes tend to be like that.  They are not long-term fixes, they just adjust things enough for appearances’ sake.  If parents complain about something, we change enough to stop their complaining but not enough to actually fix the problem.  I find it frustrating.  I prefer math education because changes tend to be more substantive.  Not always for the better, but we tend not to just change the grading.  It’s like when I was told that standards based grading was way better than percent grading.  Their reasoning was that there are 60% of failure grades in percentages, but only 1 point in standards based!  Standards based is just a 1, 2, 3, or 4, with 3 being proficient.  I was like, okay, but that’s not actually going to change anything?  I would still grade work that would receive under 60% using a 1.  It does not improve the problem they cited.  It would make it harder for kids to skate by with 55% on things and one 65% that brings them up to passing.  They would probably receive 1s on all of those, so still not be passing.  But that is sort of against anything proponents of standards based grades always told me about.

If we want to change anything, we can’t just re-skin the current system and hope that fixes all our problems.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

Bad Horse

The content isn’t related to the title, but that is my favorite song from the movie.  Anyway, I did my project over the weekend on the article by Edwin Locke about setting goals.  He found that setting high goals increases motivation and endurance than setting easily-achievable goals.  So that’s cool.

Today, in class, we were talking to our students about creating lesson plans that are set to high standards and referred to this fact.  It was fun having specific knowledge on the subject besides general life experience.  Our students were worried about setting the goals too high.

I don’t think I’ve ever set the goals too high for my class (not when I was allowed to teach my own class, anyway).  I didn’t get a chance to tell our students, since we had a pretty busy day, but I think the key is scaffolding.  I don’t know how important scaffolding is in other subjects, but it is absolutely essential for teaching math.

You have to start small.  With something that anyone can do, so that your students can feel successful and, importantly, put their trust in you.  Then you move up.  I always move quickly through the scaffolding, but never faster than my students could handle.  They might experience disequillibrium in a way they preferred not to do, but it pushed them through content often beyond what was required.

I think I have a knack for scaffolding things.  In my free time, I like to know where things came from, and how they became like they are now.  I like to know the steps.  I’ve been involved in curriculum development and made it scaffold in a way that assisted students.  My first 2 years of teaching 8th grade started with exponent rules and those were terrible.  I insisted we change it to start with equations, and students across the district did far better that year.

If something makes sense to me, I can explain it to someone else.  I don’t know where that came from - my mom always explained things very thoroughly.  For example, when my brother was 2, he asked her where cars came from.  She was like, okay, you start with rolled steel...  And went from there.  So I’m sure that has a significant effect on how I gather and assimilate information.  it’s been very useful so far, I think.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

Caring Hands, Part IV

This has been a weird weekend so far.  I finished all my grading on Tuesday night.  We got out of class early, so I had time to do some reading during my office hours.  My boyfriend and I went to the grocery store when he picked me up, thus eradicating that chore.  The quiz for my research class is during class on Monday and I finished the reading already.  I finished the reading for intro to doc studies, too, by Wednesday morning.  I did have readings for my Wednesday class, but I finished those on Thursday.

I just did my cleaning-the-house chores.  I’m about to reply to the discussion thread.  Which means I technically have no homework!  What should I do with this miraculous free time?!

Well, yesterday, I did nothing.  Like, sat on the couch and caught up on youtube shows all day.  Discovered a couple new ones while I was at it (because I needed more...).  I also made brownies!  Though that was Thursday night.  It was technically Friday, however, since I think I took them out of the oven a little after midnight.  They don’t have great structural integrity and are more like mush, but they are delicious.  I don’t mind pulling out a handful of brownies.  I probably won’t take them to school to share with people, though.

So that was a nice day.  I don’t plan on having a second one just like it today.  For one thing, I already cooked breakfast and cleaned extensively.  For another, I don’t think I could do that.  We always used to be worried about when my dad would retire (I mean, since I was like 10 or younger) because he can’t stand sitting at home for a whole weekend.  If he had any days off, we had to go on some adventure.  So we were concerned how he would handle retirement.  He did retire just last January.  And he seems to be doing pretty well.  He has a ton of projects around the house, including lining people up to do some remodeling.  And he has a new dog, under a year old, who needs a lot of attention.  He’s adjusted.

I never really thought of myself as being the same way.  I mean, I’ve gotten summers off for the last 9 years and never had a problem.  The first week or so I might do absolutely nothing, but then I would find projects to do to feel accomplished by the end of the day.  When I would visit my brother, he did seem to take after Dad a bit, because we had to leave the house at least once a day.  Even if it was just to go eat somewhere else.  I was surprised by that.  Of course, the main way I noticed is because we had just gotten back from comic con in Philadelphia (a 4 hour drive) the day before and he still couldn’t just rest all day.  I was exhausted, from flying out there, from the driving, and comic con is pretty far from a relaxing experience.  So I was quite dismayed to find he expected us to have some kind of adventure after all that.

So I could probably spend the rest of the day lazing about, but I think I’ll finish my book that I’m reviewing and work ahead a bit on the next paper I have to write.  That will make it easier to go to bed on time, which is going to be important by the time my 8 o’clock Tuesday class rolls around.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

Caring Hands, Part III

Getting done first is not usually a good thing.  I know that.  Just last week, I gave midterms to my class and there was almost a perfect inverse correlation between when they turned them in and how they scored.  Meaning that the first ones done had the lowest scores, in case I mixed up correlations again.

I also complete things quickly, but not because I rushed through them.  I’m just ready.  I wrote a paper last week that isn’t due until today, so I’ve been editing it at least once a day for four days.  Hopefully it’s good.  When I took the Praxis, I was required to stay in the room for the whole two hours, so when I finished all the questions after about 90 minutes, I spent the rest of the time revisiting all my answers.  I got an award of excellence for that.  When I took the LSAT last summer (for fun, mostly, as it turns out), I had time in each section to go back over what I did.  Not long, though, because each section is only 35 minutes.  But I did well enough that I’m still getting mail from a bunch of law schools even though I only actually applied to UW.

But yesterday I graded all my students’ unit plans and put them in the gradebook.  I had asked Linda if she wanted to go over them together first and she said no.  But this morning she changed her mind AND said I didn’t need to have them graded till Monday.  It’s Wednesday.  So I guess I didn’t need to stay up doing that and could have been working on something else.  Especially because now all our students will want to ask us questions tomorrow and we will have to field them until we get a chance to talk together on details.  So that’s not great.

I don’t like being the first one to post in the discussions for my classes, either.  But I also don’t like working on the weekend.  If I’m going to do things over the weekend, I prefer it to just be reading.  That’s easy.  Replying to posts is alright, but I’d rather have that done before Friday.  Which is hard when I’m still first to post on Wednesday.

i remember thinking in my first class this semester that all the other students in my class were really motivated and prepared to be there.  Like, they knew what they wanted to do for their dissertations and why they were there.  And I was sort of like, oh, that’s a relief.  It would be nice to be one of the ‘bad’ students (not that there are bad students at this level, of course), or at least one whose less driven.  But then I got an 87% on my first paper for that class, and here I am, joining graduate councils and finishing things the day it’s assigned.  Like always.

When I was a freshman in high school, I lived in Indiana, where they had a pretty rigid system of As and A-minuses.  My best friend was going to be Valedictorian and go to North Western like her parents to become a doctor (she went to Wash U and became a lawyer instead).  I was glad to get my first A-minus and no longer have to compete with her (though we did everything together, so it wasn’t really a competition).  Then I moved to Colorado, where there weren’t any A-minuses.  So now I had straight As again.  And that’s how I still became Valedictorian.

I don’t usually talk about these things.  I don’t like defining myself as compared to other people.  Could I have done better on that paper?  Paid better attention in class?  Taken better notes?  Graded more transparently?  Explained that better?  That’s how I usually approach life.  I don’t think about how what I’m doing might rank with how other people are doing the same thing.  Which is perhaps why I clashed with my supervisor last year.  She always compared me to my teammates even though we weren’t teaching the same subject, just the same people.  And I was doing the very best that I could, regardless of how effective that turned out to be.

That’s all I have to say about that!  Time to go do my favorite homework - reading quietly by myself.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

Caring Hands, Part II

Today, I taught a lesson all on my own to my methods students.  I told them about how to use algebra tiles and gave them a lot of advice about specifically using them with children.  Set up rules not to put them in their mouths, for example (I’ve never had a problem, but I have always discussed that in advance).

It was a lot of fun.  I felt a little strange last night, getting ready for the lesson, and reflecting that I just had one thing we were doing for the whole 90 minutes.  I wasn’t sure how long it would take this age of students, not to mention the fact that seventh graders would die with just one task for that length of time.  I usually break up class into several different activities - one to review yesterday, one to introduce today’s, one to practice today’s.  At minimum.

The lesson went well, as far as I could tell, but college students have better poker faces than seventh graders.  If the lesson isn’t doing what you want it to with a 13-year-old, it’s really easy to tell by their expression.  And many of them will just tell you (they’re very frank people).  So I thought I’d done well explaining everything I wanted to explain, and they’d done quite well on the things I had them do by themselves, but I wasn’t really sure how it went to them.

The second half of class included a student presentation on geogebra.  I just took notes on what she was doing and didn’t say anything.  After many of the students were done, one asked me what my advice would be for this situation where 2-3 students were still working while the rest were on their owns or checking their email on the computer.  I told him, and everyone was paying attention to how to handle the situation.  So perhaps they considered my lesson better than hers?  Not that it’s a competition, of course.  I reassured her during my advice that it’s very difficult to determine how long things will take when you’re just starting out.  I have a lot of experience in anticipating the length of time to expect and certainly had no idea for the first year or two of my career.  And then the fifth year, where I went to block schedule.

After class, three of the nine students followed me to my office for office hours to discuss their lesson plans that are due next week.  I had good conversations with all of them and really enjoyed talking about pedagogy.  For all my reading and work in PhD classes, there isn’t that much discussion on what you have to think about on a day-to-day basis, which these students really appreciate knowing.

The last student was the one who presented today, and we chatted for a long time about teaching.  She thought I had a wealth of knowledge and told me I was really chill, so all of her peers liked talking to me about things that were stressing them.  I told her that being chill was sort of a job requirement and I didn’t think I was before I started spending 8 hours a day with 13 year old children.  Someone in the room has to be calm.

So I think I’ll tell Linda i would enjoy teaching more classes, if she wants.  I was initially hesitant because I don’t know much time it would take me to prepare, and my plate’s pretty full.  But I think they appreciate my hard-won insight, and I am sure I could fit it in.  I took a nap today, so obviously I have some free time for such things.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

Caring Hands, Part I

This morning, I was reading the book I am going to review.  It’s called a quiet revolution and is about a high school that has been part of the reform movement for a long time.  They changed their structure and curriculum so that all students take the equivalent of pre-calculus before graduating.  I haven’t gotten that far into the book to have details on specifics yet.

In any case, this chapter basically outlined the history of math education, at least since the 70s.  I have read a few articles on the subject for my math ed class, but this was written in a different way than those were.  Mainly, it was less academic and more addressed to teachers than to academics.  As a result, it had a much greater effect on me.

The book ends each chapter with a suggestion to keep a ‘radicalization journal’ and has specific questions to ask oneself and colleagues to get everyone to really question what their practices are and why they are that way.  I have not started this journal (I figure that can wait until the second read through in the next week or so), but I have come to the conclusion that I was already radicalized.

When I worked in Rawlins, I went through the textbook and taught a lesson from it each day.  I was charismatic, maybe, because my pedagogy was probably not what brought up test scores (to be honest, though, having a stable math teacher for the first time in 5 years is what did that).  When I started on my master’s, I looked into gamification after watching a video with my boyfriend about making video games.  People enjoy playing games (any kind, not just the digital variety) even though games require a great deal of learning to master.  So what makes learning for a game fun but for school not?  That was basically my thesis question.

This is, I think, not something many of my peers ever considered.  I used what I learned about gamification to teach from then on since I found it to be so effective.  I got a job in Cheyenne and continued to teach this way.  However, I don’t think any of my administrators ever understood what I was doing (you know, in the 1-2 times they’d see me a year).

My work on this made me more open to learning new ideas from my new colleagues, particularly RaeAnn, whose teaching methodology is pretty much as far from mine as possible.  She is very non-traditional, and I suppose people viewed what I was doing as traditional.  But I always felt that the actual text mattered little compared to how I scaffolded the work the kids did.  I didn’t lecture - I started with an easy question for them to answer and added difficulty in careful steps until they were able to master whatever topic we learned that day.  It wasn’t the usual reform movement ideas where the task is some great real-world application thing, it might just be a procedural question.  But because of how I had students develop the concept, it was far more engaging than a traditional lesson.

The last seventeen years in education have increased the emphasis on testing and decreased the idea that teachers are professionals.  My book talked about how competitive ideas work great in business (how does your school rank against others?) but is completely against what people who go into education want.  In the paper I was writing this weekend, I found that the #1 reason people want to teach is altruism based.  That’s selfless and few people want to be the ‘best’ teacher - not at the expense of their colleagues.  It’s nice to be recognized for what you’re doing, of course, but no one I’ve met has avoided collaboration because they want to be the best teacher on their own.  Teachers work together and we want to teach all the kids well, not just the ones we see every day.

So the whole system is flawed.  The book also pointed out that, by its nature, the testing and accountability system is based on the idea that there are all these Bad teachers who need something in place to correct their behavior.  It assumes an overly simplistic view of education.  Not only do many of the tests reward teaching procedures over teaching for understanding, but they also are more of a weed-out process than anything else.

The point of the ACT and SAT was originally to determine who would be good in post-secondary contexts and who would not.  They also tend to be distressingly reflective of the taker’s socio-economic status more than anything else.  In any case, the point of these tests was to determine who should go to college and who shouldn’t.  So now we have mini-ACT and SAT tests that every kid has to take starting as early as 2nd or 3rd grade, and take them the rest of their education.  And what does it tell us?  Well, probably it tells us what we already know. That some students aren’t going to go to college.  But why is that bad?

When I lived in Rawlins, many of our students talked about how they could just go out in the oil fields after their sophomore year in high school and make 3 times what teachers make.  And why shouldn’t they do that?

I could go round and round on this, but I had a thought that the real reason I left my previous job was because my administrators were just as myopic as the people legislating education.  And I think I want to do something about that, if I can.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

So They Say (Part IV)

Today, I met with methods students about their first unit plan.  Unlike when I took the class, they have not previously turned in math lesson plans (to a math educator; the pre-req had general lesson plans, but they were like 8 pages).  So they were very nervous.  They’ve beene stressing about it for a while, but only one came to see me about it.

I’m glad we have this one-on-one time scheduled in (even though it made for a LONG day).  We met with each one for half an hour and read through their lesson plans, offering suggestions and revisions.  Linda did more of the latter.  I was relieved that many were going to use their plans for middle school students, since that is my area of expertise.

I haven’t gotten to read other people’s lesson plans before, I don’t think.  One of the things I was nervous about doing when I came here for this GA-ship was that I don’t have much experience working with peers.  I only occasionally observed other people’s classes, and certainly never read their lesson plans (not that many experienced teachers have a written out lesson plan like we were expecting of our students).  So I was worried about that.

But my fears proved to be unfounded.  It was enjoyable to read through their plans and tell them possible pitfalls.  They appreciated it, and Linda did, too.  One of the hardest things about teaching is learning to be proactive with student behavior.  It’s hard because you are only going to be reactive until you have enough experience to predict what they might do (and, if you teach middle school, there are a LOT of things they might do without warning).

I was talking to one of my PhD classmates recently about how she felt unprepared by the methods classes.  I do agree with her, but I’m not sure how much more preparation could really be done.  There is nothing quite like having your own classroom and suddenly everything is your responsibility.  Even with student teaching, it’s not the same; you aren’t really in charge, if push comes to shove.

She suggested that they student teach in the fall, and take methods in the spring.  I think that would be a great idea.  I’m definitely getting far more out of GA-ing for the class than I did when I took it originally because I have experience.  One of the things we talk about in education is that students need a bit of disequilibrium to learn.  They need a certain level of discomfort to accept and retain new information.

Teaching teachers means they need to get to the point of being hungry for new ideas.  And that’s much easier to do with someone who’s been in the classroom and is frustrated by having to rely on the book or whatever.  I usually wrote pages of notes to myself at the PD days before school started as I came up with ideas based on what worked last year, what didn’t, and what the PD teacher was introducing to me.  But I didn’t do that the first year because I had no real basis to go off of.

I don’t know what else we can do except put students in the classroom early and often.  As seems to always be the case, we have too much to teach and too little time.  I sort of hoped that would be less of a problem when I left public school...

[aschanke-phd-blog]

So They Say (Part III)

One of the things this week’s reading recommended was a reflective journal.  That’s what this is!  I haven’t written on it for like a week?  So it’s nice to be back.  I do think keeping track of my thoughts this way has been beneficial.  It sometimes seems like I could be using the time for something else, but I do enjoy the experience.

Building a feeling of community was also mentioned.  I spent the last week in upstate New York at my brother’s wedding.  I got a good look at the community he built around himself in the last seven years.  A month or so ago, I went to his new house and he didn’t really have a community.  It was obvious how much being back (he recently moved to Washington state) meant to him.

He’s always been the more social one of us.  I’ve never really built a community like he has, but I try to have a group of people with whom I get along well and can ask questions/favors of as needed.  There were certainly many other teachers who spent four years in the same building and we never had much of a conversation.  I’d like to say I was being selective, but it’s more that I was just too busy to go chat with someone for no reason.  I tend not to socialize unless there is a reason.

This weekend, my friend from Cheyenne is coming over for us to go to a show on campus.  We have hung out one other time since I moved - we went to the movies.  I probably have a standing invitation to just show up at her house and chat whenever I want, but I really can’t imagine doing that.  Even when I was a kid, I never just walked over to my friend’s house to see if they wanted to play.  I always called first.  I hate to be a burden.

But I’m trying to get some friends here.  A few of the people in my math ed class are in other classes, too, so I’ve been chatting with them whenever I get the chance.  I don’t expect I’ll be inviting them over for breakfast (biscuits and gravy is by far the best thing I can cook), but we have a rapport.

Anyway, I also think having that community is really important when discussing what you want to research.  It’s helpful to be able to bounce ideas off of someone, especially when they have some idea about the field.  I could pose questions to my boyfriend, but certainly someone in education, and math education in particular, will help me narrow my focus far more.

The question I’ve been considering for my dissertation is what do I want to change?  I have a lot of frustrations and ideas and things about which I feel passionate, but I think focusing it into something changeable would make it both bite-sized enough to finish and extremely motivating.  Not sure what that means, yet, though.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

So they say (Part II)

For my research class, I thought I’d send a survey to undergrads in their methods classes about why they chose to become a teacher.  Specifically, I wanted to know how their experiences as a student affected what subject they chose to teach (these were secondary methods classes only).

I haven’t gotten any surveys back yet or anything, but I have been doing research for the lit review.  Today, I read about what teachers do to increase student engagement, and how engagement relates to achievement.  It was nice, all stuff I knew before.  To make it fun, I looked specifically for research done that asked the students themselves what made them feel more motivated (a surprisingly small research pool, or maybe I’m just bad at search terms).  Anyway, that was intriguing.

One of the things was that charismatic teachers tended to get more praise, and students remembered teachers who were gregarious and got to know them.  The researchers helpfully suggested that a teacher can’t change their personality, but they can change their approach.  I think that’s one of the main reasons I’ve clashed with some administrators (okay, let’s be honest here, I’ve never clashed with anyone in my life; some administrators dislike me because I don’t fit some description of what a teacher looks like).  I’m shy and quiet and they can’t figure out that maybe I’m not like that in my classroom, that maybe I do joke around with my kids and build a rapport.  I had a good rapport.  I think, I mean, obviously I’m biased in my reading of the situation.  But I spent 8 years with little high pitched voices calling ‘hi Miss Schanke!’ anytime I saw the kid outside of my class, whether in public or the hallway or someone else’s class.  And it wasn’t like a select few - kids regardless of grade or recent discipline issue.  They drew me pictures and gave me presents.  The kids liked me, is what I’m saying, even if I’m not as charismatic as many of my peers.

The other research I read was rougher, because it was first about what makes someone decide to be a teacher, and then what makes a teacher decide to quit.  I’m not sure that I fall into that latter category - I’m still planning on being an educator, after all.  Linda said I was going to take a leave of absence, which sounds like a very delicate way to put it.  One of the articles listed like 6 reasons that teachers leave, and I was like, oh, hey, I had all of those last year!  Which sort of made me feel better - I did stick it out for a long time and didn’t just leave for petty reasons or whatever.  I never really quit things if I have any choice.  Most of the things I’ve stopped doing were because I was a child and my family moved.  Or last year, when I was taking sign language but then got too sick to leave my house for a month.  So I don’t really want to think that I quit teaching.  I just changed my role in it.

My buddy from the last few years is still working there, but I keep telling her about this program and maybe she’ll join me in it.  That would be fun.  She was working on her PhD online at the beginning of last year, but had to put it on hold because how last year was going.  And decided to wait until her daughter graduates.  But it would be awesome to do this with her.  I told her we should write a curriculum for middle school together, which I think we’d be very good at because our personalities and teaching style are basically diametrically opposed (she’s far more charismatic).  People at school were always surprised we were friends in real life.  But I think we have the same view of education and a lot of the same values, so superficial things don’t really matter.

Anyway, still no clue what to do for my dissertation, but I hopefully fast-tracked my processing through leaving my previous post.  And now I get to take a break and go see my brother get married!  Woo!

[aschanke-phd-blog]

So They Say (Part I)

Reading the doctoral journey book quickly went from things I could start doing to things I have not put the right amount of thought into yet.

One of the first things they said was to identify my personal reason for obtaining a doctoral degree.  I have already noticed that, unlike many of my peers, my reasons are not particularly defined.  They are mostly circumstantial.  My boyfriend had earned several free semesters from being deployed by the Wyoming guard, so was going to go back to school.  My current job was becoming, well, less palatable, to put it lightly.  Then I became very sick and didn’t know if my immune system would recover in time for school to start up after the summer (and what would happen to me if it didn’t).  I applied for a lot of things while I was bedridden, and this is the one that worked out as the most financially viable.

So I picked getting a PhD in mathematics education.  I suppose I could have picked a PhD in mathematics (would there have been so much reading??), but I didn’t think I would be as passionate about that as I am about education.  Reading all these articles, particularly the ones for my math education class, always gets me fired up about it (usually agreeing and wishing my former admin had read it, but occasionally disagreeing).

In any case, my personal reasons for choosing to come here aren’t going to be super helpful in picking a dissertation topic or deciding what I want to do next.  They are somewhat helpful, but I need to process them more before deciding what to do, really.  I fortunately have two different topics to research for the final projects in two of my classes, as well as reviewing information from the undergrad methods class I teach.  So hopefully one of those will turn me onto something I’d like to spend the rest of my life studying.

That’s probably overdramatic, but I do know that my dissertation topic will push me into the world of experts in that topic.  So I need to make sure it’s one I can live in for a while.

I have an excellent mentor who, I think, sees the profession very similarly to how I do.  She is a good resource to talk things out with because of it.  I’m trying to develop a larger number of people in the field whom I can form an acquaintance, but I’m not very gregarious by nature, so it’s hard.  I did apply to Graduate Council this morning, which could be very helpful if it works out.  My boyfriend suggested I go volunteer at the math lab to maybe make some connections that would help me get a job over the summer.  I’m not sure how all that works out, but I would like to try teaching a math class or two at this level, if I can.  I love teaching math, and am not sure I’ll love teaching education quite as much.

Anyway, the reading then jumped to the completion stage, including publishing your dissertation.  That is pretty intimidating, and just solidifies my thoughts on the importance of a dissertation topic I’ll enjoy discussing.  I did my master’s thesis on gamification, but that hasn’t really come up unless I bring it up.  Of course, it was just an action research project, which may or may not be particularly far-reaching.  I think it is, but I’m not sure I want to do that for my dissertation.  It was a topic I picked in my second or third year of teaching, and my experience in Cheyenne opened my eyes to a lot of other, more pressing issues.  Gamification would be more of a bandaid compared to actually addressing a number of other things.  So I would probably prefer to explore those.

[aschanke-phd-blog]

My Freeze-ray, Part II

Well, I was able to sort of freeze time.  I stopped what I was doing, anyway, and carefully wrote out a list of what I needed to do before my brother’s wedding.  I separated out the reading from the projects, so I can sprinkle in the readings throughout my day, whenever I have a moment.  Reading is easier than writing papers or whatever, so it is easy to motivate myself to do that when perhaps something more demanding of my mental processes isn’t an option.

I really am enjoying the stats book I have to read.  It’s quite funny, with amusing examples.  It might also be because it’s a relief to do something math-related from time to time.  Even my math class is really math ed research, so isn’t particularly different from my other classes (except maybe I care more about the articles).

I feel that I have made it quite a ways down my list, so hopefully I can just do regular chores on Saturday and otherwise give myself a brain break.  When I did my master’s, I was working full time and never had to do any homework/reading on the weekends.  I’m not sure, now, how I managed that.  The smaller transportation time to and from school helped, for sure (I spend about an hour a day just walking to and from campus).  I can’t really read and walk at the same time, so that does feel a little wasted.

I was feeling overwhelmed on Monday, but I’m feeling a little better today.  Maybe because I’ve had two more days of work that I’ve completed, and have no further classes this week.  I have to teach in the morning, but I won’t need to do much beyond lead discussion for that.

My to-do list is getting shorter, and I am thinking it might be more fun to write it by hand instead of just doing it digitally.  While moving my tabs over on trello is satisfying, crossing them off on paper is much more so.

While I was reading this weekend, I had a thought that I should ask RaeAnn to write a textbook with me.  Working with her gave me such a huge understanding of math pedagogy that I didn’t before, and I think the curriculum we wrote was really great.  So, I mean, I should be picking my dissertation topic, but maybe that’ll work out, too.