Why aren't they getting it?

Three lessons on solving equations with a lower ability set should hopefully ensure they can get liner equations with two variables in them. Three students aren't getting it, they're not any worse than anyone else and should be solid.

It's not a new class to me but there are some characters who have come up from an even lower set and I've been spending some time with them more than I should. I also think that I've underestimated the students who have come up.

I reckon it's because I've sat the kids that I know next to each other assuming they're stronger, as I'm not sure it's the case I think I need to mix it up a bit....must check up on them though.

AFL

Well this is enjoyable, on the recommendation of a colleague at the IoE I've started something pretty good. Each student in my class has been given a red/yellow and green card and if they understand what I'm saying and what I need to do then the green card goes to the top of pile....I'm sure you can get the rest.

I'm only a day into it but one lesson in it's working pretty well-I wish I had done this before-the moment someone is brave enough to change their piece of paper I know what to do-change the explanation and task.

Bang-job done.

Laminating

I now have my own laminator at home-I'm not sure this says anything good.

Working even better

Mental, barmy, foul, assholes, unteachable....well 11b5 are starting to grow on me. OK, most of them are functionally illiterate, most of them have the handwriting of a 9 year old, all have criminal convictions, are some sort of register and broadly .

They can also work out the general rule of an arithmetic sequence of decimal numbers (DECIMAL NUMBERS FFS!!!). It wasn't even that difficult-all you really needed to do was show a little bit of enthusiasm and not get wound up when they looked around you. Throw in a few moment of active learning, throwing a ball about to make sequence for example, direct the TA to deal with some of them, humour them ('The Don' Jerome) a little but more than anything just don't get wound up. If you do they'll sense blood and pounce on you.

I just wonder about the teachers who just shout at their students all day. Firstly they must have a rubbish day, most importantly they are making the kids mental, barmy, foul, assholes and unteachable.

I can work with this.

Bottom set year 11s. The lowest of the low...there's something to work with. They're clearly really weak and clearly 50% are going to end in up prison pretty quickly but there's something there to work with.

On the other hand 7b1. Keen, eager and really full of spirit. A little too talkative but I can bang that out of them pretty quickly

9b4/8b4.....practically exactly the same class. Stamp on them a bit....be a bit more interesting than other teachers, don't be so didactic and get some good results.

10b1...I'll find out tomorrow but have a pretty active starter activity for them.

Decision maths and Economics.....can't wait to get my teeth into them.

Well that went well

That went well.....apparently maths is all about 'numbers, dividing, shapes, multiplying, compass and circles'.

At least it was at the start of the lesson. Towards the end we all agreed that maths was more about asking the right questions, problem solving and being logical. What worked well was linking the starter to the main part of the lesson. After then had their silent debate I ignored what they wrote until they had done an activity which wasn't related anything they had done (a little game about sitting and standing) and then brought them back to make a point. I will do that more.

Today's homework was to produce a list of mathematical questions about one of Dan's video:

http://vimeo.com/13968850

Let's see what they come up with.

Silent Debate

Wow, I've actually been to a good whole school inset. Here's a good idea I'll be using this term, starting tomorrow with my new year 7s.

A Silent Debate-pose a question (I'll be starting with 'What's maths and what skills do you need?') and rather have a conversation/debate where students can be passively involved in the lesson get them in groups of 3/4/5 and express their ideas on paper-giving everyone a chance to get involved.

I'll wager £20 that not one of them (top set year 7s) will mention measuring.

They'll be doing lots of that with me this year.

New

Right, new year, new head. Lots of plans. Here are the things I want to do.

• Active learning 80% of lessons
• Produce more resources myself
• Complete the NCETM regional project excellently
• Get better Decision 1 results
• Do really well on the masters
• Get the year 9s in a position so 30% get their C. (very low ability)
• High profile Maths quiz
• 4 Golds in UKMT Challenge
  
• Blog everyday
• Get really good on the IAW....REALLY good.

Oh, and must blog everyday.

So are they from Venus

Last lesson of term befroe everyone went home and so I decided to break with tradition and show them a video of something. I decided to show them the brilliant 'Wonders of the Solar System' presented by the person I could have been in another universe, Brian Cox. He's a professor of physics, used to be in a rock band, is married to a model and despite being 41 years old has wonderful hair and teeth. I hate the man.

Anyway, Brain happened to be talking about Venus when he suddenly cut away to a busy street in India.

'Sir....are those people from Venus'.

'No Michael, but could you go to the science department and ask them for a fallopian tube'.

I don't really get this

I haven't been writing much here of the past week and a half as I've been applying for jobs and also going on interviews.

I had the first interview yesterday and it went very well.

"We'd like to offer you the job...I think you'll be very happy here and I'm pleased you'll start in September"

"Well I have another school to speak to first but I'm really pleased about this"

And the after about five minutes they decided to withdraw the offer. I explained I made a commitment to both schools.

They said it showed a lack of commitment.

A lack of commitment to a school I didn't even work for? What?

The arrogance was incredible, they waved the fact they got a decent ofsted inspection in my face and expected me to change my whole professional life for them. What other industry wouldn't even give a candidate 24 hours to decide on a position.

I saw a much better place today.

Great

On a simialr note I find it incredible just how bad some school''s websites are. It's probably the first impression someone would have of a school (ofsted inspectors included) and 50% of them look like they've been made by the stupid children as part of a project.

Powercuts

A brand new building. Less than two months old. No power.

We all went home.

Easter is Upon us

So its time to start revising. It's the most important part of the year so every year 9, 10 and 11 lesson will include some past paper GCSE questions and it's the time we all need to stop doing a good job and start 'teaching the test'. No need to whine, this is the job. Getting kids to pass the exam.

This year I'm going to something a little different.

1) Let them know how to study themselves. Each class is going to get an hour of maths study skills so they can do it themselves. Detailed and more accurate guidance on the use of livemaths.co.uk which is what we use.

2) More emphasis on vocabulary-particularly in Statistics there are so many examples of students who simply don't know what the word means so they get confused. It's a real weakness of my teaching and I need to do this more regularly anyway but I'm going to get students to do their own word wall which I'll make myself refer to each lesson. If I use then so will they.

That's my focus while doing revision this year-already printed out the questions on boxplots for the year 9s.

I can feel myself getting tired already.

Formalising

We have a pretty rubbish consultant, employed by the local council rather than the school which use them, who nobody really likes. She seems to think that merely playing games and having activites which are rich is good enough in a maths department. It is not.

The trouble with maths teaching in this country is a focus on process and a narrow range of skills which is desired. So all this week so low ability year 8s did lots of rich activities on sequences and how this could be linked to graph. They drew some lines, they made their own shapes with some blocks and saw links between them and could draw some conclusions from this. Good. Could they answer some exam style questions about sequences? No.

So on Friday they had a very teacher led prescriptive lessons where they simply did the sort of questions they will see in a GCSE exam in two years time. They found the general term, they found the 50th term they had some multiple choice questions, they saw sequences that went up, they saw some that went up by non-integer values-they can now pass an exam.

And our department lives and dies by its results.

Do the rich tasks, let them play games then for then give them the boring stuff. They need it.

Making Something boring Interesting

Today an email from a colleage was roundly taken the piss out of because he sent links of these videos:

Flying Bread

22 Bricks

and suggested they could be used to teach estimating and accuracy. Other than being a little annoyed at the maths department for taking the mick out of something well meaning I was also thought that the email itself was rubbish.

'How about this for teaching accuracy and estimation'

He should know he audience, we are all incredibly busy people with better things to do than interpret what someone might do. The mian reason why maths teaching is so poor in primary schools is simply because the message isn't tailored to the audience (women of child bearing age since you ask), if the bloke who sent the clips to the teachers had also included a message bout how he had used them and if they worked well in his previous classes then people would have been a lot more receptive to him.

I just need to work out how to use them myself now...there's the germ of a good idea there.

Politics

One line manager told me to do x

Another said y

A member of SLT asked to go on z meaning I couldn't do x or y.

They had an argument.

It was decided I would do x,y and z and it was all my fault.

I agreed.

They'll all thank me on Friday for the hard work I put in.

'Sorry for being a dickhead'

Some of the best things about teaching in East End is the ways of people expressing themselves where at the time it's deeply inappropriate and needs to be checked but also has an underlying tenderness. One of the best examples of this today was as a student walked from a lesson and apologised to a teacher.

'Sorry for being a dickhead sir, I'll do better'.

Let's ignore the swearing for a second. The kids was apologising (and also acknowledging) that he had done wrong and was promising to sort himself out. The swear word was coarse and unpleasant-its also derived from a lack or articulacy and a representation of where he was from. So I was hearted by the teacher's response.

'Thankyou for apologsing...just don't be a dickhead tomorrow'.

Cheeky, funny...there's a shared understanding.

Let's put that in comparison to a meeting I was having with a parent and a head of year about a child's ongoing desire to fight with everyone in the year group.

'Well Angry needs to tell a teacher if he's being picked on'

'That's not the East End way Mr Scouse....he needs to fight back'.

Both are coarse, both are vulgar. One's cheeky and humorous, the other feeds into a culture of fecklessness and a disregard for authority.

Both need to be stamped out if the kids going to really succeed anywhere.

Yes

I'll post this in full because it's so right. From one of the best blogs about education I read.

Here is one of my private assumptions about education innovation that could use some public criticism:

If [x] is going to change teaching practice at scale, then [x] needs to be easy, fun, and free for both the teacher and her students. [x] needs to be all three of those things at the same time.
Realize that if you're a teacher and you're reading a blog post, you're automatically seeded in the top 10% of innovative educators. You'll try anything once. Let's also go with Jack Welch and assume that 10% of educators are hopelessly and/or willfully incompetent.

Convince yourself, then, that 80% of teachers exist on a sliding scale of innovation and are basically up for grabs. Those who don't want to try [x] aren't necessarily bad educators. They may have made a rational calculation that [x] isn't easy enough, fun enough, or free enough to adopt.

There are implications here, some obvious, some subtle:

"Good" doesn't matter. This is a little sad. But most of those 80% already have [y], which they consider "good enough." They won't pick up [x], however superior it is to [y], unless it is easier or more fun. This puts the burden on the reformer to make something easy, fun, and free that is also good. Good is the Trojan horse of education innovation.

You'll have to package [x] for Internet distribution. Because it's the only way to distribute at scale for (nearly) free.

Learning should always be fun, though I'm not talking about "fun" as it exists in "unlimited rides and deep-fried Oreos at Six Flags." Rather I'm talking about the profound sense of satisfaction and accomplishment inherent to good learning. Just to be clear.

Learning isn't always easy but learning tools should be. Just for instance, last week, I saw groups of students clicking the same download link over and over again in Safari not realizing that they had already downloaded the attachment. The download window was open but obscured by the browser. Anecdotes like this make me skeptical of Scott McLeod's argument that computers are to teachers what checkout registers are to grocers. Many of you have vastly overrated the ease of educational computing.

The field of easy, fun, and free innovations that are also good for students isn't exactly crowded but, for the record, I have bet on two horses. I expect these picks to strike certain readers as simultaneously naive, deranged, or self-obsessed but these innovations, more than any other I've used or observed, are ones that sell themselves:
Google Reader.
What Can You Do With This.

No further comment

AfL for parents

Well I suppose that was a cathartic experience for us all but I wonder how useful it really was. With the odd exception each student dragged their parents around to teachers who told them the same thing for five minutes. Each parent must have heard the same thing on repeat for an hour and then left.

I felt really sorry for Bonkers' mother who was simply told what a crap child she had. All she could really do in return was have a go at him. As enjoyable as it was to see him with his head bowed meekly saying 'Yes maam, yes maaam' to each criticism we had of him it seemed cruel on both parent and child.

Why not organise it in such a way that each parent sees only one or two teachers and then spend the other forty minutes on training the parent on the best way of helping their child. It's good we tell them how they behave in school but why do it for so long. Let's spend half an hour teaching them how to log on to and use webstes we recommend effectively, good simple activities they could use with their child as they live with them....adding up or estimating shopping bills...games and resources they could buy. Simple easy ways of improving their children rather than merely letting them know how much we like/dislike their children.

For a profession who talks so much about assessment and feedback we're not great at giving it to everyone.

So much better....

Today I was out of school all day long at a session aimed at Gifted and Talented children run by a few people who run this perfectably acceptable website. Some parts of the day were great, they introduced a topic on sequences and mapping in a slow methodical manner which really teased out the 'correct' answer from some students who weren't allowed to reveal the rule. They used different, more difficult numbers before encouraging students to write the rule algebraically themselves. I was really geared up for a great day.

This was followed by an hour long lecture where our year 8 children sat and listened to them.

WHAT???

Then they had 90 minutes to do an open ended investigation. Most of them did it for about 45 minutes with little help and weren't sure what to do next, as they were given no instructions they sat and talked to each other. Who could blame them.

Then an interesting part of the day, an hour long conversation about listing questions the students wanted to answer about straight line graphs. I thought this was great, really solid important pedagogy which made link between what they were doing and how 'real' mathematicians operate.

Again....another 90 minute investigation which they could get stuck into for 45 mins.

No real conclusion, no bringing together of results. I doubt there is one child who could say what they learnt today. That would have got a 3 in an ofsted observation.

I should have loved the session today, I think investigations and projects are great. I love giving students the opportunity to investigate their own questions. I also really like straight line graphs. I'm really good at them. what a wasted opportunity though. You can't just leave children with a bunch of questions and expect them to get on with it and find something very meaningful because they might only find something half meaningful. I'm sure our students have half an idea that one of the numbers has something to do with where the lines crosses one of the axis. I doubt they could be really specific about which number did what and why.

Why not formalise what was learnt, why not be a little prescriptive and tell them something after they've some so close to learn something for themselves. I think most of our children left feeling like they were bad at maths because they couldn't put the final piece of the puzzle together.

If the last piece doesn't quite fit, maybe it's better to hammer it in.