First Week Down

I've finished my first week at KIU. I'm really tired. I think I really overworked myself.

This time (as opposed to last year, my first year teaching) I'm trying to be more introspective. If I'm to believe what I've been reading, becoming a good teacher isn't about forcing things around you to work out, but about being organized and evaluating success. I like the idea because it reminds me of the spiral design model I learned in college.

Actually, a lot of things about teaching can be transferred to teaching rather nicely. Good teaching involved lots of careful planning, setting benchmarks early and evaluating them. Evaluate your success, rework things, and try it again. I'd like to do a more critical analysis of this in the future, but I'm still figuring out things on the teaching end. Maybe I'll write a book eventually. It's kind of interesting to me.

As I said, I'm overworked, but I'm trying to consider myself and how I've improved from last year. Last year I was just barely learning the material, and coming up with crap lessons at the last second every time. It wasn't that I wasn't putting the time in though. I think my biggest frustration was the material. I spent so long trying to figure out Biology every night, I didn't have time to figure out how to teach. Albert was an amazing help, but by the time I started to realize my own failing, I felt like I was drowning a bit.

This year, I tried to avoid that. I still may not know all the technical teaching jargon, but I know I need to be better prepared. So I got prepared. Some of that backfired, as you saw in my last post. But I still had a lot of lesson plans written in detail. I'm already changing them, but I wrote them for change in mind as well. I feel much more secure about where I'm going.

But now the problems have gotten harder. The classes are bigger. If there are problems with understanding, it's a bigger problem. My own faults as a teaching shine through much more clearly now when I have 20 kids staring at me in bewilderment, as opposed to five. My Geometry class is hard. I've jumped into the class just as they are starting to learn proofs. What a lousy time to start teaching a class. Proofs may be one of the hardest things a person learns in their entire life. Some people never get it. They talk about it years later with their kids and have two opinions:

1. I loved it!! It was the only math I ever really understood.
2. Oh boy, that was hard stuff!! I think you'd better ask your mother about that.

And I think mom might have a better idea. Despite common stereotypes about guy/girl brains. I really think girls have a better grasp on these sorts of spacial relationships. Guys seem to have causality a little stronger, but they don't pay enough attention to detail and skip to the end with incorrect results. The girls are more likely to take their time I think. This is just my current hunch about things though.

As for myself, I got a C in geometry first semester. It's the only C I got in High School. I loved math. The proofs were hard. I didn't like the detail. I didn't like being that organized. But you have to be to make this stuff work. I asked one of my struggling students this week if his room is clean. He got a little embarrassed and said some kind of wishy washy "kind-of... no..." answer. So I told him that's part of his problem. He likes piles. He wants to look at the ground, rely on some intuition, feel around a bit, and find that red shirt. But for proofs, you need to have it in the closet, labeled in the "Spring wardrobe" section.

If you don't know what season it's for, you're just as screwed as if you didn't know where it was. It's not just the detail, it's the specific wording, meaning, and use of things. It's so easy for them to just assume one word is the same as another. But proofs are built on proofs. You can't assume. You need to know the definitions cold. If it doesn't say C applies to A, then you need to prove B first before getting C. It's the "common sense theorem" as we joked about when I was in High School. If it makes sense, it must be right. But that just doesn't fly in Geometry, and I haven't yet figured out a way to make them get it, and they are sinking fast.

My other problem, besides bilingual issues, is fitting things within the larger picture. The computer classes are fun, but I am asking myself what I want them to actually learn, and I'm not sure. The 10th grade class is clear. The rest feel more like, "Play around with word until you get something pretty at the end."

It works. It is a lot better than what I did before. But the actual skills learned are not clear. Part of the problem is that the curriculum and especially the course objectives are skimpy. Before I leave, I need to write this stuff.

New teachers just shouldn't have to write curriculum. But I'm doing it. It's hard. It's like writing design specs without the requirements. At my last school, I had nothing except a book. This time, I have a really sparse one page high level curriculum. It's good. No complaining about it. But I feel like I'm being asked to begin coding something with nothing but an email from the CEO telling me what he wants.

Anyone that has done any work in software engineering knows that is a bad idea. There is so much more needed. Let's assume this particular CEO is really smart, and he has good ideas. I'm still cranky, and I don't trust it. Wendy did a great job on this stuff, but it's just her opinion of things it seems. There is a loose connection to some international standard called ITSE, but very little is strongly connected.

So we have good stuff, but not a lot, and it's based on one person's ideas. I need to do better than this. I need detailed goals. I need a way of evaluating them. I need to know I'm teaching standard ideas that will work no matter where the kids go, and will expand to meet the ever growing technology around them. I need a firm grasp of what each grade level is supposed to learn specifically. I wast to be able to pick an important idea, whether it is how to mail merge, software qualities, abstract problem solving, specific ethical and social issues, or specific software packages, and tell you by exactly which point they should be able to meet exactly which criteria.

I got some amazing ideas and lessons and plans and rubrics and everything else form the last person. But at the same time, it feels like some things are so random. Why do all the grades start with essentially the same project second semester? Why do we have x MS Word assignments, and y MS PowerPoint assignments in grade z? What is the difference between each of these Word assignments? What can they do in the third one, that they couldn't do in the second one? Why do the objectives feel the same for all the word assignments?

"Open up word. Find some pictures. Add some text. Make it pretty."

This is fine for earlier grades. But I can't figure out at what point it stops, or it should stop. Should the seventh graders get more of this? How should it be harder? What about the eighth graders? At what point is "fooling around" not acceptable anymore? When do I start really taking them to task for making more subtle design and usability mistakes? Can I integrate them early on, without discouraging the kids creatively?

Lastly, all this is compounded by the fact that everybody speaks a different language. Even if I were fluent in Japanese, this would be a problem. If I want to address the class about, say, color and font choice, what do I do? It's pretty simple, right? Use no more than two fonts, and no more than two colors. Stick with a theme. Try to make one or two headers and use them for everything. I could dumb this down all you want, and give them a handout as I'm giving examples and running a PowerPoint presentation talking about it. Or I could just talk and give a handout. I could just mention a single rule, or I could get into detail with the older ones?

Right?

Wrong, because half the class can't read the handout. Even if I gave it to them in Japanese, I can't just let them figure it out. So I explain it in English, and I lose the Japanese kids. Either way, it takes me twice as long to do things. I have to demonstrate things more, and they don't understand it as much because they don't get the commentary.

These are the challenges that have been plaguing me this weekend as I prepare for the second week.