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Staying in touch

I’ve struggled to stay in touch with people for as long as I can remember. Much of this has to do with my upbringing. When I was young, we didn’t have many family friends or close relatives. My immediate family and I lived in a bubble. The bubble would expand every now and then but remained largely unchanged over the course of my childhood and adolescence.

My inherited tendency to not keep relationships alive has transferred to my life as a teacher. Through the years, I haven’t kept in touch with former students as much as I could have. So many outstanding kids have gotten lost to time. Considering how long I’ve been teaching, this is disheartening.

All of this became clear last school year when a couple of my former students made it a priority to keep in contact with me. They were still in the building (they hadn’t graduated), and I don’t think they did it on purpose, but we still managed to have ongoing relations in ways I never have before. We went beyond the casual hello in the hallway; we laughed and discussed everything and nothing at the same time. They kept me grounded and primed me to be the best teacher I could be.

To these students, staying in touch meant informal chats in a comfy classroom. To me, it meant much more. Through our check-ins, these students showed me the value of staying in touch. And since I don’t have much experience with it, they also showed me what it could look like.

A student-teacher relationship is sacred because of our frequent interactions, the space we co-inhabit each day, and the ongoing need to learn from one another. When a young person is no longer my student, our relationship loses the gravity that drew us together. Thanks to a few students, however, I realized that it doesn’t have to be this way. I now believe that meaningful relations can indeed exist after June.

As this school year unfolds, I know I can’t keep in touch with all my former students, but at least now I know it’s possible, how it feels, and what form it can take. This challenges my longtime inability to keep loved ones close, which feels like a personal and professional breakthrough.

Non-instructional routines

In teaching, there’s no denying the benefits of instructional routines. Every good teacher has them: the Turn and Talks, the Stop and Jots, the What do you Notice? What do you Wonder? These types of practices—and there are many, many more—are essential to any teacher’s toolbox. Discovering how they fit into our teaching and using them consistently can be challenging, but they are powerful (and necessary) vehicles for student learning.

Instructional routines are so powerful and carry such weight that they often overshadow the many non-instructional routines needed to produce a healthy, thriving classroom. In my experience, non-instructional routines, which usually never appear in a lesson plan, represent the glue that holds a classroom community together.

I can have all the shiny, research-based instructional approaches I want. Still, effective, holistic learning cannot take root in my class without a good amount of hearty, wholesome non-instructional practices. These routines work to connect us as humans and bridge a divide between us and the content. Students can learn without these routines, sure. But to what degree?

Non-instructional routines vary greatly from teacher to teacher and stem from the interests of the teachers and students in the room. I’ve written a lot about some of the routines I use in my classroom. Beverage Friday was the newest, which I invoked last spring. The set of routines constantly evolves and adapts to the students before me.

This year, my school has made it a goal to focus on routines that further learning. I love this idea. I just hope that, in addition to the heavy emphasis on outright instruction, we also hold space to discuss non-curricular and non-instructional routines that foster trust, community, and love. Our students need these, too.

Math Stories

In the land of Mathmatica, there are two happily married variables named Xara and Yesod. They lived happily, and they deeply enjoyed each other’s company. One peaceful day, however, the widely-feared gang of Arithmetic Operations suddenly took Xara within their clutches.

That was how one of my students started their Math Story, an assignment I gave students last week. The assignment tasked them with writing a piece of fiction that weaves an Algebra 2 problem into the plot. Students had a choice between eight problems my cogen helped me select, all of which we discussed as a class during the last several weeks. The only other restrictions for the assignment were:

The story has a clear beginning, middle, and end
The story has a problem or challenge that is resolved by the characters
The solution to the chosen math problem is included in the story, with work
The story is at least one page, double-spaced (not including the solution)

I gave students the option to work together, even if it was with students from another class period.

Students write regularly in my class throughout the year. However, asking them to write a short story offers them something entirely different than what I have previously done. With it, I aimed to tap into their creativity and let their imaginations run free, using math as the driving force. I’m truly horrible at unlocking this side of their brains within the context of problem solving. Practically all of what we do daily is grounded in algorithms and procedures. The Math Story was a break from that.

The assignment came as a recommendation from an English teacher at my school. We were at one of our monthly professional cycles discussing literacy across disciplines, and he suggested I try it. I always find myself telling stories at home with kids. It seems natural to bring the idea to school. Why not?

I drafted a version of the assignment and took it to my cogen students. They were into the idea and offered a few pointers to tighten it, like how long it needed to me and when it should be due. They thought it could be fun. I wrote two exemplar stories for the class to accompany the guidelines. Students had one day in class to work on it to help kickstart their writing. Everything else had to be done on their own.

The result was some awesome stories! Sometimes I forget how creative teenagers can be! Here are a few excerpts that do not do the students justice, but will have to suffice for the purpose of this post:

Once upon a time in the realm of Mathlandia, there ruled a king of mathematics known as “King Palacios.” King Palacios wasn’t your ordinary ruler. He didn’t just wear a crown; he wore an oversized calculator as a hat. Also, instead of having royal duties, he had math duties, where people had to pay him $2,000 of gold to get a chance to talk and solve their math problems. People from all over the kingdom came to him with their problems.

There was once a quiet city on the edge of the earth. In this small city, there was a mathematician that people had huge expectations for. You might ask, why? This mathematician was supposed to save the city from a nuclear beam by solving this one equation. The solution would disarm the beam.

Evil Mr. Palacios and Mr. Palacios have a math fight. This was one of the most insane math battles of all time. Their auras grew stronger as the battle continued, improving their math knowledge by a factor of seven. They both expanded their math domains, one of their most powerful techniques. This meant that whoever was stronger would win the battle since being in another’s domain meant being completely vulnerable to any attacks and having no way of fighting back.

Mrs. Yasin had a really hard time solving this problem. First, she replaced p(x) with c(x), but that didn’t work. Then she remembered what her amazing Algebra 2 teacher Mr. Palacios taught her way back when she was in 11^th grade, which is the equation p(x) = r(x) – c(x). This equation shows the relationship between profit, revenue, and cost of owning a business.

There was a trend of students using me (or at least my name) in their stories. As students wrote, they asked for extra credit if they used my name in their story. I don’t give many extra credit opportunities, so why not? It was a fun twist that proved to be worth it. Very memorable!

The cherry on top is that, at the end of the year, I hope that some of my students’ math stories will be included in our class book, Mathematical Voices Volume 5. It’s been a few years since the book welcomed a new writing task, so I look forward to adding it to the compilation.

Beverage Friday

I’m always looking for ways to foster community in my classroom. As a teacher, being close to my students and sharing unique experiences brings out the best in me. I only hope my students feel the same.

“Building community” can take many different forms, but for me, it often takes the form of a class tradition. When in-person learning resumed several years ago, I wrote about some classroom traditions that emerged (or reemerged) after remote learning, many of which have been staples in my teaching for years.

Many class traditions are short-lived by design. They appear out of nowhere, last for a year (or less), and are never heard of again. For example, one year, my fifth period students clapped for me when I walked into the room (I had a class right before them in a different room and always arrived just after the bell). Last year, fourth period hung Doritos bags in the classroom. We collected as many different varieties as we could find. (We even had one from The U.K.) Come to think of it, there have been so many of these pop-up traditions and rituals through the years…I really should do a better job of writing about them!

This year, another interesting tradition has found its way into my second period class. We call it Beverage Friday.

It started two months ago when I randomly asked a student in the class about a bottled drink they had with them, clearly purchased from a corner store. It was 11am and the drink was unopened. That seemed odd, so I asked why. The student told me that she had bought it for a friend and hadn’t given it to them yet. I remarked how kind she was.

“My friends don’t do that for me!” I said, half joking.

We started talking about how cool it would be if more people started buying each other drinks just because. We chatted for a few more minutes. Before I knew it, she volunteered to buy me a beverage. I politely asked that she not spend her money on me, but she insisted. I gave in. That was on a Tuesday. She vowed to give it to me on Friday.

Before I caved into her demands, my one condition upon accepting her gift was that her beverage had to be intentional. I requested that she not get me a drink randomly; she had to put thought behind it. I even encouraged her to do her “homework”: figure out what I liked and didn’t like. I wanted the drink to be representative of me rather than something that would simply quench my thirst.

When Friday came around, I was excited. Before class, I asked her if it would be okay if I announced our little pact to the class before she presented me with my drink. She loved the idea.

After our warm-up, I told the class all about our conversation, and then she revealed her beverage of choice to the class: a kiwi strawberry Snapple. A day before, she overheard me saying to another student how I didn’t like drinking soda. She also remembered me saying a few weeks earlier how I love fruit, especially strawberries. Thus, her choice of drink was a type of strawberry juice. The class erupted in applause.

Uplifted by her mini-presentation and the class’s reaction to it, I proposed that this turn into a weekly tradition. My pitch to the class was impulsive and on a limb, but why not indulge in such a tradition? It would be a fun, generous, and unique way to show appreciation to one another. Each week, the person who received a drink the week before would give a drink to someone else and present it to the class. And that person would do the same the following week. And on and on. The recipient of the drink remains unknown until Friday. And, just as with the drink I received, the beverages we gifted to one another couldn’t be random — they had to be given with purpose and thoughtfulness. The class was totally into the idea.

So far, five drinks have been exchanged, including one from me. Forgetfulness on behalf of the givers has caused recipients to not always get their drink on their assigned day, but overall the kids have been really into it. New traditions can be hard to get off the ground, but it seems like this will take us until the end of the year.

We’ve even found a neat way to help us chronicle our beverage-giving journey. When a recipient finishes their drink, we keep the bottle in the room. Our collection is growing!