My two cents (Week of Mar 8, 2021)

For each school day of the 2020-21 school year, I will be writing two sentences to capture some of the impressions, feelings, experiences, or thoughts I had that day. This is the 22nd post in the series.

Monday (Mar 8)
A student in the eighth period volunteered to replace me this week in our daily ritual “Mr. P and the Random Thing,” where a student from our class names a random object that I have find in my apartment (or something close to it). Today a classmate asked her to get an orange; she ended up showing us three different types!

Tuesday (Mar 9)
For a few weeks I was feeling uninspired and unsure about the impact of the Future Educator Club. But after a couple of the students encouraged me to not drop the ball, the Future Educator Club met again after school and made plans for the next few sessions.

Wednesday (Mar 10)
Found myself slowing down several times in my classes to express deliberate amounts of patience; my students weren’t readily offering up responses, but I tried to remain empathetic. In the past, I would have done this in a way that was passive aggressive, but today I was more understanding — I genuinely waited for them to be ready to engage.

Thursday (Mar 11)
Excitedly, I attended the first of four workshops centered on the work of Dr. Gholdy Muhammad and her book Cultivating Genius, which I read last year. An uplifting thought: after teaching from home since November, one week from today I’ll be back in the building.

Friday (Mar 12)
My co-generative dialogue focused on how we could structure the class to have one “work day” every week or every other week (e.g. a day where students who need 1-on-1 help could get it, but those who would like independent work time could be excused from class altogether). The anti-asian hate workshop went really well with the staff this afternoon; I think the racial and social justice collective (of which I am a member and who plans these bi-weekly workshops) seems to be finding our stride.


bp

My two cents (Week of Mar 1, 2021)

For each school day of the 2020-21 school year, I will be writing two sentences to capture some of the impressions, feelings, experiences, or thoughts I had that day. This is the 21st post in the series.

Monday (Mar 1)
Decent energy all around today as we explored factoring trinomials through my Dunkin’ Donuts spilled coffee problem. In 5th period, we debated whether soup was a snack and even did a poll to decide the matter (the numbers don’t lie: 60% of students responded NO); somehow we concluded the debate with the question of whether we humans should be considered soup whenever we take a bath.

Tuesday (Mar 2)
I’ve been having some thought-provoking conversations with colleagues about the role compassion has in our teaching. Ended the day with back-to-back affinity group experiences, which concluded at 9pm, that left me hanging by thread.

Wednesday (Mar 3)
I was so tired today that I forgot about a scheduled meeting with a colleague during sixth period. She was graceful in reminding me about our meeting, which I luckily was still able to attend; she’s doing a “case study” of my instruction and curriculum for her grad class.

Thursday (Mar 4)
I had a strong urge to play tic-tac-tie with my students today, which I took full advantage of. I publicly played at least 5 students in each class; after suffering an early loss in each, I bounced back to tie, except in period 9 (I lost to the last student, which caused me to have a losing record).

Friday (Mar 5)
My cogen had 4 new members today and orienting them to the space took more time and energy that I imagined; we had a small takeaway for next week, but I was hoping for more. Spent an hour this afternoon debriefing with a MfA colleague about the first white antiracist affinity group we facilitated earlier this week; she’s GREAT.

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A Mathematician and Me

Mathematician, Scientist, and Inventor Dr. Valerie L. Thomas (1979)

I made a choice and had to face the consequences. If I didn’t study and my grades weren’t what I thought they should be, I couldn’t blame anybody but myself. Also, what I needed to do was be in class on time, sit up front, be well rested, and, if I didn’t understand, ask a question.

That was part of the remarks of Dr. Valerie L. Thomas, a mathematician, scientist, and inventor who visited my 5th period class last week to speak with my students. Dr. Thomas has held high-level positions at NASA, including helping oversee the early development of the Landsat program, and is the inventor of the illusion transmitter, which NASA sill uses today.

Her visit was the culmination of an assignment I gave my students that was a tribute to Black History Month. It was called A Mathematician and Me. I stole the idea for the assignment from two school colleagues, one of whom is my antiracist penpal Stephanie Murdock. (Murdock and her co-teacher actually joined my class for Dr. Thomas’ visit.) The assignment asked students to research a Black mathematician of their choosing and write a short profile of them. In the profile, they also had to share why they chose the mathematician and how they can relate to them. To help them find a mathematician, I gave them resources like the Not Just White Dude Mathematician spreadsheet curated Annie Perkins, Mathematically Gifted and Black, and Mathematicians of the African Diaspora.

One of the silver linings of remote learning is that we’re all just a Zoom link away from each other. So, as an extension to the assignment, if my students chose a living mathematician, I offered them extra credit if they invited their mathematician to be a guest speaker at our class. (The mathematician didn’t need to respond for them to receive the extra credit.) A handful of students took me up on this opportunity and emailed their mathematicians to invite them to our class for a day. Dr. Thomas graciously responded to one of my students and volunteered to speak to us.

She talked to us about a lot. With a warm, calm, inviting demeanor, she told us about her formative years with mathematics and, as she got older, how mathematics became a bigger and more important part of her life. She worked hard and, although she took no advanced mathematics before college, she was insistently observant, curious, and precocious. For example, she shared how she would always sit in the front of the class and ask a question the instant the teacher said something that she didn’t understand. (This is precisely how she learned about proof by induction.) She shared several other interesting stories that were peppered with both insight and humor. She thoughtfully responded to all of my students questions.

If I’m honest, I’m still a little shocked that it all happened. I’ve never had a guest speaker in my class, let alone someone with such expertise and prestige. In addition, because her visit aligned with Black History Month, it provided an incredibly unique experience for my students and I that I could not have anticipated. With her visit, she not only shared her fascinating mathematical journey with us and offered up advice, but she helped all of the outstanding Black mathematicians my students researched this month come alive. She helped their stories and achievements travel through time and arrive at the present moment in the form of a Zoom call. She gave all of them a face and a voice.

I’m immensely thankful.


bp






My two cents (Week of Feb 22, 2021)

For each school day of the 2020-21 school year, I will be writing two sentences to capture some of the impressions, feelings, experiences, or thoughts I had that day. This is the 20th post in the series.

Monday (Feb 22)
After checking in on everyone’s break, I used a Desmos activity on inverse functions to ease us into the week. It went well.

Tuesday (Feb 23)
My 8th period needed a mental health day. We talked about oranges, recipes involving oranges, what makes an orange part of the citrus family, the color orange itself; it was quite fun…and, dare I say, philosophical.

Wednesday (Feb 24)
This has been a revengeful week; it’s like it knew that we had a week off for mid-winter break and wanted to get even by making us all suffer. Thankfully, I felt productive doing lots of small tasks, creating lots of opportunities for small victories.

Thursday (Feb 25)
For Black History Month, I had my students research a Black mathematician of their choosing and write a short profile of them. Today, after one of my students emailed their mathematician to see if she would be a guest speaker in our class, one of these mathematicians (Dr. Lauren L. Thomas) visited my fifth period class and shared her story with us.

Friday (Feb 26)
Had two colleagues join me for the cogen today, who have showed interest in starting their own (we talked a lot about videos). In the racial and social justice staff workshop after school, I shared (for the first time publicly) a harmful experience that a black, female school colleague had when she was dismissed from our school because of a “white privilege” shirt she was wearing; I was nervous.



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