Teaching Life Update

Many of you who follow me online will know that I switched schools this year, for the first time in my career. I spent the first 8 years of my career at an alternative high school in a large district, which let me get a small school experience in an urban environment. Our enrollment was under 300 the whole time I was there. For several various reasons I don’t need to post online, it was time to move on after last year and I moved to a traditional high school in the same district, where the enrollment is between 1500-1600 students.

So far, I love it. Last year really dampened my spirits and had me pretty down on teaching, I won’t lie. I’m getting some of that joy back here. I’m teaching a yearlong Algebra 1 class, where we spend some time filling in skills students are missing and moving more slowly through the Algebra 1 curriculum, Algebra 2, and next term is my overload term so I will also have a section of regular Algebra 1. (due to our district’s financial struggles, every high school teachers has to spend one quarter of the year with no prep period, teaching all four classes. How fun, right? 😦 not)

There are a lot of differences here, but also a lot of similarities that people might not expect (or want to admit). To do a little compare and contrast:

Things I miss from Alt Ed life:

• knowing almost every student in the building, at least by face if not name
• students that know they’re on a “second chance” and are committed to trying
• small staff that has regular staff social events
• my friends on my old staff that are real friends, not just work friends
• being the only person in the building teaching a course, so I get to make all the decisions (other than district mandated tests) and have flexible pacing
• my little math department of 3 that always knew we could walk into each other’s rooms and vent, ask questions, or get ideas (and we all had the same prep time)
• all teachers committed to giving students multiple chances to show mastery, ready to try different techniques to reach a kid
• being able to meet with all of one student’s teachers and get ideas when they’re struggling
• students having a great relationship with building security and (relative to where I am now) low amounts of issues with skipping class
• very small classes allowing me time to work 1:1 with multiple students throughout the class period

Things I’m struggling a bit with in traditional HS:

• A big department where 3-5 teachers all teach the same class, having to stay together pacing wise with them, having to give and enter data for common assessments within 1-2 days of when they do
• Other teachers wanting to all use all of the same activities (mostly worksheets), and wanting/expecting me to share every activity I make with them personally
• Larger classes and getting to those students who need a bit more attention or motivation
• working with a coteacher who has much stricter compliance expectations in regards to classroom management than I do (we’re constantly discussing this though so we’re coming to some form of compromise)
• security just cannot cover the hallways during the lunch block so students don’t come back to class after lunch…
• more of the teacher population is very traditional and aren’t as open to standards based grading policies, revision and retake practices, are more strict about students not being allowed to use notes or formulas, etc.
• I have gotten lost in the building a few times, I won’t lie (There are 6 floors. It takes up like 3 entire blocks. The bottom 3 floors aren’t below the top 3, they’re down a hill. It’s a wild building)
• there are very much still at risk students here and they need support and some staff members are not open to this being a thing, want to blame it on students for not working hard enough, etc.

Things I’m loving in traditional HS:

• wider variety of students – not all at risk students! but still some of those exact same kids that need that extra love and attention. But also some that like, have a college plan already and just do their work without hand holding and complaining and frustration, are involved in multiple activities, have well rounded cultural experiences
• getting to be part of the culture like sports and music and homecoming and theater and hearing about all the cool non academic things my students like
• having more teachers to ask for resources when I need to fill in gaps
• more administrative organization (because there’s actually an admin structure not just a principal and some ill defined support roles) and communication
• charity drives and events (most students at my alt. school needed the support of some of these things so it felt weird to hold them as a school)
• big staff events with booster funding, etc.
• not necessarily knowing the person all my students are dating (lol, but really, sometimes it’s better to only know half of a couple)
• not feeling like every single student in the building is my personal responsibility

Things that are the same:

• The teens are great. The teens are so great. They’re funny, they’re smart, they have a wide variety of fascinating interests, they’re on the whole more tolerant than most adults, they want to correct injustices and improve the world around them and want things to be fair and equal.
• some students have a great deal of trauma from various sources and need our support
• teachers don’t have enough time in our days
• teachers have to do way too much paperwork because no one trusts us to do our jobs correctly if we don’t fill out a form
• I continue to find things I can do better
• Most days I feel like I’m a decent teacher
• most of our PD meetings could be emails
• did I mention the kids are great?
• but freshmen are kind of destructive and leave a whirlwind of pencils, papers, and trash on the floor EVERY. DAY.
• upperclassmen are annoyed by freshmen
• I still am not interested in looking into any other job

So I guess that’s where we’re at. Overall, I’m glad I made the move. Some days I am overwhelmed with sadness at the community I left, but the truth is that I will always have that community because they’re part of me. I was so lucky to fall into the staff that I got to be on from about 2014 – 2018, and I know that it is pretty unlikely I’ll ever find a school like that again. This community so far is pretty great, and it’s ok if they’re just work friends, I think. I feel like I can share my opinions and my knowledge and at least be heard. Maybe I’ll find myself back in alternative ed someday, or maybe I’ll just keep finding the kids who fell through the cracks in the traditional system and giving them a little extra of my time and care, because they need someone too.

Activities to Make Students Check their Solutions to a Solved Linear Equation (free downloads)

I am still here, everyone….maybe a teaching life update is in order soon.

Quick share of a resource that I adapted! I am teaching a year-long block Algebra 1 class this year. So, these students need extra support, mostly because they did not do well in 8th grade math, or maybe 7th grade. Some of them were online students last year and didn’t do much of their work. The way we have it set up is that quarters 1 and 3 are an “Algebra Lab” course, where we work on missing skills and get a head start on the first Algebra 1 standard for the next term, so we can move a bit more slowly. Quarters 2 and 4 we work on the Algebra 1 standards, so they’ll have their full Algebra 1 credit by the end of this year. It’s going well so far. Most of the students seem to be appropriately placed.

But, we’ve started the first Algebra 1 standard of solving linear equations, and almost all of them refuse to check their solutions once they’ve solved, because “that’s too much”. This means that they are a) not really understanding what their solution means or if it makes sense and b) missing points on assessments that they could probably fix pretty easily if they realized they were wrong.

Magic Square Activity

So I was searching for some sort of activity that would force them to check their solutions somehow, and I stumbled upon this Magic Square activity by Katherine Sims. Her activity looks great, and you could totally just use hers. However, my students hadn’t gotten to equations with variables on both sides of the equation yet, so it wasn’t going to work for us.

I decided to just adapt it and rework her equations that had variables on both sides, so that they didn’t, and retype up the activity. Here is my version – the equations may have like terms or distribution, but all the variables are on the same side of the equation. I put this in dry erase pockets, so students solved the equations on their desks with dry erase marker (there isn’t a lot of space on the sheet itself to do this) and then just wrote the solution in the Magic Square.

This forced them to check their solutions, because they got VERY frustrated when they solved all 16 equations and then discovered their row and column totals didn’t match! Most students at that point went back and substituted their solutions back in to find which ones were incorrect.

Sum It Up Activity

I decided to follow this idea as we did move into solving equations with variables on both sides of the equation. I have an activity I use with my Algebra 2 students when they solve exponential equations called “Add Em Up” where they do a set of 4 problems and are given the total of all the solutions to those problems, so they can see when one or more of their answers are wrong. I searched for a similar activity for solving equations and couldn’t quite find what I wanted, so I made my own. Here is Solving Equations Sum it Up!

Looking back, I could have made this activity for variables only on one side of the equation, and just used Katherine’s original activity for the Magic Square, but that kind of logic hasn’t been where my planning brain is going this year so far…

There are six sets of 4 problems, labeled A through F. I printed these on bright green paper and hung them around my room. I had my students working in groups of 2-4 students. Each group got a copy of the record card, and then sent a representative to one of the green sheets to copy down the four equations. When they came back to their group, they divided the work up however they chose and solved the 4 equations. Again, most of my groups quickly learned that the easiest thing was to check your solution using substitution as soon as you solved it so that you weren’t waiting for the other solutions only to find out that the total didn’t work out!!

When they had all 4 solved and adding up to the correct total, they called me over and I put a sticker over the challenge they had completed on their record card. They turned in the record cards when they’d completed all 6 challenges so I could give them practice credit for the activity.

I am really hoping that these two activities convinced some more of my students to check their solutions when they solve equations. Hopefully they are helpful to you if you’re having the same issue!