Well the summer has arrived and that means another year of teaching school has been put to bed.  That was year #9 for me.  I was thinking to myself that few jobs are as cyclical as teaching.  Just about every teacher knows what year they are on (unless they’ve been teaching along time and then its seems to get a little murky for them).  Is there any other jobs that have such delineated starts and finishes?  Maybe baseball player?

This past year was unique for me.  I believe it was my toughest since my first year.  First years of teaching I think are universally challenging.  So what was so tough about this one?  Well for one thing I taught a 6/5 contract.  This means that instead of carrying the normal load of 5 classes, with one off for preparation, etc, I taught all 6 periods of the day.  It amounts to a 20% increase in the number of classes taught and comes with a 20% increase in the teacher’s salary.

I had taught a 6/5 contract before but the extra class was the same “kind” of class that I was already teaching, like another geometry class when I was already teaching several.  So it was more work to actually be there teaching it, and more work to grade the papers, and more work after class or at home because my preparation period was gone.  But I didn’t really have to do any extra lesson preparation.

This year my sixth class was a class I wasn’t teaching so it demanded its own time and energy in preparation.  And the extra class was one of our rougher classes with less eager learners and plenty of classroom management (if you get my drift).

But anyway, I made it.  In fact I did something different this year that seems to have had a major difference in the way my students felt about me.

I belong to the “school” of teaching that believes that it is not the role of the teacher to be the students’ friend.  It has never been my intention to get the students to like me or think I am “cool.”  This year however, I took a couple moments at the end of classes when we had a few spare moments to tell a couple of stories from my life that I thought might entertain my students.  I have been amazed by the response of my students.  I guess I told some pretty good stories because my students seemed to look at me differently that in years passed.  I had several students come shake my hand after school on our last day.  I got hugged by two other male students.

I have my students fill out a survey after their last test on their last day to give me feedback on what they liked about class and what they would change to make it better.  I tend to get pretty positive reviews from students but this year they were more positive that usual…and I think it was the stories.  In fact tons of them explicitly mentioned the stories in their comments.  It became typical during the school year for students to start begging for a new story.  Of course what motivation might have been to just distract class for a few moments so they wouldn’t be doing math, but I could tell that they really just want to hear about some event from my life.

I am the skinny one

I told stories about:

• nearly eating a homemade, headcheese sandwich in Chile
• jumping of an 80 foot cliff at Lake Powell
• nearly getting suspended from school my senior year of high school for using Pee-Chee folders
• my great-grandfather nearly having his head cut off by an axe by his cousin (I tell this one every year right before Thanksgiving)

My father thinks that kids lead sheltered lives these days so that most exciting moments from my life sound like I am Indiana Jones to them.  Whatever the reason is, my story-telling seemed to make a difference in how my students felt about me.  Did this translate into better effort in math class?  Maybe not…but I actually think it did.

How would you have responded?

This past Monday, at the end of each class period, I announced to my students that I would be having a review session afterschool on Thursday and that they were all invited.  Here were the details:

• the students would have to stay the WHOLE session, up to 4 hours
• they would have to work, I told them if they weren’t working I would send them home
• I bought pizza and soda for everybody

So how took me up on the offer of a 4 hour study session, right after already being at school for 7 hours?  66!

Not bad, don’t you think?

The occasion for the study session was our annual state tests, which essentially measure how much the students have learned in their core academic classes.  The tests measure the students but they are aggregated to measure schools and districts too.  In fact they can be used to measure teacher effectiveness as well.

One of the big problems in the testing though has been getting the students to do their best.  Although the tests matter a lot for the school (and to teachers) they basically have no impact on the students at all.  Our school has solved this problem by offering students some powerful incentives.  Namely, if they do well on the tests, we will change their grades in the class to reflect the level of mastery the tests confirm they have achieved.  In other words, a student who has earned a D or a C but who really prepares and does well on the state test will have his or her grade changed to reflect their learning.  This is very motivating for a lot of our students.  Motivating enough that they would take me up on the offer for a study session 🙂

After sending the sign-up sheet around I anticipated way more students attending than I have desks.  So I had our custodial staff deliver a rack of chairs to my room at the end of school on Thursday.  It was a tight squeeze but I got them all in there.  Here are a couple of pictures:

I’m not sure the pictures really show how crowded we were, but there were a lot of bodies in there. (This was also a good use for my wide-angle lens.)

The last couple of years my students have done fairly well on the state tests.  In a way, their performance is MY report card and it is important to me to do well.  I told my student that I do not have the most important job in the world.  When I go to work it is not life and death like a doctor or police officer, but I still want to do my job well and that their performance on the test will reflect on me.  I tell them that I am counting on them.

Here are a few statistics from last year’s testing.  The first shows how my honors students have done as a group compared to the other teachers at my school who teach the same class.  You’ll notice my first year teaching the class, I had the lowest scores.  I realized that I had not been demanding enough.

click on graph to enlarge

The last graph, shown below, is similar to the analysis that the LA Times used recently to evaluate elementary school teachers in the LAUSD.  It compares students tests scores from one year to the next.  This is, in my opinion, the best measure of teacher effectiveness.  After all, a teacher’s students’ scores can be good because they received a bigger share of the “good” students, which is like being dealt a good hand in cards.  But measuring how the students did compared to last year neutralizes a lot of that variability and gives you a pretty good measure of the teacher.  Here is a graph from last year for our regular geometry classes:

click on graph to enlarge

You will notice that geometry is a challenging subject for our students as a lot of students received lower scores compared to their algebra test the year before.

So when do we find our how the students did on this year’s administration of the test?  We have to wait until August…it is a long wait.