Technology is not the cure for all ills of our education system.1 But the approach that our society seems to have taken in trying to implement technology into our classrooms seems Draconian — at best — and is too often a corollary of the timeless “just throw money at the problem and it will go away” approach.2

The resulting paradigm of “oh you have a problem LET’S JUST THROW TECHNOLOGY AT IT” has given way to a toxic soup of a hot mess of technology tools that are available to educators. Which might sound fantastic, except for the fact that there is wayyyy too much stuff for most teachers to learn to use in the “spare time” that they already don’t have. And even when we have the time, new tools are often NOT the solution.

One example: Do you have people in your workplace that don’t know how to communicate with coworkers? Let’s throw technology at the problem, and purchase a fancy enterprise-grade software solution to tackle that! Unfortunately few will know how to use it, even fewer will want to use it, and at the end of the day, it wouldn’t even solve the root problem: that some people generally lack basic communication skills.

I could rant forever. It’s a classic case of education sans wisdom, or knowledge without character. Steve Jobs would often say that he wanted to be “at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.” But that’s so important, if you think about it: You can give anyone Picasso’s paintbrush — that doesn’t mean they’ll suddenly be able to start painting like Picasso.

I have always believed that if you’re going to throw resources at a problem in search of a solution, that it needs to be done in a thoughtful, well-planned manner.3

Okay, enough. </rant> Let’s shift gears.

This Summer, I plan to set aside some time to pursue a solution to a problem that actually plagues us teachers — in particular with AP Statistics, but surely for other subjects as well.

First, let me do my best to describe the “problem”.

In our district, high schools have four 90-minute class periods a day. In AP Statistics, we’ll use… oh, let’s say anywhere from 30 to 50 of those minutes tackling the lesson at hand — usually a mix of notes, lab activity, brief group discussion, but almost never straight lecture.4 Oh, if you’re wondering about the other 40 minutes or so, that is usually spent on going over homework (usually the first 10-15 minutes or so) and sometimes taking a quiz (12 minutes if it’s short, 25 minutes for a longer affair).5

So what happens when a student has to miss class?

Say, for a college visit?6 Or a golf tournament?7 Or a band trip? Or a ________? Well, on a lucky day I might capable of compressing the lesson down to about 15 minutes, but I could easily be out double or triple that if luck is not on my side.

Practically, this means that if 3 students miss class in a given week8 and ask me to help them get caught up, I’m out about 90 minutes or so of my personal time, and wishing that I could genetically clone myself to be in three places at once.9 (By the way, in spite of the fact that I teach “AP students”,10 telling kids who have to miss class to just “read the textbook” doesn’t usually fly well. Neither does the “this is what you’ll have to do in college” line — sounds good in theory, but if you want to switch places with me for a week to try it out, please ring me up, anytime.)

For a given week, three dedicated half-hour tutorial sessions might take up my entire week’s worth of before-and-after-school tutorial sessions.11 Spending time with students — wonderful students, may I add — precludes us from grading papers and planning lessons and doing other “teacher stuff”. And that precludes us teachers from having a life.12

Allow me to clear this up:

Having students that are willing to come in for tutorials to get caught up is NOT the problem. That is very much a GOOD THING — and it’s a “problem” that more teachers would love to have. The PROBLEM is simply that we don’t have 37 hours13 in a day.1415

In my four years of teaching AP Stat — which is by far the toughest “teach yourself” class of all the courses that I have taught16 — what with the large number of extracurricular activities that these “AP students”17 are involved in, this is by far the biggest “bottleneck” of our time.

Which got me and at least one other Stat teacher in the district to thinking… there has to be a better way that we can tackle this problem.18

So we have an idea — one that we begin work on tomorrow.19 Yes, tomorrow would mark exactly one week after the official start of our summer break.

And that’s one issue of coming up with good solutions for our classrooms: Good solutions take time to develop.2021

More summers than not, I have dedicated half of the break22 to working on the “drawing board” for the upcoming year. And while I’m no longer a huge fan of the idea, it’s looking like this will be one of those summers. Blegh! But the goal is for this to make our lives as teachers just a little bit easier moving forward — so hopefully it will be worth it come September.

1. Don’t even ask me to identify the “ills” of our education system. While we could discuss a myriad of “problems” that some would say need solving with regards to our educational system, that is a rabbit hole I wish NOT to descend into today, if ever. [↩]
2. The problem with which, of course, is that when you get to the end of the road, you often end up with the same problem and a lot less money [↩]
3. And not just for some higher-up to be able to put a checkmark in a box [↩]
4. Even with “AP students”, a straight 45-minute lecture would put ME to sleep, not to mention the 17 year-olds in the room. Which, by the way, brings me to a pet-peeve of mine: the way some people throw around the term “AP students”. Newsflash: they’re still kids! [↩]
5. It’s summer break so I’m too lazy to do the math but I think that roughly adds up… it usually does in the class and I’m going on that instinct [↩]
6. I do, in fact, teach mostly seniors [↩]
7. I actually had a kid last year complain to me that she had to miss class to play 36 holes of golf. Oh, the struggle. -_- [↩]
8. which is about typical [↩]
9. And NO, this is NOT the technological solution in question… though I have occasionally wished for this to be possible — usually during the brutal 4th six weeks of each year. [↩]
10. In this context, “AP students” means that these kids sincerely want to get caught up on what they missed. Translation: you can’t just ignore them. [↩]
11. On paper, we’re usually available for more than that, but things tend to come up more than us teachers would like. [↩]
12. We can argue if I’d have a life anyway some other day. [↩]
13. I just made that number up [↩]
14. Not having a life is really just a side-effect of not having 37+ hours in a day. Maybe. I suppose creating clones of ourselves might help, but let’s be practical. Not that having 37 hours in a day is practical… [↩]
15. Well this is a real problem for teachers in general, probably for many other professions as well if I were to ask around, right? [↩]
16. which, in the high school ranks, really only excludes Calculus [↩]
17. there’s that lovely phrase again! [↩]
18. and perhaps deal with other problems that we haven’t even yet considered, while we’re at it. [↩]
19. But don’t get excited: it’s just a seedling of an idea at this juncture. Quite plausible that nothing comes of it. [↩]
20. Good exams take time to develop. I may write a post someday about the process of writing a good exam… for me, those things usually go through multiple rough drafts. [↩]
21. and if you know anything about my personality, I don’t like crappy solutions. [↩]
22. July 4 weekend is usually the start/end point [↩]

This morning I woke up from a dream that I was driving to school1 and suddenly realized that I had forgotten my lunchbox at home. Apparently that was enough of a jolt to wake me up.2

Which got me to thinking on the topic of recurring dreams — or rather, one in particular that still dogs me every now and then. Every time I mention this one around friends — particularly, friends in my approximate age group that are working jobs and are long done with school — invariably a bunch of them chime in with “OMG I GET THAT ONE TOO!”

It goes something like this:

Like, what the heck IS that?4 I suppose you could try psycho-analyzing it to say maybe we’re anxious about being unprepared for the next stage of our lives? Or that we feel like our lives are moving too fast? Or that maybe we’re forgetting something really important? Sigh.5 6

Interestingly, a friend pointed out that a bunch of the folks in our circle of friends who seem to share in this recurring dream are graduates of the College of Engineering at The University of Texas (at Austin).

Which — if you’ve been there — would actually explain a lot. :)

1. given that it’s my 5th day of summer vacay, this immediately classifies it as a nightmare [↩]
2. Hashtag, teacher problems. [↩]
3. A couple of variations on the same theme that I’ve had: I have a final exam (as a student) and for some reason, I can’t find the classroom that I’m supposed to go to… or it’s the first day of school (as a teacher) and I can’t figure out which bus route to take to school. Yes, bus route. I can’t explain it either. [↩]
4. And according to Reddit, me and my friends are not nearly the only ones… [↩]
5. Okay, so a quick Google search says this has something to do with midlife career change anxiety. Hmmmm. [↩]
6. Here’s another link that — more or less — nails it. [↩]

Here’s the usual drill: Teachers come back for one day of work after graduation, and that’s it. We’re done, sayonara, hasta la vista, baby.

And today would’ve been it… were it not for ice-pocalypse.

As it is, we have two more days of professional development1 standing between us and freedom.

I can’t even begin to describe how difficult it is to get up in the morning for these days,2 especially when your mind & body have slipped into semi-hibernating summer vacay mode.

I also cannot even begin to describe how much stuff I have accumulated in my classroom3 over the years. The plastic container pictured above used to be enough to fit all of my belongings for the first few years.4

A few years back, I refused to buy a refrigerator for my classroom5 because I felt like that would’ve been the ultimate sign of surrendering any semblance of a life outside of that room. But had I known that I would have settled in and accumulated so much junk6 in my classroom anyway, I would’ve just bought the fridge and been happy. Oh well.

Under “normal” circumstances, I’d be able to at least drive this stuff over to my new campus and dump it somewhere… but with the renovations going on over yonder, I can’t even do that. So there will be boxes piled up in a corner of my living space until around August, which is when I usually start to slowly hit the defrost button on my brain anyway, so I guess that works out.

If you were about to get kicked out of your room7 and had 10 seconds to choose three items to take with you, what would you pick?

Yes, these are the kinds of you ask yourself8 when you spend an entire day of packing up and cleaning out your working quarters. On an absolute knee-jerk, I think I would pick:

1. My golden horseshoes9
2. My coffee maker
3. My chair

Well, due to size and practicality issues, I’m not taking my chair, and I’m probably not taking the coffee maker either.10

So then I got to thinking — what would I substitute out for items 2 and 3?11 And I think both would be objects that have been in my classroom since Season 1.12

• One would be a piece of “furniture” that… I won’t talk about.13
• The second, strangely, is something that could so easily be replaced, but one that I am rather fond of:

1. and I think I have so many issues with the use of that phrase, but I may save that discussion for another lifetime [↩]
2. But I’ll try anyway! If you were a performing musician or comedian… I’d imagine its a bit like coming back out on stage for an encore… AFTER everyone in the audience has gone home… and then staying out on stage for another half-hour ANYWAY. It feels a bit pointless. [↩]
3. which has moved three times in the past 6 seasons [↩]
4. I lived pretty lean… until about the time I bought a coffee maker for my classroom. Hmmm. [↩]
5. Even though I had already bought a coffee-maker and a microwave [↩]
6. Well… I use the term “junk” in an endearing fashion… although a lot of the stuff truly is junk. [↩]
7. think: either your bedroom or your office [↩]
8. Or maybe it’s just me. [↩]
9. Only two, as one of my math department co-workers will forever point out. Okay so this is technically TWO objects. I don’t care. [↩]
10. Gasp!!! But I don’t know if I’ll have running water in my new classroom, and besides, it might be time to upgrade anyway [↩]
11. That is to say, in this imaginary game where I am somehow limited to only 3 objects… [↩]
12. That have moved with me each time I moved classrooms [↩]
13. Maybe because it’s not my property to take… but if you’ve been through my class, think about where I always put handouts for the taking… [↩]

I’ve had two former students — on two separate occasions — recently ask me about my move to a new school next fall:

“Are you getting paid more over there?”

And that’s cute. =)

Because if you’re a teacher and/or know how teacher pay scales work, you understand: That’s not the way it works.

But that’s the funny thing.

The reason that question even gets asked is because that sort of thinking — that a horizontal move elsewhere somehow equates to a bump in salary — actually makes sense almost everywhere else in the “real world”.

1. Hint: It’s never for the money! [↩]
2. As a Statistics teacher, I can’t use the word “random” in the typical colloquial sense without riling up my conscience… [↩]