The First-Ever Block 5 Math Department Pot Luck Lunch

Today we had our first-ever block 5 Math Department pot luck lunch.

We have a very large department (24 teachers) and not all of us have the same block for lunch. The block 6 lunchers had a pot luck last week, and so fueled by the competitive spirit, the block 5 lunchers were mobilized by one of the least social people in the department to host our own pot luck. The sign-ups were on the corner one of the office white boards, so the menu was shaped over the last week. And since we have by far the largest crew, hopes were high that we could pull this off. And we did so -- with style.

I made the Lemongrass and Ginger Roast from the Field Roast cookbook because I've been wanting to try it and we have a surprisingly large number of vegans and people with significant food sensitivities. I rushed home from school yesterday so I could make it and set it on the stove to simmer. Sarah made a salad which I had been planning to use as a base for my new favorite school lunch (chef salad surprise). Ernie made an incredible, silky hummus and pita bread. Lisa made a shrimp and avocado ceviche. Raymond made a wonderfully spicy red lentil dal, which I still don't understand how he heated up but it was delicious. Tyler brought donuts. Scott baked a boule of crusty sourdough with cheese and sausage.

Not to scale

But the runaway winners of the day -- and in my opinion, the offerings that raised this pot luck to the level of Artistry -- were Robert's mother's fried chicken wings and Alex's made-to-order waffles.

Alex brought in his waffle iron and a killer cinnamon syrup that he had discovered on the internet. His TA worked the waffle-making station at the standing desk, making waffles to order and generally supervising (don't worry, we fed her).

That's right.

We. Had. Chicken. And. Waffles For. Lunch.

In. The. Math. Office.

And fresh-baked sourdough bread. And vegan charcuterie. AND DONUTS.

Who can turn down a good donut?

At one point, Art strolled in from the computer lab and felt bad that he hadn't brought anything. Everybody jumped in and chided him, "DON'T FEEL GUILTY -- WE ARE DROWNING IN FOOD." So he loaded up a plate and joined us.


I don't know why we never did this before.

As we were winding down, Lisa said, "I kind of have a math problem I wanted to ask about, but I don't want to spoil it."

And everybody jumped in again and said, "DON'T FEEL GUILTY." She sketched the problem and most of us started tinkering on scratch paper, but as usual, Robert saw straight through to the core of the simplification. We all put down our forks and pencils in shock at his surprising yet unsurprising clarity.

Then, of course, we needed another round of waffles.

It was the best community-building activity I've ever done. And it was basically free. I hope we do it again soon because Raymond's grandmother made these killer dim sum things for our end-of-school pot luck last year that nobody knows the name of but everybody devoured them. They look like little fried footballs with some kind of mystery meat or veggies inside their cavernous pockets. And they are TO DIE FOR.

More on katamari and speed demons #MTBoSBlaugust

Gotta squeak this one in under the #MTBoSBlaugust wire. :)

In the world of meditation retreats, what I've come to think of as "Emotional Breakdown Day" of a five-to-seven-day sesshin is pretty much always on a Wednesday (or Day 3, if the retreat doesn't start on a Sunday). You can set your watch by this. There is something about getting psychologically and emotionally heated up that happens after you've been simmering for three days. I think this is true at all spiritual retreats around the world. At a three-day retreat like Twitter Math Camp, it comes at Day 1.5. All of a sudden, Twitter and blogs are flooded with snippets or full-on geysers of despair at how great everybody else seems to be doing and how totally crappy you [INSERT YOUR OWN NAME HERE] are as a teacher.

I have tried to learn not to take this seasonality personally, but it's hard not to. When you go deep, you get invested.

This cycle seems equally true for me during the school year. Week 3 is inevitably my emotional breakdown week. I can no longer keep up the pace (or the illusion of the pace) and the kids can no longer keep it up either. So things start to break. Students act out. Norms fall apart. I lose my shit.

This is just the nature of the cycle of practice. Like winter, or hurricane season, or the World Series, It. Happens. So the real test is how I am going to deal with it.

I changed the seating chart in 7th block and rolled out my best rethinking of katamari and speed demon problem-based learning practice (see "Lessons from 'Lessons from Bowen and Darryl'"). I put the speed demons with other speed demons so they would leave my katamari alone already. I want the katamari to learn how to trust their own minds, their own guts, their own hearts. They lack confidence. But put a bunch of them together, and they have no choice but to trust themselves and each other. Without the speed demons to carry them along, they have to think.

And I tell you, my friends, it was magical.

I revised the day's problem set to put the Important Stuff at the top (though I never label it as Important Stuff — that gives it too much weight for teenagers, plus too little weight for everything else), instructed them to get one table whiteboards, two markers, and a washcloth and I yelled, "GO!" I think the yelling is a particularly artful piece of instructional practice.

The room began to hum and glow in the late afternoon fog. This freed me to question and support the groups that felt particularly stuck — to help them get just unstuck enough to keep going.

They didn't even care when they worked beyond the time limit I had set for this work.

I especially loved the spontaneous alliances that formed across difference. After the first really juicy problem, two young men who hadn't said 'boo' to each other in the first two and a half weeks — a young black student and a Chinese-American student — gave each other a particularly complicated, multi-part handshake than made my heart smile. A table of girls cheered when they finished the same problem.

This is why I believe that getting students into a state of flow when they are doing mathematics is the most important thing. If you align yourself with everything we know is good and healthy and whole about doing math, then everything else will proceed smoothly.

Week 3 — Talking Points — Desert Island Thinking #MTBoSBlaugust

When I arrived at Princeton, I had been placed with three other roommates in a Gothic dorm suite. I was proud of the things I had accomplished so far. I'd been tied for valedictorian at a huge and competitive public high school, I'd been a soloist at the All-State choral and orchestral concert, and I'd been president of and/or varsity lettered in all my extracurriculars.

So as I discovered that everybody I met had also been valedictorian, editor of the school newspaper, an All-State varsity athlete or musician, etc., I had quite an adjustment. I had to learn how to stay present with my own inner experience and on what was in front of me directly.

I've been thinking about that experience these past two weeks as I have been watched my incoming 9th graders at Lowell adjust to the shock of discovering what it means to arrive at the next level.

The classes are much, much more demanding than they are used to, even at the strongest middle schools. And in addition, as every visitor can see at the front entrance of our school, there is a board that celebrates accomplishments of many of our Lowell graduates since our founding in 1856. There are three Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, Broadway and Hollywood stars, admirals and generals and and politicians and world leaders. There are sports legends and pop culture icons, civil rights heroes, the founder of The Gap, and friggin' Lemony Snicket, among others.

Every race, ethnic background, and gender seems to be well-represented.

No wonder my poor kids are freaking out.

Now I try to imagine what it must be like to be one of the very few African-American students in our school. Some of them appear to be doing just fine, but I imagine it is a very strange and disorienting experience to find yourself in what must seem like an endless ocean of whiteness.

We are trying to be intentional in how we are supporting these students and transforming our school culture. We are following best practices and reflecting critically on how we are doing and how we can support their experience. I wish that I could magically airlift in a larger number of faculty of color so that they felt more reflected in the adult community they see all around them. But that is not how public education works. And we have no time to indulge in magical thinking.

So this is the point at which I am introducing some Talking Points on what I like to call desert island thinking. It is the best way I have found to help students to cope with their own feelings of imposter syndrome and the need to be their own best supporters as they enter a completely new territory.

I call it desert island thinking because it is what helped me to cope when I felt overwhelmed and alone as a freshman at Princeton. I reminded myself over and over that, if I were stuck on a desert island, I would want to be with other smart and motivated and hopefully good-hearted people because that would give us our best chances to survive and thrive.

In my teaching life, I think of this as Otter Nation. Our motto is, Hold hands and stick together. When sea otters sleep, they hold hands so they don't drift apart from their tribe. The same is true of us math teachers. We hold hands through the #MTBoS and through #educolor , through Twitter and blogs, and through every social media-based method we can find.

We hold our students in our hearts and try to give them every possible support and advantage we can provide.

For me, a part of that involves helping them to become metacognitively aware and and self-reflective about what they are experiencing and how they can cope with it, how they are brave and well-equipped and the advantages of holding hands and sticking together.

Our Latin Club has hoodies with one of my favorite lines from Virgil's Aeneid emblazoned on the back: forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, which I would loosely translate as, "Perhaps some day we will laugh about this."   This is pretty much where many of my students — and especially my students of color — find themselves at the start of Week 3 too. At this point in Aeneid I, Aeneas and his troops have been driven from their homeland in Troy and find themselves on storm-tossed seas, wondering how they are going to survive.

A growth mindset, and some desert island thinking, along with Talking Points about it, are the best support I can offer them.

Week 1 - "very much like being shot out of a cannon" #MTBoSBlaugust

Week 1 is in the can and I wanted to blog one of my best ideas from my first week back.

I should start out by saying that Week 1 was very much like being shot out of a cannon — much more so than usual. My classes this year are huge — 36, 37, or 38 students per class — but my room is the smallest in the school. So it took a lot of clever angling and arranging to ensure that we could have enough desks in the room and that everybody could more or less see from their given position in the room. I always mark on the floor with a Sharpie so that it's easier to put the desk clusters back into their optimal positions. Once upon a time, I would have considered this a form of vandalism, but now...? Hey, that's just common sense.

SEATING CHART MANAGEMENTI had a major conceptual breakthrough with seating charts this August. I always use OmniGraffle to set up my basic seating chart/management chart template that I use on my clipboard to take attendance and make notes. This year, it occurred to me: instead of using those stupid little name card tags with names to make a wall chart (which takes up an unreasonable amount of time), why not just make a board with a sheet of vinyl across to hold blank copies of the week's seating charts?

So now, I  can just print off two copies of my updated charts — one for my clipboard and one for the wall pockets. And voilá! Easy to change the seats around.

The stapled blob of paper charts makes it super-easy to make notes about collaboration or mathematical successes during group work. It also makes it easy to enter attendance on the computer each class because I just look for the 0s or 1s. My scribbled comments make it easy to enter "Professionalism" scores or comments, or to send e-mails to students or families. My working copy of charts gets stapled together and placed on my clipboard. When the week is over, I archive it in a big binder.

[visualize the dazzling photo of my wall chart that will be posted here on Monday]

There's a lot more to say about Week 1, but I'm still recuperating. More soon!

Hey, Megan, Here's my
handouts hanger in situ!

#MTBoSBlaugust 3 - The Bumper Car Theory of Anti-Racist Training for Teachers and Staff

This one is challenging to write because I want to honor all appropriate boundaries while inquiring into my own personal experience of the process.

This next week, during our whole-school PD on Wednesday, we are embarking on our first year of a multi-year program of anti-racist training for teachers and staff. Earlier this summer, I was one of 25 teachers and staff from our school who attended the initial training, and naturally, nothing went as planned. Does it ever? Heavy Sigh. So this morning, we did our reset and met about our plan to do this training with our whole school.

The enterprise of confronting privilege to teach and learn about privilege is daunting, and it is unavoidable that many people who encounter this work will quickly get rubbed raw. In some ways, that is by design. You can't remain comfortable while digging into uncomfortable territory. But at the same time, conceiving the work merely as a project of "disruption" dishonors the good will and long-term focus of individuals who have come together on their own out of their own deep-rooted belief that we need to do better, both for our students and for ourselves.

So you can see how it's a complicated and messy process to get started.

Your face here

What I am coming to understand about it all is this: in order to have courageous conversations about race, we need to learn how to see our own personal invisible beliefs. These are hard to see because they are by nature invisible. They are blind spots. For example, as a high-status, highly educated white teacher, I tend to feel confident in sharing my views publicly; but at the same time, I struggle to keep my passion and confidence from appearing as arrogance to those with different patterns of privilege. And I'm just one individual teacher in a very large faculty. I'm sure that other teachers struggle to notice their own patterns of privilege. Plus the nature of the dominant culture in our school is unusual and complex. So all in all, learning to see the individual and collective belief systems and blind spots is going to be a real challenge. We are going to need to spend a lot of time in a space of collective and individual not-knowing, together. And I fully expect that process to be uncomfortable.

What strikes me most is that this whole process is like being in racial identity bumper cars. Like at a carnival. We need to expect to be disturbed and surprised and confused as we discover how other drivers in their own identity bumper cars interpret and experience life from their own points of view, because everybody is so certain that their own personal bumper car point of view is clear-seeing and constructive and intentional. But every time the ride starts up, whenever you try to steer your own bumper car, you cannot help but crash into other people's bumper cars. So the process of investigation is complicated because there is no way to step outside of the bumper car bumping arena while the inquiry is ongoing.

From the 30,000-foot perspective, I can see that the bumper car system is designed to thwart objectivity. In their own bumper car ride, nobody is 100% in control of their own bumper car. We all have our own projections and privilege and beliefs that we project onto every other driver who crashes into us. If you consider how the bumper cars are designed, you may understand logically that the bumping is unavoidable. But after you've been in the arena for a little while, trying to steer your own car for a bit, it becomes hard not to take things personally. It becomes impossible to avoid lapsing into the belief that other drivers are intentionally crashing into you to push you off course.

I think this model is especially true when you've got a large room full of public school educators — smart, highly educated, open-hearted people who do what they do out of dedication to learning and to contributing to the common good. The moment you start to prod individual teachers into seeing how they benefit from various networks of privilege, things get painful. People shut down or break down. And I've never yet seen it handled well. In our culture, teaching is already pre-constructed as a "Wretched of the Earth"-level of profession. Poorly paid, micro-managed, and bullied by corporate reformers and unelected politicians. What could possibly go wrong when you try to confront public school teachers about privilege?

So I think it is going to take a certain gentleness, determination, and persistence to help a whole faculty to see how we as individuals benefit from different forms and degrees of privilege, both in our school culture and in our society. It is also going to take chocolate and a whole lot of radically appropriate self-care. I am hopeful in the long term that we will make progress, but I suspect that in the near term, things could get messy. Still, I remain optimistic and curious to see how things unfold.

Scan in your best worked examples #MTBoSBlaugust

This is going to be a short post because I am trying to take my own best advice:

Scan in your best worked examples.

Let me repeat that: Scan in your best worked examples. Scan in your best worked examples.

And if you are just joining us... today's advice is: scan in your best worked examples.

I spent about 2 months working through every problem on every page of Exeter Math 1. All 91 pages of problem sets. And finally, today is ScanFest 2016.

I first learned this advice from Sam Shah (of course), and it bears repeating. Your frazzled, middle-of-the-year self will thank you for it.

And now, back to scanning.