Meditation With Middle Schoolers – Episode Pi Minus 3: Sending and Taking

So on Friday my 8th graders’ giant research papers were due, and this is the week that high school acceptances go out. The 8th graders are stressed to the max. When the bell rang, my Advisory students begged. “Can we meditate? PLEEEEEEEASE?”

And as I always do when they request to do mindfulness meditation, I put on my mental robes and teach them this practice that has saved me so many times.
This morning I taught them the practice of lojong, which is a Tibetan form of mindfulness that translates loosely into “sending and taking.” The idea is that you breathe in the suffering that is out there, and you breathe out the peacefulness that is needed.
I sat on the staging table at the front of the room, folded my legs, and rang the singing bowl before giving them the instruction. “Close your eyes, and focus your attention on your breath coming in and out at your nose.” I waited for them to get very still, which inevitable helps them to get very, very quiet. “Think of someone who is very precious to you,” I began, “and when you breathe in, imagine yourself breathing in their pain and suffering and anxiety.”

Being middle schoolers, they have a lot of friends who are also suffering. The silence was so profound I could hear my own pulse.

“And while you are doing this practice for someone you care about very much, I will be doing this practice up here on this table for you — breathing in your anxiety and breathing peacefulness into your lives.” I gave them some guided instruction in imagining how it feels to receive this kind of heartfulness, and in noticing how it feels to send it out.

Turns out, it is very healing.

When I gave the instruction for closing the meditation, students stayed still even after they opened their eyes. One girl exclaimed, “That was magical!” The other students all nodded.

I told them, “This practice is always available to you, and all this week I will be doing this practice and sending peacefulness energy to you — wherever you are, all the time, every day.”

I rang the bell and gave them a deep gassho (bow) out of gratitude. There are times that remind me why I teach, and no hostile or ignorant third parties can take that away. I remembered something my teacher Dr. Fred Joseph Orr always said to me, “In a contest between the imagination and the will, the imagination will always win.” And here he would pause before finishing. “ALWAYS.”

Reflection on wallowing after the "Two Faces of 'Smartness'" workshop at the Creating Balance in an Unjust World conference

So yesterday I was at the Creating Balance in an Unjust World conference on math and social justice in San Francisco with Jason Buell (@jybuell) and Grace Chen (@graceachen), and I finally got to meet Brian Lawler of CSU San Marcos (@blaw0013) and Bryan Meyer (@doingmath) in person. They are (of course!) both terrific. I came away so impressed with Brian Lawler — a wonderful math education teacher and researcher as well as a fun guy and a total mensch, in addition to being my friend Sophie (@sophgermain) Germain's mentor. You should definitely follow him on Twitter if you're not already.

He and Jason and I crashed the "Two Faces of 'Smartness'" workshop session yesterday right after lunch, which was beautifully given by Nicole Louie and Evra Baldinger.  It was glorious to do math on the floor with Brian and Jason at the back of a classroom where about fifty math teachers from around the country had crammed ourselves in because we wanted to learn about this and well, honestly, we just didn't care about having to sit on the floor.

What was wonderful about it?

Well, first they are both such amazing, caring, reflective teachers and mathematicians. We were given an Algebra 1-style complex instruction group task and we worked on it deeply, in our own ways, for 15 or 20 minutes. There was so much respect for the others in the group, along with deep listening and amazing mathematical and teacherly thinking.

Some of that wonderfulness was wonderful for me was because of my own issues over the years with shame about my own mathematical thinking processes, which are usually quite different from those of other mathematicians and math thinkers I work with. Even after many years of intensive work, I still have a conditioned habit of abandoning my own thinking in favor of somebody else's — anybody else's — especially if they seem confident about their thinking. I have a sense that this is similar to what our discouraged math students often experience, the ones who prefer English class or music or social studies, because I was one of those students myself.

Jason is a middle school science teacher, so he also has a slightly different way of looking at math than Brian or I do. At one point he suggested that we verify our idea by counting the squares. Brian and I looked at each other dumbfounded for a moment, since that had not occurred to either one of us. I exclaimed, "What a great idea! It's so science-y!"

We laughed, counted, and continued our work together.

There can be such joy in a group task like that, but not if the group's working structure is set up with rigid norms that limit individual students' participation. Frankly, I just hate the "assigned roles" kind of group work because I find that it fails to reflect -- or prepare students for -- the kind of group work that happens in a real-world collaborative setting such as a software design meeting. There, engineers and product marketers and managers come together but are not restricted in their participatory roles. No one is limited to being a "recorder" or a "task manager." One person presents a starting point to kick things off, and from there everybody just jumps in with the best they have.

That's how we were working on the floor together yesterday. It was an organic, free-flowing process, and as a result, both the learning and the mathematical conversation were far more authentic than I've usually experienced in this kind of work.

There were also rat-holes — glorious rat-holes! — we chased down. At one point we had even (temporarily) convinced ourselves of the possibility of a quadratic formulation of the rule, even though we'd been told (by the title of the worksheet) that this was a linear growth function. After a few minutes, we punctured the balloon of that idea, and felt a little deflated ourselves. We'd been working for several minutes straight but unlike most of the other table groups, we had still not called the teacher over for even our first of three check-ins. I hung my head in discouragement. "We are fucked," I said. But then we laughed again, brushed ourselves off, and picked back up where we'd last seen something productive.

The end of the workshop activity involved reflection on what the others in our group had contributed to the process in a method known in complex instruction as "assigning competence." You highlight one of the key competencies that another group member demonstrated and you tie it to a positive learning consequence to which it had led us. For example, I appreciated how Jason had brought in ideas from the real-world thinking of science because it had added rigor and a verification mindset to our process. Brian appreciated how I'd been able to stay with my confusion and keep articulating it in a way that made my process visible and available for investigation.

This pleased me because it is something important I think I have to contribute. I call it my process of "wallowing." I have a deep and self-aware willingness to wallow in my mathematics.

One of the other teachers in the room asked me to say more about what "wallowing" meant, and at first I felt overwhelmingly self-conscious about speaking up. But then I remembered that (a) I was being asked by other math teachers who are passionately interested in understanding different ways of reaching students who have their own unusual relationships to mathematics, and (b) I had Brian Lawler and Jason Buell on either side as my wing men, and come on, who wouldn't find uncharacteristic courage in that situation?

So I told him that for me — and in my classroom — wallowing means learning how to be actively confused and developing a comfort and a willingness to stay present with that confusion while doing mathematics.

In much school mathematics, appearing confused is a frequent and constant source of unspoken shame. And so most people with any amount of self-regard quickly learn how to cover it up and hide it from view. I went through much of high school disguising my confusion and shame as thoughtful reflection. I became a master of avoiding humiliation in class by keeping my confusion well-hidden. If I didn't get *caught* being confused, then I couldn't be humiliated or shamed about it.

Later I would work through my confusion privately so I could show up in class always and only being able to raise my hand about something I felt I understood cold.

So I believe there needs to be a culture of allowing for wallowing in active confusion in our math classrooms. We should not be too quick to dismiss confusion or try to resolve it or spackle over it.  I would even argue we need to consider it a badge of honor and an activity worthy of our time, consideration, and cultivation. The only way to cultivate curiosity is to cultivate an environment that is supportive of wallowing — active engagement and presence in the process of being confused.

It is the deepest form of mathematical engagement I know, and it is thrilling, inspiring, and honoring to be a part of it. When a student experiences that euphoric, lightbulb moment of authentic, personal insight, we can be assured that the understanding it signals is not only deep but also durable. This is true because when you are actively confused about something, you are fully engaged in making your own mathematics. Whether it is a "big" idea or a "little" procedure, these moments of insight are the source of all intrinsic motivation. And isn't this the kind of reflective, metacognitive insight about student learning processes that we are hoping to cultivate?

Go graph yourself!

Yesterday I used masking tape to turn the floor of my classroom into a coordinate plane. 

Students had to graph themselves, then find the slope of the line between themselves and various other points in the room. A good time was had by all, and a few insights were had.

Today I think we will also graph all the bits of trash that usually get left on the floor by lunch time. That will give us time to set up for a fierce game of Coordinate Plane Battleship.

Oh, the things we do to promote a deeper conceptual understanding! :)

Standards-Based Grading, or How Teaching For Mastery is Different

Teaching for mastery is different.

Teaching for mastery especially means giving up a lot of old and cherished assumptions about assessment. Anybody who has adopted SBG in any way can attest to this. But I am continually amazed at how unwilling many of us can be to letting go of old, ineffective methods, beliefs, and assumptions about assessment.

At its essence, valuing mastery means not only tracking relative mastery but also accepting mastery as the measure of student success in our classrooms. And that means letting go of the value we have always placed on the routinized behavior of the the dutiful student.

This is is probably the hardest shift of all.

As I shifted over to SBG, I noticed how much of our system of math teaching is organized around students being merely dutiful: sitting still, listening quietly, practicing silently, accepting information without challenge. It's a model of student passivity that places everybody into the known and accepted hierarchy. The "good" students land at the top. The "middle" students land in the middle. And the "weak" students land at the bottom.

But as we all know from having inherited, taught, and assessed these students, this schema does not measure mastery, skill, or comprehension. Dutiful students often lack conceptual understanding or procedural skills. They often have distorted memories of algorithms they heard about but never owned.

Changing over to an SBG system of teaching and assessment has meant that I have to create conditions under which any student — even ones with problem behavior or lack of "dutiful-ness" — can achieve mastery.

To me, this idea exposes the biggest flaw in the existing system. If a teacher or administrator decides from the outset that a given student is a "B-" student, then what reason does that student have to make the effort necessary for improvement?

This system also fails to allow for individual (or group) movement up the fixed staircase of the classroom hierarchy, except for improvements in "dutiful-ness." And it seems to me that if we want to improve access and equity to mathematics for all students, this is the single biggest obstacle we face.

It also seems to me that we need to consider the possibility that any hierarchical model might be transformed from a staircase to an escalator, in which all students can be expected to reach the target floor or level of skills and understanding. And that means we will have to allow for the possibility that all students in a class demonstrate the mastery that is asked in a way that permits them to receive a higher score than the "B-" or "B+" that they have always been pigeonholed into.

A Day in the Life: cheesemonkeysf edition

5:59 am - Dog begins licking my toes and face insistently.

6:00 am - Shot out of a cannon. Or the alarm went off. Can't remember which.

6:01 am - Stand up to avoid falling back asleep.

6:02 am - Feed dog breakfast.

6:03 -6:13 - Shower while planning first two class periods.

6:14 am - Dog licks toes again.

6:15 am - Make coffee. Start drinking coffee. Assemble lunch. Check Twitter. Eat breakfast. Fend off further toe-licking. Read news.

6:40 am - Get dressed. 

6:45 am - Walk dog. 

7:00 am - Leave for school. Plan third and fourth class periods while driving. 

                Car dancing playlist: The Sign, Tweet Me Maybe, Theme to Sesame 

                Street, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Shuffle everything else.

7:30 am - Arrive at school. Remember great lesson idea to steal from @samjshah. 

                Set an iPhone alarm reminder to steal great idea from @samjshah later.

8:00 am - Students begin pounding on my classroom door. They know I am hiding inside, trying to get some work done. They do not care. They want to change the origami flower indicator on my technology podium from gold to blue. This is our indicator of which color day (blue or gold) it is. For some strange reason, being the first student into the classroom and changing the flower has become a coveted job of honor. 

8:10 am - Give up and let students in. Student W wins the honor of changing the flower. Student X settles for writing the day's date and "BLUE" on the whiteboard. Turn on the school's morning newscast and figure out whether PowerSchool will cooperate in taking attendance today.

8:15 am - Morning newscast. Take attendance. 8th graders provide witty commentary during newscast, much like Mystery Science Theater 3000. Remind someone to close the door so we don't infect the 6th graders with our attitude. I think the 6th graders fear me. Make a note to ask someone why.

8:20 am - PowerSchool attendance module works - hallelujah. Submit attendance. Answer random unrelated questions.

8:30 am - First class period begins. This is English. We are doing NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. Thank God. Students take out netbooks and proceed to write for the next 45+ minutes uninterrupted. I do some of my own NaNoWriMo writing, read and make comments on their novels via Google Docs/Google Drive, then grade papers and record papers like a champ. This is the last week of the term.

9:35 am - Recess. I eat yogurt at my desk in the dark-ish classroom while simultaneously planning a third-period activity and grading papers for third period. Make a note to nominate self for Cirque du Soleil.

9:50 am - Second period class begins. Another English section, more NaNoWriMo. More great reads and comments, more papers graded and recorded.

11:00 am - Passing period before third period classes. Dash out as students enter the room, reminding them to "Please don't burn the house down." :)  They are good kids. When I get back, they are noisily but busily comparing Interactive Notebooks (INBs) for today's double INB check.

11:06 am - Algebra 1. Start INB checks while students complete reassessments and solo assignments. All INBs are checked successfully. The lowest score on any INB in this round is 95%. Several 7th graders ask, "Aren't you proud of me?" I assure them I am very proud of them. Make a mental note to buy @mgolding at least one beer at Twitter Math Camp 2013.

12:00 pm - Lunch. Conversation with other grown-ups. Fabulous cookies in the faculty lounge. A few very good laughs. I would really like a four-hour nap, but I think I can make it through the rest of the afternoon.

12:35 pm - Algebra 1. Same as the previous routine but with more reassessments and solo assignments. Many INBs are checked. Most are successful. Some students need to find or fill in missing assignments/pages. We have a brief discussion about whether or not to start a new INB with the new term. We vote and decide to start a new INB on Monday even though the new term starts on Friday.

1:20 pm - Directed Studies period. There is some silliness, but everybody has assignments to finish before grades are due. I have papers to grade and record before grades are due. Somebody asks a question about a musical group I do not know. Somebody else answers this question. Silence resumes. At the end of class, several students tell me they plan to sign up for my directed studies class again next term. I find this puzzling.

2:05-ish - Prep period. I open e-mail and discover 40 new messages, of which about half are from parents or colleagues that need to be answered before I leave. Click and type, click and type. As we used to say when I worked in the software business, first we put the bugs IN, they we take the bugs OUT. I feel that way with e-mail. Delete a bunch of silly Reply All messages. Grade papers and record them, grade and record.

3:10 pm - The end of school bell rings. I stay at my desk and finish grading and recording as many papers as I can. More e-mails. A few phone calls. Go to the office and sign my overdue attendance summary from last week. Eat a banana.

4:00 pm - Leave campus. Drive home while listening to news and music. No set play list for the drive home. 

4:30 pm - Find street parking. Walk the dog. 

5:00 pm - Move boxes in the garage to create a path for something that's supposed to happen later this week (can't remember what; must consult notes).

5:15 pm - Take out trash. Make dinner out of things that are lying around in our kitchen (crusty baked mac and cheese). Put mac and cheese into the oven to bake. Answer more e-mails. Read Twitter and math teacher blogs. Consult notes from this morning about what to steal from @samjshah . Empty dishwasher and reload with dirty dishes. 

6:15 pm - Eat dinner while watching news. Catch up with beloved partner during muted commercial breaks.

6:30 pm - Beloved partner goes off to get ready to do his radio show. Dog assists me in putting dishes into dishwasher. When I sit back down at computer, dog flops behind my chair and passes out. Some snoring ensues.

7:30 pm - Remember the Day in the Life teacher challenge. Decide to write up this summary even though it is boring as all, well, whatever. 

8:00 pm - Press the "Publish" button. Sneak off to watch The Daily Show before heading to bed.

What We Actively Value, Versus What We Tell Students We Value

Lately I've become acutely aware of what I actively value in my classroom, which has entailed an uncomfortable amount of noticing the conditioned habits of my teacher personality. I don't collect and stamp homework assignments. I don't have each day's agenda and objective for the day neatly written on the whiteboard by the time the first bell rings. My classroom is pretty messy most of the time. I don't have a good system for filing away those last three copies of every handout for future use. I took great permission from @mgolding's system of daily handouts using her Container Store hanging file system: basically, the handouts migrate downward one pocket until there are no pockets left, at which point they go into the recycling bin.

I've made my peace with these tradeoffs because I discovered early on that if I was allotting attention to those things, then that was attention I wasn't allotting to the things I actually do value.

I adopted an SBG assessment system because it aligns my grading/scoring system with the things I actually value: mastery, effort, and perseverance. And also presence — being fully present with the activity we are doing that I actually care about. And as I've noticed that, I have noticed something else I feel good about in my classroom: my kids know that those are the things I value. Which that means they don't waste valuable life-energy bullshitting me about the small stuff we all know I don't really care about.

This has led to a lot of interesting progress with students I didn't expect to make progress with. Less successful students who don't feel shamed stick around to ask questions and engage in meaningful academic inquiry. They come to my room during their study hall periods to follow up, get help on missed or misunderstood assignments, or ask for additional work they can do to improve their understanding.

Not their grade -- their understanding. Their performance.

I am not used to this, and it causes me a lot of inconvenience. 

Students who have a reputation for giving up and giving in ask me if they can write another draft, reassess their missed algebra skills/concepts questions, and take greater ownership of their learning in my classroom. My ego would like to think this is because I'm such a highly effective teacher, but in actuality, I think it's more that my walk is becoming more aligned with my talk. I care about mastery and effort and perseverance, which means that those are the things I respond to.

What I did not realize until this afternoon is that this also means that I don't respond to things that are NOT those things. Which means that my kids are not expending any effort pretending to care about things around me that they really don't care about either. There is a focus on the work, and there is not a focus on things that are not the work. This may sound obvious, but actually it's not -- or at least, it wasn't for me. It took me years to discover that I'd been walking around in a consensual trance all my life.

This kind of awareness is challenging, to be sure, but it is also incredibly freeing. Students spend a huge part of every school day pretending to care about things that don't actually matter to them. Fitting in, pleasing teachers, winning points. Some of it is necessary but much of it they know to be complete and utter crap.

Ten, fifteen, forty, or fifty minutes of being authentically engaged in something that matters to somebody is a huge thing. Ten, fifteen, forty, or fifty minutes of authentic interaction with someone who is trying to focus as sincerely as possible on what actually matters in this life is even bigger.

I learned this lesson from years of experience with my mentor and teacher, Dr. Fred Joseph Orr — mind to mind, and heart to heart, though it took years to digest, and quite frankly, I'm still digesting. I'll probably be digesting for the rest of my life. No one had ever paid that kind of focused, intensive, thoughtful, and bounded attention and awareness in my presence before. And it made me discover how it feels to feel alive. I only discovered how precious that kind of awareness was -- and still is -- once that chapter of my life ended and a new chapter had begun.

I was noticing all this today during a test in which some of my lowest-performing students were asking for "help" with certain problems. I noticed that each time I came over in response to their request, they were not so much asking for assistance as asking for a kind of authentic engagement and support that was neither judging nor doing for them but simply witnessing their effort with presence. What I noticed today inside myself — and what distinguished this from mere adolescent attention-seekig behavior — was my own felt sense of a embodied memory of seeking out this kind of authentic connection in my own work with Fred. And this felt sense gave me the motivation to allow that connection and that presence. I trusted something inside my own inherent, intelligent functioning that told me to allow the connection rather than to pull back and resist. It was a subtle and quiet movement inside me, and I'm still figuring out what exactly was going on.

How many times have I mistaken noise for the signal? Do discouraged students ask because they hang on to the sane and healthy hope that they can learn and connect and make progress? Fred always told me, "The organism moves toward health," and I grew to believe him. I wonder if this is what my discouraged students are really asking for when they ostensibly make a seemingly attention-seeking request for something called "help."

And this is why I teach...

It was another crappy Friday in an arithmetic series of crappy Fridays that were running together and threatening to define the limit of my patience for fall trimester as x approaches a mid-sized number that is nowhere near infinity. So I have no idea what possessed me to wake up even earlier than usual to pull together an extra day's practice activity for my right-after-lunch class of rumpled and discouraged algebra students — the ones who believe to their core that California's Algebra 1 requirement is God's own punishment for unremembered karmic crimes they must have committed in previous lifetimes.

But I did it.

The topic was solving and graphing compound inequalities — a skill set that must be mastered in order to have any hope of making sense of and mastering the next topic traditional algebra curricula force-feed to our students: the dreaded topic of absolute value inequalities.

There's really nothing I can say to convince a roomful of skeptical eighth graders that compound inequalities will prove not only useful in business planning (which, after all, is simply algebra writ large across the canvas of the economy) but also amusing and possibly even interesting little puzzles to delight the mind.

To this group of students, they're simply another hoop to be jumped through.

So something in me understood that I needed to reframe the task for them, and to do so using Dan Pink's ideas about intrinsic motivation from his book Drive.

Nothing unlocks the eighth grade mind like an authentic offer of autonomy. As I explained recently to a room of educators at a mindfulness meditation training, middle school students suffer emotionally as much as adults, but they have comparatively little autonomy. A little well-targeted compassion about this can carry you for miles with them, though I usually forget this in the heat of working with them.

For this reason, I like to save practice structures such as Kate Nowak's Solve—Crumple—Toss for a moment when they are desperately needed. I have learned to withhold my Tiny Tykes basketball hoop for moments like this, when students need a little burst of wonder in the math classroom. And so even though I was tired and very crabby about the ever-increasing darkness over these mornings, I pushed myself to pull together a graduated, differentiated set of "solve and graph" practice problems to get this group of students over the hump of their own resistance and into the flow experience of practicing computation and analysis.

And oh, was it worth it, in the end.

The boys who are my most discouraged and resistant learners came alive when they understood that a little athletic silliness was to be their reward for persevering through something they considered too boring to give in to. They suddenly came alive with cries of, "Dr. X— watch this shot!" from halfway across the room. One boy who can rarely be convinced to do the minimum amount of classwork completed every problem I provided, then started tutoring other students in how to graph the solution sets and perform a proper crumpled-paper jump shot.

The girls in the class got into it too, but they seemed more excited about the possibility of using my self-inking date stamp to stamp their score sheets. So I gladly handed over the date stamp to whoever wanted to stamp their own successfully solved and graphed inequalities.

I was far more interested in reviewing their mathematics with them. One of the things I love best about practice structures like this one is that they give me an excuse to engage one on one with discouraged students under a time crunch pressure that adds a different dimension to their motivation. Suddenly they not only want to understand what they have done, but they want to understand it quickly, dammit, so they can move on to another problem, another solution, another graph, another bonus point.

Ultimately, Solve—Crumple—Toss becomes an occasion for conceptual breakthroughs in understanding.

I can't tell you why this happens. I can only tell you that it does happen — often. It makes me feel lighter, more buoyant about teaching them algebra. And it makes them feel happier too.

I wanted to write this down so I could capture it and remember this for a few weeks from now, when it stays darker even longer in the mornings and when I feel crappier and crabbier and more forgetful.