Friday, January 26, 2018

Word-Problem-Phobia Relief (Nuts and Bolts)



Word problems are the anti-reese’s-peanut-butter-cup of homework--a surprising combination that can make you feel bad about two subjects at once.

For many students, the concrete and discrete right-or-wrongness of math is a refuge from the more complex gray areas of other subjects, a refuge which is rudely breached by the introduction of written language into the work.

For others, a language challenge may make word problems much harder than just the conceptual/applied thinking challenge they are intended to be.

For still others, who have learned to cope with struggles in math and struggles with deep-reading separately, putting them together is a cruel trick that topples both houses of cards, and can quickly max-out cognition or resilience or both.


From early grades, many math problem-sets progress from simple to more difficult, and then repeatedly affirm that word problems are the uber-challenge because they are at the end of the set. This makes math homework feel like descending into quick-drying cement: slower...slower...annnnd stuck. That is a seriously demotivating experience. And when it happens daily or weekly....phewf!




Helping students tackle word problems, I think the first order of business is overcoming that (legitimate, experience-proven) revulsion, and the certainty of the inevitability of failure. Admittedly the practical strategies I use are not unusual, but the starting place seems to be. We need a light to break through those clouds before we can do much else. So we ignore the words.

--------

This is how I've quickly described the process to parents (more involved dialogue-version below):




To be very clear, this technique does not actually overcome any of the learning challenges described at the top of this article, really, at all. It merely seeks to cut through the emotional baggage that tends to compound these strugges over time, so they can be addressed directly.


Here’s an expanded conversation about a different word problem:


(First we put a data box on the scratch paper or board, and I ask the student...)




What are the numbers you see?


(student generally starts reading the problem)


Wait, wait! Sorry,  don’t read it yet. Those words are just annoying noise right now. I can even cover up the words if that will help. We don’t even know if it’s useful information, but we’re pretty sure the numbers are, so just ignore the blah blah blah around them and tell me the numbers.


....8 and 12 and 4?


Any other numbers?


...no?


There might be?


No.


Okay, so 8 and 12 and 4. So, I dunno about you, but that paragraph looks a little intimidating to me--like uh-oh, how are they gonna try to confuse me or whatever--but 8, 12, and 4? Not so much. Could you add those?


Yeah, um it’s...


No no, I was just asking if you could. I don’t care what the answer is.


Yeah, it’s...


Seriously, you don’t need to do that math. I totally believe you can.

Could you multiply or divide them? Or like add two and divide by the other? Or subtract or whatever? Is that getting too hard?


No, I can do that.


So we could put a plus, minus, times, or divide sign between those numbers any which way and you could do it? That’s a pretty tall order. Is that too much? Be honest; I won’t judge. We’re after the facts.


I think I can do that.


I want you to be super confident before we move on. Should I stick some operations symbols between those numbers?


OK.

(I do that and note if we need to review math facts, order of operations, etc. later for retention, after talking about them in this context. Or/Until...)

I’m kinda super confident...


Well, let me know if you change your mind about that--we can always backtrack. Nothing wrong with that. BUT “super confident,” eh? Awesome.  So we put those numbers in our data box. Stack em up. Boomp boomp boomp.  Okay, now we need to know what they are...


(starts reading the problem)


Not yet! That’s still blah blah blah mostly. Where would the words be that tell us what these numbers are counting?


By the numbers?


Yep. Probably. So what are they? What are our units?


Um, 8 um, bags?

OK, what else? (At this point I am only looking at the student and our scratch paper, so I’m explicitly not looking over her shoulder at the word problem and evaluating her or the quality of her work. We are a team; she is dictating and I’m recording. I need the info from her.)


Um, 12 pieces.


12 pieces? Does it say pieces of what? It’s hard to picture 12 pieces.


It says pieces. Oh! Pieces of bubblegum. Sorry.


No need to apologize! I actually said not to read the other words, so you were just trying to follow instructions. That’s good! Good job making me try to imagine random pieces. (write pbg next to 12)


O...k (generally bemused at this point)


What’s the 4?


Um (worried)... Bags?


Is it bags?


It says bags.


So 8 bags and 4 bags? Are they different colors or something?


...It just says bags.



Ok. Perfect.

Here’s a hard question; you can answer or I can tell you. I see this stuff because I’ve done these this way a lot, but maybe you can too. Either way is fine. You know how we talked about the operations you could do with those numbers?

Operations?

Plus, minus, times, divide...

Yeah?

Well, can you tell that now some of those would make sense but others wouldn’t--because we know what the numbers are counting? Um, am I making sense or should I explain what I mean?

I’m not sure.

OK, I’ll explain. If I had 8 bags could I take away 4 pieces of bubble gum?


Maybe, If there was gum in them.



Ha. Yep. Assume no gum. I could take away 4 from 8, but if I put 8 bags in front of you with nothing in them, could you take four pieces of bubblegum from them?


No. Not really.


Nope, so see we are probably not going to need to subtract 4 from 8. Can you see what we could subtract or should I tell you?


...I’m not sure.


So, imagine those 8 bags in front of you again. What could I subtract from them, of the things in our data box?


4 bags.


Right! Usually plus or minus in a word problem will have to have the same units, the same things being counted... bags or ducks or vampires or munchkins, but all just one of those things. Multiply and divide could have different units, or the same, just to be confusing. Can you imagine what the problem might be about 8 bags, 4 bags and 12 pieces of bubble gum?

Maybeeee.... you have one piece in each bag because there are 12 bags?


Oh! That's cool, I hadn't even thought of it that way. I like it! Like if there was a bubble gum shortage and the government subsidized bag companies or something...


...I guess?


I was thinking something more like if there are 12 pieces of bubble gum in a bag and someone gave me four more than the 8 I already had, how much would I have. I dunno. Which one of ours do you think is more likely?


Yours.


Because I'm the teacher?


No, because mine is too easy.


Oh, yes! That's smart. Yeah, the first thing you should expect would be it to be some kind of operation like you guys are actually doing in class right now. That doesn't work on like achievement tests, but day-to-day it's smart. If you do a word problem and it seems super easy, like something you learned two years ago, its totally smart to be suspicious of whether you read it right. Nice!

Two more things before we read the whole problem.


Seriously? 

I know; don't worry. I know it seems super slow, but it gets much faster as this stuff becomes automatic and it makes these SO much easier. Seriously. Trust the crazy man with the dry erase markers. Is there a question mark in the problem? 


Yes. At the end.


Okay can you read the sentence before it?


"How much bubblegum do you have left?" 


OK so I'll write, "how many pieces of bubblegum left?" as the question in our data box. Just a quick check, does the sentence with "12 pieces of bubblegum" end there or does it have more words?


It says "in each bag."


Ok, so I'm gonna write "per bag" with a line like this after pbg. Does that make sense to you? 12 pieces of bubblegum per bag?


I think so.

And I need to ask a favor. When I get all involved in a math problem, and I feel like I know what to do and it's such a relief... super satisfying, you know? Or at least, better than being stuck. I can get to my answer--like the numbers--and I forget to make sure it actually answers the question they asked. Can you remind me to reread that question in the data box to see if my answer makes sense before we decide we are done? I mean, I should check my answer anyway, but I should also reread that question.


OK.


Thanks! I think you've proven that no matter what this question is, you can do the math. Do you feel like that?


Kind of.


OK. Maybe I'm over confident in you. You just inspire confidence somehow. Nice talent!


....


Anyhoo. Why don't you read the problem and see if we can figure out what math to do.

"You are running the coin toss game at the school carnival, but you are worried that you are going to run out of prizes so you want to take inventory, and maybe you can make more prizes. You started with 8 bags with 12 pieces of bubblegum in each bag. You have given away four bags. How much bubble gum do you have left?"

__________________________________________________________________




Again, at this stage the teaching goal is to see what the student can do when she is not coming at the problem from a place of insecurity. Does she know that how much is "left" probably implies subtraction? Does he know that "per" implies multiplication (sometimes division)? There are lots of ways to further problem-solve the stuck-points once they are less painful and overwhelming, as this approach hopefully enables.

My experience with this technique is that often students have trouble realizing that the approach and pre-thinking are making problems easier. They often do better but they think it is because problems have gotten easier. This can make it worth while to have them go back to their old way and read a whole problem before creating the data-box, to experience how much harder that still is, so they have a little more buy-in to what can seem like "extra" work--pulling out data and considering it before reading word problems.
------
I am fairly bursting with "Oh, and...!" thoughts, and perhaps over time I will better discern which ones will be instructive to include. I think it is probably important to add that I am always monitoring teacher-talk vs student talk. If I am doing all the talking (as this might seem to suggest), it means either
a. I am teaching very poorly
or
b. we are in the very early stages of an I-We-You teaching pattern.
I think it is simplistic to assume that lots of teacher talk is bad. Similarly, I think it is mistake for tutors to assume they should never simply "show" the student what to do. It does feel odd for a student to be very passive while a teacher is very active, but as long as both know that there will be many repetitions of the task, with the student doing more and more each time until, hopefully, the teacher's role is basically to cheer and clap for a wonderfully independent worker, showing (modeling!) is a vital first step, not to be skipped! If you do skip this step you are pushing the birdy off the branch without it ever even having stretched its wings yet--that's mean.

-------


The real joy with this word-problem approach is watching students systematically disassemble their own Reese's cup of Confusion, into two separate, and therefore much more manageable, collections of information, before re-assembling it, knowing it intimately from the inside out, into a confection they can sink their teeth into with gusto.

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Study Skills for Tests (Video--Things Students Need to Know)

I had the opportunity to speak to 6th graders about Study Skills in the fall of 2017, and someone asked me for the presentation, so I narrated a video version. It lacks the actual TASC Study Plan (on which one chunks and calendars work), and it's a little rough but there may be some useful tidbits here.
KWYKASI! (Study Skills for Tests) from Mike L Miller on Vimeo.

Dyslexia Making Integer Operations Inscrutable? Here's help! (Nuts and Bolts)



    Wow! I didn't realize how uncomfortable I'd be putting my math strategies out there. OK, math folks, have at me. The fact is, if a given strategy is counterproductive in some way for the sake of fleeting success that will not endure, I want to know.

    Ulp.

    I arrived for a mid school-day session several years ago to be greeted by a 6th grader in tears, with his head on his arms. He had only ever been cheerful or resigned before, never so defeated. He was dyslexic, and had made huge strides in reading comprehension and writing accuracy, as well as math, all school year long. Now he had started doing operations with integers in class, and he couldn't make sense of it. He was super embarrassed to be crying, but also determined to figure it out.



    In retrospect, his plight reminds me of my startled realization while starting to learn Spanish, that the accent marks just didn't stick in my brain. I would write a sentence and know there was an accent mark, but I couldn't even decide which word it went over, let alone which letter, and I couldn't hear anything in my pronunciation that gave me a clue. If there had somehow been an equals sign after my "la sopa es para el capitan" sentence, I would surely have gotten it wrong.


    I told him it made sense that it was confusing, because those plus signs and minus signs sometimes meant an operation and sometimes changed the value of a digit. We started reading these integer operations problems as sentences, one symbol at a time, and it got him over the hump.

    Here's what we said and did (equations were on a white board):

    First, I asked him if he knew what each of the pieces was. That is, even if looking at the whole equation was confusing to him, if he looked at the symbols one at a time, could he identify each symbol in order, separately, or was that crazy?

    He thought he could do that.

    We agreed to read these problems like a sentence, look at one symbol at a time, from left to right, and do what each symbol says to do, on a number line, before looking at the next. Here's what each symbol meant:
  1. Always start at zero, facing right.
  2. Digits/numbers tell how far to go in the direction you are facing.
  3. Plus means face right.
  4. Minus means face left.
  5. A negative sign means switch directions
    (On the desk, I often used two pieces of paper to mask all but the part/symbol he needed to look at; on the board I often hid the extraneous info with my hands)

    ----
    Let's start with
    3 + 4 = ...What?

    Seven.

    Wait, so that's easy?

    Duh. Yes.

    So are these positive or negative numbers?

    Positive.

    OK, so we just added
    +3 and +4 
    and got +7,
    right?
    Like this?


    But we didn't write those positive signs at first because a number without a sign is positive anyway, right?

    I guess so.

    You mean you're not sure if any of the numbers are negative when I write
    2 + 5 = 7
    or
    3 + 6 = 9 ?

    No, they are all positive.

    Okay, so let's be annoying and make some of those numbers negative in that first one.
    It was
    3 + 4 = 7

    so

    -3 + 4 =
    3 + -4 =
    -3 + -4 =
    Oh, and we can subtract too, just to make it worse. Yay!
    -3 - 4 =
    3 - -4 =
    -3 - -4 =

    Okay, which one should we start with.

    I don't care.

    Me neither! We have so much in common!
    OK, let's take

      -3 + 4
    So let's look at one symbol at a time:

    Wait! Where do we start?

    Negative three?

    We could but that could make it confusing later. Let's always start before the first symbol. What's before the first symbol?

    "Before the first symbol?"

    Yeah, the first symbol is that negative sign, right?

    I guess.

    I mean if we read from left to right, the first thing is all the way left, right? I mean left, correct?

    OK.

    So what's on the far left: is it the negative sign or the equals sign? Can you tell or should I show you?

    The negative sign.

    I agree. So if I say "before" it I mean to the left of it, yeah? Because we read left to right. So what's before the negative sign?

    ...nothing?

    I agree! So where do we have 'nothing' on our number line?

    Zero?

    Sure! Zero. So let's always start at zero, and if there's nothing to the left I guess we can assume there will be "something" next to the nothing, and something is more than nothing, right? So which way do we go on the number line to mean "more."

    That way? (pointing)

    Yep, to the right. More is to the right; less is to the left on our number line. We count up to the right, down to the left. So far so good?

    I guess.

    So let's always start at zero, facing right, before we read the first symbol.


    OK.

    So what's the first symbol we see?

    Negative sign? (many would say 'minus')

    What does that tell us to do?

    Switch directions.


    Right, so now we are at zero facing left. What's next?

    3

    What does that tell us?

    Move 3.

    Ok so where do we end up.

    3. I mean negative 3.


    Okay now we're at negative 3. What's next?

    Plus.

    What does that tell us?

    Face right.


    Nice! Yes, then what.

    Go 4.


    Okay, so, do you know what -3 + 4 is?

    Positive one.

    Which we usually call...

    One.

    Nice!


    -----------
    Lather, rinse, repeat...
    _______

    For that student, on that day, this made it all come together and he went from utter bewilderment to doing a dozen or so correctly in rapid succession, without a number line. It was such a joy to have him leave so confident after arriving so miserable

    . In retrospect, I worried that he might have a hard time coming to think of "negative three" as a separate value from "three," and to see "-3" as the representation of that number, because we had disconnected the sign from the number to get right-sized chunks for him to decode. But over time it seemed that he grew in facility with integers, and began to process these problems in larger chunks--much like moving from phonetic (sound-letter) to orthographic (sight word) reading.

    I also worried that it wouldn't translate easily to multiplication and division (there's a nice discussion of this here), because though it's easy to apply repeated addition to a positive times a negative, multiplying a negative times a positive is more ambiguous, unless you just think of negative groups as sort of negativizing the total. (Ok math people. Be gentle.)

    For practical purposes, a student like this one finds (and this one did find) great relief in my encouraging him to just ignore the signs and multiply or divide the numbers, then use his knowledge of the rules for combining signs (different signs = negative; like signs = positive) to put the correct sign on the answer.

    However, this clashes with my both/and stance regarding math teaching for understanding. I don't want to deprive a student of deeper understanding by handing them prefab tools for arriving at solutions--which may also deprive them of the core understandings necessary to reason in more complex mathematical situations. Yet, I also don't want a student's math skills or cognitive style to make the insistence on teaching for understanding first a roadblock that they perceive to be standing in the way of their practical need to solve problems, get credit, and feel successful. Creating both/and learning solutions is a delicate, perpetual, highly-individual dance that only seems to work when the student is a key player guiding us to collaboratively build understanding and calculation success, knowing both are vitally important.

    _____
    Bonus!:
    I just remembered, it was with the same student that I first explained pi with string and scissors. And I ran out the door and made a video:
PiDay! from Mike L Miller on Vimeo.

Finding the Main Idea (Nuts and Bolts)

Lillipads and Lowerarchies


    ​Taking bullet point notes from text is often the kind of assignment from which we backtrack to explore main idea. Some students can naturally read a paragraph and intuit a nice approximation of the main idea but many will grab one idea and run with it...and hope. They may have been told that the first sentence is always the main idea, or maybe the "first or last."

    As soon as I can see that the student is basically taking pot-shots without a notion that there is a possibility of puzzling out an accurate answer, we do it this way. For many, this scaffolds a future ability to "intuit" (actually just reason out) a main idea without all these steps. It's really neat to see the progress, especially when that progress undoes self-defeating shortcuts like "first sentence every time." I tell students the main idea is "the thing the paragraph keeps talking about the most, and what it says about it."

    Here's a random textbook paragraph:

  1. First we look at each sentence and identify the simple subject (noun that is "doing" the verb), and we paraphrase the predicate in a few words. (Obviously, if the student doesn't know subject/predicate structure, we start there)

SubjectPredicate
Cell Cyclebegins-->formed ...ends-->divides
Itcopies DNA
DNAcontrols what cell does
DNA made of chromosomes
Copying chromosomesmakes cells alike
Cellsmake cells?
Cellsare prokaryotic or eukaryotic



Then we get rid of all the repetition:

SubjectPredicate
Cell Cyclebegins-->formed ...ends-->divides

copies DNA

controls what cell does

made of chromosomes
Copying Chromosomesmakes cells alike





3. If we see something at the beginning or end that doesn't seem to go with the rest at all, it is probably a transition. We can check the previous and following paragraphs to see if they share subjects with these mystery sentences. If so, we remove them. If not, we may decide to leave them in. At this point, it is actually helpful to note that this isn't rocket surgery.

4. Then we take what's left and put it in a sentence. This can require complex language, but it gets easier for most students with practice.

This paragraph's bullet point might say: 


  • Cells contain DNA(chromosomes) which direct what they do and allow them to make exact copies of themselves.

​If the student wanted to include the "beginning and ending" part from the first sentence, we might do that. Hopefully we have already discussed general —> specific structure for organizing ideas, and they can understand that this is a very general transition statement and may not be necessary. As with Subject/Predicate structure, if they lack this background, we simply backtrack to that foundational piece. Backtracking to lay foundation is a constant and it happens very quickly, so the student doesn't really have any time to sit there feeling inadequate. I just say, "Hey, let's do this for a second...!" and we're off.

It will be difficult for many students to paraphrase the predicates, but even using a longer version of the note, the process still works. I let them know they need to translate it enough to prove to themselves that they understand the sentence and what they've written--if they copy language they don't understand, it's useless. It is also important to realize that even if generating the "bullet point" as a grammatically correct sentence is too much of a challenge initially, again, the process of noting all the subjects and identifying all the repetition (especially in texts that talk about the same thing in every sentence, but using synonyms or different levels within the same semantic group, such that kids don't see they are the same thing until we put them in a little pile by themselves) really clarifies the surprising, hidden concreteness of main idea identification.

One of the primary coping strategies for a wide variety of learning challenges is to find the "thing" that can be used as an answer, and cling to it. It only takes a few crushingly embarrassing moments of a teacher asking a question, the student having no answer, and the teacher suggesting they "pay attention," for them to learn to find a thing at all costs. As long as it is in some vague way related to the subject matter at hand, they can turn that "pay attention" into a far less humiliating "nice try, but not quite."

Some students perceive a meaningless on-rush of information all day, and their instincts prioritize the bits that maximize pleasure and minimize pain (we all do this latter part to some extent). Whether attention challenges reduce the choice one has regarding which elements make it into consciousness and are retained, or processing speed makes only the initial information retainable as working memory chugs along sorting facts into longer term memory while additional information continues to sail past, or the social demands on mental bandwidth simply push out any cognitive space for comprehension and retention of academic material, kids will find ways to cope without further humiliation, and often ingenious ones.

By the time they are entering middle school, students who do not differentiate between levels of specificity, or levels of importance, are at a serious disadvantage. But I think it is very important to perceive how hard won the act of grasping and retaining any material is for many students. And developmentally, the next step is not to start to categorize things remembered, but simply to remember more and more! I think it is key to note where on this path a student is, and to be willing to backtrack to where they really are, not with an implicit "you are behind!" message (they get this elsewhere), but with a startling, attention-getting acknowledgement of the progress on display when they show you where they actually are.

Furthermore, you can get amazingly far if you are smart and can learn to retain information, even if you don't see relationships between bits of information yet. For these students, explicit exercises to practice noting categories and subcategories are a vital precursor to all kinds of critical thinking, not to mention organized writing...and retrieving key ideas from text!

Saturday, January 20, 2018

Effective Team Meetings for Students with LD (Things Helpers Need to Know)

Big People in Little Chairs

I recently had the joy of attending two teacher-parent-admin meetings in rapid succession, once on each side of the table. My daughter’s teaching and support team met with her mother and me at the crack of dawn, and then, after just long enough to twiddle my lips a few times, I found myself seated as a Learning Specialist with teachers, administrators, and parents at my school to discuss a 7th grader’s academic journey.


The joyous fact is that, in spite of a common-sense notion that these roles are completely different, they have more in common than I would have suspected. In fact, the “changing hats” metaphor is more specifically apt than you might think: yes, I did take off my Parent Hat and put on the Learning Specialist Hat, but they are just darn hats! From my forehead down I am fully Mike under those hats, in both arenas, and the more honest and genuinely Mike I can be, the better for each role. I’m there in both cases as an advocate among advocates, with very different lenses and pieces of each puzzle, but absolutely parallel goals (a child’s happiness, success, and preparation for the future...you know, nothing big). And in both cases, those goals are best met when I strive to understand and respect what is at stake for every other person in the room, as best I can.


I have to add, having said “each side of the table,” that it is important that this never be literally so. A meeting should not feel like an American Idol audition or Captain Marvel addressing the Council of Elders. If it happens by chance, please stand up and move to the other side. Otherwise the lone parent or couple (or possibly teacher or administrator) will be more defensive and feel less cared for--an unbalanced table group is not the formation of a team, and our bodies know this, even if our minds say “Oh pshaw.”




Two things about these types of meetings I wish to convey:
  1. Talking about progress shouldn’t be confusing, but it is. We can remedy this a great deal if we talk about two kinds of progress, separately: progress relative to self, and progress relative to peers. As teachers and helpers we should offer this; as parents we should ask for it.
  2. Though everyone present would bristle at the assertion that they are present for anything other than the child’s well-being, beyond that shared concern, each player has different things at stake, and it is in the best interests of the child if everyone goes in understanding the personal stakes for each person in the room. What does she need? What does he need? What do they need?...

----------

Emily asked me after our meeting, “how do you think it went? Seems like things are pretty good!” I think this is a pretty common parent experience of such meetings, relatively independent of how positively the school team intended to convey things. Why this disconnect?


Perhaps because the teachers are with the child every day, and they don’t always realize how much the school-child may differ from the home-child; perhaps because teachers assume parents must have a baseline clarity about their child’s academic strengths and challenges (especially teachers who are not parents); or perhaps because of misplaced privacy notions regarding discussing “other children” with a family: teachers often leave out the "progress-relative-to-peers" piece entirely. But this kind of progress is often the crux of the problem--is the skills gap closing or widening between my child and her classmates? Yet the combination of the above assumptions and the further disinclination to be frank because it is simply a more difficult conversation to have, leads many educators to dwell mostly or entirely upon improvements relative to self, simply labeling them as progress.


So maybe James is talking out of turn much less, or getting much more of his homework in. But if his peers are turning all of their homework in, and talking out of turn never, that is key information! Furthermore, if James happens to feel no agency in these behaviors, if they are beyond his control in some way, he is likely suffering in spite of his “improvement” and if parents go home feeling like he’s doing great because he is improving--after all, that’s all anyone can do!--he suffers alone. He still feels different from his peers (and is) and he is now less likely to continue to improve, because it’s much harder alone. What a relief to have parents come from a teacher meeting happily saying how proud teachers are of your progress! How difficult would it be to then say, “Actually, dad, I don’t feel like it’s going so well...”


What parents often get in meetings, even with talented veteran educators, is a confusing mishmash of positives and negatives, and we naturally average these out to see which side wins. And because of the process I just described, positive often wins, and parents leave feeling uneasily swayed toward an outcome that “things are good. James just needs to work a little more on A, B and C.” This process of averaging needs to be made unnecessary through more clarity. Helpers need to help parents hold the strengths and challenges side by side, celebrating the strengths and continuing to scaffold their child’s joy in those strengths, which are a major source of comfort and satisfaction in school, while also clearly delineating the impact of the child’s challenges on his quality of school life, and providing concrete ways for the entire home-school team to support efficient progress addressing those challenges.


So, we must always be clear about which kind of progress we are describing, and we have to describe both. We have to address progress relative to self because it is the most fundamental kind of progress, and the child--who may be entirely focused on comparing herself to peers and be missing her own progress completely--needs to see and feel the achievement of such progress. Yet, we must also consider the child’s progress relative to her peers, or to grade-level expectations, or whatever normative measure the school is comfortable addressing with parents, because if that gap is widening, we are setting the child up for more frustration, more missed learning, more feeling inadequate, and probably the inevitable cessation of that progress, because what’s the use? If that gap is closing, is it closing quickly enough? Do we need to add further measures to increase the rate of that progress and can we do that without exhausting the child?


The self-peers pair is sort of the school version of a key belief I have about tutoring. There’s another pair of musts here. It is vital that good tutoring provide long-term remediation and short term help.  Not either/or, but both/and. That is, a child may have core skills missing, and need many hours of help to build them up, yet if I focus entirely on that long-term project and neglect the fact that the child is walking into class, experiencing her own challenges as immutable and innate each day, then I’m basically risking her engagement in everything we do by acting like it is OK for her to be hemorrhaging self-esteem all day. She also gets no reason to believe school can be better than this for her. These implicit messages are unacceptable to me. She is fine as she is--we are not working to “make her OK someday.” She does not deserve to suffer. So it is imperative that I help her first to understand herself as a learner with her current skill set--always in the context of a growth mindset, but not implying that she will grow into something “better,” just someone for whom some tasks are easier--and help her figure out how to navigate school as she is, with self-esteem intact. But it is precisely just as vital that she be getting the long-term remediation as well, because with only the short-term coping strategies, I may actually be systematically teaching her to stifle her own potential by avoiding or working around challenging areas rather than strengthening them. This, she also does not deserve. She and every student deserve both immediate and long-term help, and to feel reasonably good about themselves the entire time.


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Now then, what is at stake for each person in that meeting we were discussing? Get ready--here come some pretty global assumptions and I’m trusting you to see their value as a starting place in such meetings, from which one can address people present and then listen and calibrate responses to how correct or off-base these assumptions actually are with respect to each singular individual in that room on that day.

Teachers need clarity and resources. I don’t care how well resourced the school is, that person is in a room with 20 or 30 kids, and each of those kids could work with that teacher one-on-one all day and still benefit from yet more differentiation, information, support, and care. The need is endless. It is impossible to do enough. Of course, a skilled teacher is not the sole source of knowledge and learning in the classroom, but the almost magical facilitator and manager of the awesome brainpower and curiosity of that group and the learning potential seeping out of every corner of their shared environment. In a great classroom, they are all teachers and learners and helpers and helped, and the teacher is more the navigator than the crew--or the power source! And still, there is always more to give, and there are constantly new obstacles raised by circumstance and bureaucracy to foil that giving. So teachers need clarity--what specifically is being asked of them, and how will they acquire the resources to give it, especially the resource of time?



Administrators need problems solved. They arrive at school to take their place at an I Love Lucy conveyor belt of issues every day. The people they value most take more problems off the table than they bring, and everyone else does the opposite. Each problem before them is generally growing or shrinking at any given time. The prime directive is to keep the growing problems of one area (or family) from affecting other areas (or families), and to make them all shrink and disappear as quickly as possible. I think there must be joy in the problem-solving aspect of the job, satisfaction when one peruses the population served and appreciates all the problems that are not affecting the majority. I’m not sure; it makes me queasy to contemplate, but I am not the appropriate personality type for such a job! Nevertheless, an administrator will attend a meeting seeking to keep problems from arising, getting bigger, or affecting others, and will seek ways to shrink or overcome them as efficiently as possible, because that conveyer belt does not stop.


Parents need transparency, tools, and emotional support. If every teacher is under-resourced, every parent feels inadequate. We are all pretty sure we are doing it wrong. Some of us avoid facing that worry by obsessively fault-finding among all the other people who interact with our kids. Some of us are so overwhelmed by parenthood that we just nod and smile and hope, but don’t really take in anything anyone says. Parenthood confronts us with the most befuddling constellation of gray areas we will ever encounter, countless binaries that we must find an elusive happy medium between: freedom & control, fun & work, leniency & sternness, support & detachment, activities & downtime, and on and on and on. Parents are desperate for a kind of clarity that they simply cannot access on their own, because they lack the emotional distance to see clearly. Their child, whom they generally care about more than just about anyone or anything else in this life, is the manifestation of their genes and their parenting skills in the world, and a comment about that child, positive or negative, is basically a comment about the parent. Or it feels that way.


I’ve watched a teacher describe a child’s (negative) behavior, and then both parents are silent. The teacher assumes that they don’t get it, so he describes a similar incident. The parents might nod but are still very quiet. The teacher describes another incident and the parents look frustrated or downright upset. After seeing this dynamic several times, I think I understand part of what may be happening. The teacher is actually asking for help, but quite often the parents want help with the same behavior, so they are both disappointed and mortified that it is happening at school. Because they don’t explain the behavior or make suggestions, the teacher tries to communicate the seriousness of the situation by offering another example. The parents’ mortification and disappointment deepens, because they were hoping for answers, and they are kind of getting pummeled with the sense that no one can help their child or them. By the third example, the parents are beginning to get mad because it feels like a case is being made against their child, by a person who obviously doesn’t like their child or them. The relationship may be headed for disaster at this point. When parents are silent in meetings, there is often great discomfort happening. Imagine what you just said about their child was about them, and assume that they got it from the first example--they do not have the teacherly context of a classroom full of flawed kids each with their own foibles, so their kid may sound like a monster among angels from the very first example. Case making does happen, and unless this is actually what you are doing, you do not want to create that impression. If you simply say that you are asking for help, you might at least get an acknowledgement that they are as stumped as you, and this can build connection as you agree to contact one another if either party makes progress with this puzzle. And if we can remember to add the context of less-than-perfect peers to their child, it will be much easier to hear.



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Ah, brains. I have one. It just woke me from only about five hours sleep with an elaborate nightmare which ended with me floating in the Bay, having fallen from a collapsed bridge, deciding whether or not to bother trying to swim to shore, because San Francisco had apparently just been nuked. I awoke, convinced myself that no part of that had happened, wondered if I had a fever, and then went, “Oh! Duh! You forgot to mention what’s really going on in those meetings, and everywhere else.” Whoops! Brains are neat (and terrifying).




Again, oversimplified, but really helpful: I teach kids about one set of ingredients for “feeling OK” which I learned from Tribes way back when, and they apply here before any of those other “stakes.”


Everyone in that meeting wants to feel a sense of Autonomy, Belonging, and Competence, and they will instinctively ally with those who foster these things, and shrink from those who threaten them. Most will come into the room on high alert because all three are profoundly threatened by the occasion--especially for parents when you consider that they are getting a double whammy because both their own and their child’s Autonomy, Belonging, and Competence (which of course feels like an extension of their own anyway) are under threat!

Again, in exactly the same way as when working with a student, these considerations would be purely manipulative if they were merely used to seduce people into giving you what you want. This is what an unhealed abused person may do, because the weakness of genuineness is too dangerous, and domination is the only route to safety. But the rest can (and must) simply keep an eagle-eye out for the genuine opportunities to offer meaningful choice (fostering Autonomy), to identify shared experiences (fostering Belonging), and to delineate the wisdom and skill with which another person is navigating their role (fostering Competence). These are solid building blocks for ABC and doing this in a genuine way builds real connection, enables collaboration, and creates efficient teams that are a joy to be a part of.

With a student, I am a strengths detective, using that eagle eye to relentlessly introduce or re-introduce the student to strengths that have become buried beneath a pile of suffering due to misunderstood challenges that have systematically eroded their senses of A, B, and C. Telling them is often ineffective; they must be shown--in fact, they must demonstrate the strengths to themselves, and have them identified as such in an inarguable manner. You just did that and that is awesome. I know people who dream of doing that as easily as you just did. It is the same for adults, including me. We become blind to our assets and it hurts.
Happily, very few people are susceptible to disingenuous support. We get it all day: the empty smile and handshake, the greeting that asks a question without waiting for or wanting an answer, the check-in that only speaks and doesn’t listen. These are perfectly valuable social norms, of course, but they are worse than useless when over-employed in high stakes situations because they signal self-centeredness at best, and the intention to manipulate at worst. It is important to get real--take a risk--quickly, to set the tone that it might be safe to do so. And then do so in a very purposeful manner.
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Coming Soon!

Things Students Need to Know: Guessing
Things Students Need to Know: Teachers Generally Love School
Nuts and Bolts: Word Problems
Nuts and Bolts: Integers
Nuts and Bolts: Systematically finding the Main Idea

Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Taught to the Tune of the Gaslight (Introduction)




I was never hungry at school, or forced to get a job, or lacking any of the fancier tools of education. The vast majority of my teachers assumed I was a decent, bright individual before they ever interacted with me, and they remained supportive after. Thus, my privilege probably shows when I start to whine about school. So be it. Let me try to make the whining productive and you can think of me what you will.

As in discussions of social justice, I am extremely skeptical of the implication that because a thing has improved we should not continue to strive to make it still better, especially when the thing is as important as justice, or equity, or education. In fact, though of course there are some incredible educators and institutions out there, unless we go way back to the drawing board, questioning all of our assumptions about education before creating something flexible enough to serve everyone, there will always remain much work to be done.

Good schools, bad schools, great schools, average schools: even with all their various flavors and shapes, systems and schemas, philosophies and ethics, if we can point to an institution and call it a “school,” it probably meets some basic criteria: students learn in groups; they follow schedules; their progress is monitored and norm-assessed. Students probably outnumber teachers. They probably compare their progress to their peers. Their sense of their own okay-ness, and possibly their very value as a human being, is internally “norm-assessed” within each of them, all day.

Millions of years of evolution have enabled nature to take a single cell and turn it into a toddler, with the folks around that toddler mostly taking our cues from her. This is a Nature that knows what it's doing, and does things we can’t possibly do. Then, for some mysterious reason, after a few short years, we say ‘thank you--we’ll take it from here” to nature, and we insert that youngster into a series of institutions in order to shape them into a proper thinker, doer, and member of society. It is odd and arbitrary on the face of it. Why this form for all these functions? And do we really want to sacrifice quality for the sake of efficiency in this area, as we have in the post-industrial world for so many other...products? Apparently so.

I’m not arguing that we only learn at school; that’s silly. But the sheer ratio of time spent at school versus time elsewhere--and the ways many of us casually contrast the purpose and value of time in and out of school, especially with kids in earshot--strongly implies that vital work is supposed to happen at school.

With regard to the learning that does happen at school, my point is twofold:
  1. No matter the strengths and weaknesses of a particular institution, it will only map seamlessly onto the strengths and challenges of a very small portion of its students. For institutional learning to be effective at all, it must by its nature force the vast majority of students to quickly adjust their individual strengths, challenges, affect, and behavior to school norms that conform to those of a mysterious (and imaginary) “normal” student, in order to succeed there. This adjustment feels to many students like an adjustment from wrong to right, from bad to good, and if they struggle with it, it often feels like a shameful defectiveness--like they are the problem. No! They must be disabused of this notion. We may all agree that institutional learning is great, or at least the best we have--but we must give children agency in coming to that agreement with us for themselves, so they know the costs and they don’t internalize the unavoidable drawbacks of communal learning as flaws in themselves.
  2. Moving from family to classroom, a child becomes less important in the new sphere (with the notable exception of kids facing serious challenges at home, who may find much greater, precious care on arrival at school--but the pattern may proceed similarly through school afterward, and may be even more painful because of that initial relief!). I matter less here: my opinions and needs are subjugate to the group. As school progresses, classes get bigger, and the time with a specific teacher decreases. Individual importance decreases further. Agency does as well--in fact, the degree of agency bestowed upon a student by various authorities throughout the day is increasingly dependent upon her ability to adjust to those aforementioned constrictive institutional norms. Some students can't adjust to some of them even if they desperately want to. Unless some part of school is deeply satisfying, the cost of this lost agency, this feeling of not mattering, is much too high. Kids are depressed, or angry, or anxious, or any combination of these. Again, they need to know what’s going on: it is the nature of institutional learning to subject them to these pressures. They deserve to be given the tools to conform, if they wish, and the tools to remain true to themselves while agreeing to conform, for the good of themselves and their school community. And they deserve the systematic proof that they can experience the satisfaction of ever-increasing skills and understanding, as the direct consequence of striving to conform in a healthy way.

So, though I am interested in radical revolutionary approaches to education, I am not setting out to do that here. I want students to be happy in the school where they are. I want them to be given the tools to succeed and maintain a powerful sense of their individual, perfect, one-of-a-kind-ness. I want to let them in on the secret. The grown ups are flawed; the system is flawed--they’re not crazy for thinking so. Without that information, our schools are systematically gaslighting the kids they are supposed to serve. Let’s stop that.



I often tell kids about my grandfather teaching me to fish. He taught me once and I’ll never forget it. Why did it stick? Why was it so effortless? I felt safe; I felt loved; I was not in danger emotionally or physically. He both told and showed me. He did not shame me for errors or for not understanding; he explained what I did well and he adjusted his explanations and modeling by paying close attention to what I did and said. He was happy to be there with me. And I him.

I try to to help kids internalize a teacher like that--notice their own strengths, pace themselves according to what works, balance easy and difficult tasks. I also help them to notice a teacher like that when they meet one. Ideally we all have that Internal teacher when we don’t have an external one, and we make the most out of the external ones when we meet them.

Let's talk about how.