Sometimes I get into a funk and take some time off from creating
things. I almost always find that when that happens, I have to branch off in a
new direction to re-light the fuse.
With all the teacher walk-outs, the state of education is much in the
news. I have some opinions about that, having been a teacher for a short, weird
period of my life. So, branching off, I’m going to tell a few tales from those
days. Bear with me, because I’m not going in any particular order, and I’ll
probably meander around.
I’ll start with a 3-month gig I had as a long-term substitute in
McLoud Oklahoma. The special needs math teacher was out on maternity leave. I
knew this would be a challenge for me, having never been particularly genius at
math. I had gone through the para training and alternative teacher
certification by that point, but wasn’t really educated on this kind of
teaching.
I walked into the classroom at the end of the hall and took stock. I
would be teaching kids at several different levels, primarily from a basic
mathematics book and a pre-algebra book. McLoud had 4 classes per day instead
of 6, and the students were expected to do their schoolwork in class, so I only
needed enough books for the classroom, not for each student to take home. I had
one ancient student computer on a desk at the side of the room. I had one
cabinet of supplies, mostly holiday decorations for the classroom. There were scented candles and Jesus things
on the teacher’s desk, and a broom in the corner, which I soon discovered was a
necessity since many of the kids came to school straight from their morning
chores in the barn. Yuck.
The lovely thing about teaching special needs classes is that class sizes
are quite small – as legally required. So you do have a little more time to
work with individual students, and classroom management is much, much easier. I
had students who ranged from one boy who couldn’t tie his own shoes, didn't smell very good, and only knew
how to calculate on his fingers to the quick-witted 7th
grader who seemed to be in special needs class only because he wasn’t at all
good at sitting still or keeping quiet. There was also a skater dude who would
bring in his skateboard and park it behind my desk, sit down in the back of the
room, and promptly go to sleep, every day.
As I tackled the challenges of teaching math to these kids, I cast
back to my days as a volunteer in my daughter’s classrooms in Oregon. There,
the teachers relied heavily on “manipulatives” to teach math theory. From there
they progressed to word problem solving, and THEN to what most of us think of
as math, problems written in math’s symbolic language. It was a consistent and
orchestrated approach that all the teachers in all the grades utilized. I
quickly came to realize that these Oklahoma students had never been taught the
concepts behind the math problems. They were unable to equate the symbols on
the page to anything. It was purest luck that any of them could go beyond
calculating on their fingers.
With no budget and no teaching supplies besides the textbooks, I
turned to Google for inspiration. By luck I found a thing called “algebra cards.”
Cardstock, scissors, a sharpie, and a Saturday’s afternoon work, and Monday
morning I faced my class armed with my new tool. The cards are used to lay the
algebra problem out on a table top. The students can then solve the equation by
adding and removing cards, keeping the equation balanced as they isolate the
variable. After we worked through several problems together, a light bulb
started to go off. From then on, my algebra students regularly grabbed the
cards and stood at the table, working together to solve the problems.
In that moment I realized that it was a GIFT that I am not great with
math, because I could see and relate to the struggles of my students. Being
able to figure out how to teach them made me realize I was not bad at math at
all, I was just bad at doing math the way it had been taught to me. It helped
me to see my students as people who were unconventional learners and started me
down a path of discovery that led, eventually, to the democratic schooling
movement.
But, back to McLoud. My methods worked really well on some students.
For the ones who had severe learning disabilities, not as much. Perhaps with
more time and support, I would have figured out how to tailor my instruction to
every student. But the end of the semester came and the regular teacher
returned. I went back to sporadic substituting for the remainder of the school
year. At one point the teacher I had replaced sought me out and asked “What are
these algebra cards the students keep asking for?” It was clear that she was
not at all pleased that I had introduced this new method to her students. I
explained them and gave her my cards, but I later found out she never used
them. It was clear to me that neither she nor the district really cared about
helping these students find their individual level of achievement. They taught
them because they were legally obligated to do so, but there was no creativity,
passion, or empathy in the process. I always wondered what happened to the
clever, restless boy, or the skater kid who couldn’t stay awake. One does, you
know.
