I ask myself that a lot, actually. I'm writing this post after putting the kids to be at 8:00, just so I can get my lesson plans done for the week in an uncertain time of if we're actually going to finish the week in person (I fear that this will be an ongoing feeling for a while), prep for the high school baseball tryouts that are happening this week, make sure my kid's baseball team's plans are in place, iron shirts for the week ahead, and ensure that my wife is supported as she, a district nurse, spearheads the contact tracing and mask mandate fiascos across her district. 

So... what am I doing?

For my first week, the goal was to create a space where students felt like they belonged, and do as much math as early and as often as we/they could manage. I know that I could have done better, yet I'm happy with where it ended. Here's what I did, courtesy of plenty of other really cool people:

Monday

• Name Tents (courtesy of Sara Van Der Werf)
• Welcome Back Form (thwarted when kids didn't have login information... whoopsie. Courtesy of Mari Venturino)
• 4 4's Activity (SO MUCH FUN. Courtesy of Jo Boaler)

I liked the outcome of the 4 4's because it allowed even the least comfortable student to do something productive on the first day of school. I showed students that 4+4+4+4 = 16 as an example and let them work on the rest. I paused them every 3 minutes too check in and get some responses to the board.

I told students that I wanted them to use their phones, and to have them out, but to keep it respectful. I'm well aware that phones are a distraction; I feel it as well. It will be a balancing act all year, and I'd rather have the understanding that they can use them than can't.
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At the end of the period, students filled out the first box of their name tent, and I spent the afternoon responding to every single one of them.

Tuesday

• Continue with 4 4's Activity to show students how perseverance has its benefits.
• In groups of 4, students worked to complete Challenge 4 from this set (courtesy of Math Pickle, shared by Melanie Janzen) and I wasn't sure how it would go. Lo and behold, so many of my students did well. What they didn't realize that I couldn't care less about them getting the right answers; it was merely a focused way to have them talk to each other, and it worked. My room was noisy​ for the first time in forever. 
• After 5 minutes, I paused each group and had them rotate their paper around the room in a snake pattern. This was one way to get cross-group collaboration without having students physically switch groups, mitigating the potential "close contact" variations. It also provided other groups a chance to see what their peers were coming up with. We did this in 3 rotations.
• When the students got their papers back, they saw what others had done to it. My hope was that other groups would contribute ideas to others, and all would feel like they had learned a little something. It was a BIG success, in my opinion.

Wednesday

• By now, students had received their Chromebooks and had been warned to bring them to school. 
• We worked on this "building patterns" activity that I created from Fawn Nguyen's visualpatterns.org set
• Most students worked on the set using the Chromebook, and many others chose to write it out on paper. Either way, the entire purpose of this was to (again) get students to talk to each other, and to recognize patterns, something we are going to be doing all year with the Open Up Resources curriculum.
• This is the first day in which some of the students really struggled, so it was on me to find ways to encourage and reinforce where they were at. It wasn't perfect, but it was a good day of learning.

Thursday

• Visual Pattern
• Visual Pattern 2
• We looked at each pattern individually, and worked together to build the next 3 steps, then (gasp) step 43. Yeah, we did hard things today.
• We wrapped up, once again, writing in our name tent space, as we had done all week long. I loved some of the responses and questions, giving me an insight into who was in the classroom and their personalities.

Friday

• Blue Sheet
• Practices Problems
• Today was the first day we did some straight up mathy math. I felt like it was a good transition from puzzles to puzzles to puzzles to puzzles to math. For each unit we are committing to create a blue sheet, a rendition of Sara Van Der Werf's Green Sheets.
• The goal with the Blue Sheet is that we didn't want to spend a week reviewing old material. This is a way to cut down on some of the nuance and get deeper into grade-level content. It's not that we refuse to review, but it won't be to the point where we go weeks before jumping into grade-level material.

This week was exhausting, exasperating, fulfilling, nerve-racking, and filled with anxiety. It was every emotion I could imagine, all in a 120 hour span of my life. I was anxious about masks and student compliance, but had very few issues. I was excited to have a classroom full of 35 students, and nervous about interactions to ensure that everyone in the room felt like they were safe. I will say, it was safe enough for two students to come out to me, safe enough to  get kids to laugh, and safe enough to dive in and do math after being out of rhythm for over a year and a half.

I don't know how the rest of the year will go, or even next week, and I'm learning to be ok with that.

Partly because of that, I am making a change to my homework policy. Call me selfish, but I don't really want to have the stress of getting students to turn things in. Teachers' mental health, amirite?

Now, if I can, I need to go get my lunch ready for tomorrow; it's going to be a long week.

Happy "It's Good To Be Back" Fishing

A popular way to gain traction on a tweet is to begin by saying "unpopular opinion" and follow it up with something that is, quite knowingly, very popular. I don't intend to do that here, so I will just say this: there is such thing as learning loss through the Inevitable Forced Remote Distance Disaster Learning Model of 2020-2021.

I have read articles, posts, and tweets about how we can't possibly say students have lost any learning through a pandemic, as long as they are able to get through the pandemic. This seems to be a false equivalence, as what I have witnessed is a divergence in the students who have shown up every day compared to those who have not. 

Student 1:
Student 1 shows up to class every day. They decide to show themself on camera, respond occasionally in the chat, and turn in most of the work assigned. They are often seen in/near a bed, sometimes laying down. They aren't feeling motivated, but know that school is a place where they need to be, and they do enough work to get by. Some of it is probably copied or scanned from an app, but there is a clear effort to complete the work. Heck, there are even times when it's obvious that someone has helped them by writing the work for them.

Student 2:
Student 2 shows up to class every day. They decide to show themself on camera, respond to everything in the chat or by unmuting their microphone. They sit upright at the desk in their room, turn in work that is highlighted and meticulous, wanting to stay ahead. They get some answers wrong, even though they know that there are apps and services out there to do the work for them. They attend office hours when it is helpful, and will take the initiative to ask for assistance when necessary.

I'm not talking about Student 1 or Student 2 when I talk about learning loss.

Student 3:
Student 3 shows up to class some days/most days/every day. They might turn on their camera the beginning of the period, or leave it on as their ceiling fan gets a full workout, only to be left alone for the remainder of the class period. They will rarely turn in work, and it is often either impeccably done with too many answers (I won't assign the whole thing, and tell the students in the meeting which problems to do) or it is incomplete. Student 3 does not respond in the chat, does not ask for help or attend office hours, and will often be in the group of the last students in the meeting, even though I dismissed them 5 minutes prior.

THESE are the students I am referencing when I think about, and talk about, learning loss. I can empathize with students who have lost the motivation to complete any work, and to even show up and remain attentive. I have had students share that they will mute their teacher and watch a movie during class; this is learning loss, a lost opportunity to learn. I have had students share that they get into the meeting so that they're marked present, and go out to work with a family member; this is learning loss, a lost opportunity to learn. There are other scenarios, but these two should paint a sufficient picture of the students I am most concerned about when referring to learning loss. 

This year in my Math 2 course, we have gone into detail about recursive and explicit equations, functions and patterns, quadratic functions, geometry, trig ratios, and more. We trimmed a lot of content to account for seeing students twice a week. We assigned no more than two things per week. We have now slowed down to cover one lesson per week through the remainder of the year. I say this to clarify that it is not a coverage issue. For Student 1 and Student 2, they have received an ample amount of content to be successful in the next course, Integrated Math 3. For Student 1 and Student 2, we know that there are going to be some areas we need to review and fill in next year, but that there is a foundational understanding of the key concepts we need them to know. 

For Student 3, we have no idea what they know/don't know because they haven't turned in authentic work. To wrap my head around this, I looked up numbers, and out of my 170 students, 29 of them are currently in a position of "learning loss" through my description. SEVENTEEN PERCENT of my students are turning in nearly no work, missing multiple days, not engaging in chats/discussion, and not turning in assessments. No tutoring program or late-semester intervention is going to get them up to the level of their peers, so they are, by definition, behind. They have lost a learning opportunity.

For that 17 percent of my classes, I worry. I have not been able to build community the ways in which I had hoped, and now that we are a month from the end of the school year, I don't know what else to do. Counselors and administrators have contacted and attempted home visits. I have sent messages. I continue to attempt engagement when we are in the class setting. The return to in-person learning will be rocky and messy and exciting and chaotic all at once, and my hope is that this group of students find a way to regain their sense of belonging in a school setting. 

We return to hybrid in-person/remote learning next week, and I can only hope that what was lost is slowly able to be found again. 

Happy "In Search Of The Lost" Fishing