Reality Check

I survived my first day.

I can officially say that I have taught a class of 30 rambunctious, hormonal teenage geometry students and surprisingly, I loved every minute of it. Class was a little hectic to start, but things straightened out and students were surprisingly on task. It could have helped that the AC appears to be on overdrive, turning our room into a large refrigerator. Nevertheless, students listened to us and the overall dynamic seems very energetic and fun. My co teacher, Ms. Martin, and I have very similar personalities but are very different in many ways, too. She is a bit more nonchalant and pals around more with the students whereas I seem to be emerging as the disciplinarian. Honestly, I think my lessons are fun but I also think that if we are going to cover a semester's worth of material in four weeks, we need to be a bit serious about things.

Speaking of serious, we administered out diagnostic exam. We positioned it to our students like this:

Imagine you're Kobe Bryant. The Lakers just won the championship and you're feeling like you're on top of the world. But what did you have to learn how to do before you could get there? You had to learn how to dribble, shoot layups, freethrows, threes, dunk...there were so many things that came before you could ever wear that championship ring. Consider what we're doing in this class a Math Tryout. We're not going to cut anyone, obviously, but we're going to figure out where you are so we, your coaches, can take the right steps to coach you to that championship ring (or high school diploma).

It worked. The students ate it up, and they took the exam seriously. They were asked to write something for every question, and they weren't allowed to say "I don't know" or "I can't". Instead, they had to write what they DID know about the problem and what they COULD do to try to solve it. Everyone did (with a little coaching) but the problem is that they honestly don't know the material. In a class of tenth and eleventh graders, less than a quarter of them could identify an acute angle. In our class, the average was a score of 4 out of 44 possible questions.

One of the big things here in TFA is the idea of malleable intelligence. There are all kinds of chants ("Your brain is like a muscle--exercise it!" "Knowledge=Power") to reinforce the idea that knowledge is something that is not necessarily inherent, but is rather created through hard work. If there's anything that my students take from this class, it'll be the idea that they CAN achieve great things if they work hard and that they ARE smart no matter what anyone else has told them. While the diagnostic results are a bit daunting right now (OK-a lot daunting), at least we know that our players are off the bench because they're here, in our classroom, ready to learn.