Not long ago one of my colleagues asked me a question I’ve heard at least twenty times over the past year: How is it I’m a math teacher when writing is clearly such a big part of my life? Fair question. I’ll admit that on the surface it doesn’t seem like a natural fit, and I’ve always kind of enjoyed the apparent irony behind it when people ask. But maybe it’d be best if I took a few minutes to explain how I became both the math guy and the writer to clear up any confusion.
I’d been pegged as a math guy as early as elementary school. Not because I had any great aptitude for it, but because I switched schools halfway through the year as a third grader. School #1 taught multiplication facts in the first half of the year, and School #2 taught them in the second half. So when I showed up at School #2 having memorized everything through 12 x 12 while the rest of my class was working on the 2s and 3s, they thought I had super powers, and that perception carried my through the rest of elementary school. I was decent in math, but I was no genius by any stretch. By the time I finished high school I only ever got as far as trigonometry, and barely got through that by the skin of my teeth.
While math was just something that I put up with because it was part of school, writing was always present in one form or another, even going back as far as third grade. When I hit my late twenties and was just getting established in my teaching career, I began taking writing more seriously with the limited free time I had. But this was also the same time window as the masters degree, and once that benchmark was reached it was all about working through the step and lane changes of district career advancement. Doing this amounts to taking several classes to build up credits, which, for a lot of people, gets done in the summer.
During the summer of 2003, I took a mail order class about differentiated learning. Most classes I took amounted to little more than “pay the fee / read the book / write the paper / congratulations on earning your A / moving on,” but this one had some ideas I wanted to try. When I returned to school in the fall, I learned it was my year to be on a performance review cycle. Our principal told us that year there were two options: Be observed three times, or be observed once and complete an independent growth plan. I took the growth plan, partially because it got me out of two of the observations, but also because I figured the growth plan would force me into trying some of the ideas from my differentiation class.
It seemed not many people had been interested in the growth plan option, so my principal was very much on board with the idea. We agreed to start with math, since that was one of the more concrete curricular areas I worked with. After a year of working on the plan and another year of experimenting with the model further, things were coming together. Both my principal and instructional coach were excited about some of the things I was trying, and I felt like I had stumbled into something that might become interesting after a few more years of trial and error.
Then at the end of the 2005 school year, in fact on the last student day (which I remember because I was playing my newly-released CD of Dream Theater’s “Octavarium” album in my classroom before the morning bell rang; what can I say, music nerd, and I’ll own it), the principal called the intermediate teachers together to let us know our school district was going to be starting a new program, in which 4th and 5th grade teachers would be specializing in subject areas. Four buildings would be piloting the program the following school year, and we were one of them. We were given the option to participate in a week of summer work to help get the program started. During one of our building meetings that week, when we were determining how people would be partnered off and what subjects they were going to cover, the principal turned to me and said, “So you’ll be teaching math, right?” Since I didn’t want to give up on the momentum of what I thought I had developing, I was all too eager to say yes.
The rest is history. There were sacrifices made in this: I had to give up several years of read-aloud with my classes, which was painful, and I missed out on what it was like to work with that rare student who came along with extraordinary written voice. But ten years after the fact, I don’t miss it. I see what a challenging curriculum all of the reading and writing has become, and I can’t see any positives outweighing the negatives of switching over.
Besides, I know so much cool stuff about fractions now, and I don’t know how I could ever keep it all to myself....
Monday, March 23, 2015
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
An Open Letter to My Sister on Halo Eve
So here we are on the edge of March 4th, and tomorrow the halo finally comes off. Hopefully this means all of those messed-up vertebrae in your neck are healing like they’re supposed to and you’re ready for the next big step in your recovery.
I was experiencing a good amount of denial about the seriousness of your accident right after it happened, and I couldn’t understand why. Even after the first day in the hospital when you couldn’t elevate the bed more than a few centimeters without extreme pain, and Dave and I were taking turns feeding you soy milk a few drops at a time, I figured as long as you were still alive and the prognosis allowed for optimism, things would be okay. But it got more real when the numb wore off and we had a better picture of how lucky you had been. I clearly remember Dave telling me how someone had said that for every eleven thousand people who sustained the same kind injury you had, eleven thousand of them usually wound up either paralyzed or killed. You being the one to make it past those kind of astronomical lottery-ticket odds was too much to think about. I began to internally flinch away when those near-miss fact examples came up, because hiding in denial was so much easier.
During the first days in the hospital when you had to constantly see the fresh shock on the faces of the people who came to visit you, your blunt and defining pragmatism (not to mention your sense of humor that can out-darken mine at times) rose through the painkiller haze even then, when you’d simply reply to their commiserations and genuine pity by saying, “Beats being dead.” From that point, every tiny benchmark was a celebration: She can move her fingers and toes; she can sit up; she can stand on her own; she can walk; she can go home; she can go out for Christmas Eve; she can go shopping; she can knit again; she’s getting better.
Now at the end of this part, I find occasional moments when things are catching up with me. I don’t know, maybe everything we had to endure with Erin taught me to be practical in the moment and store the emotion for a more convenient release -- it likely did. But tonight I am so very happy for the day you have coming tomorrow when you finally get that thing taken off. And I am especially happy that you didn’t die. Because if you had, I would have been completely, irreparably broken.
When you were given March 4th as the official halo removal date, I knew it was time to start putting together the celebration some of us had talked about back at the beginning, and now the party is only days away. If anyone needed proof of how happy I am you’re still around, remember that I am allowing you to bring both Karaoke and cilantro into my home.
Just be sure that when the party is over, you take them with you....
I was experiencing a good amount of denial about the seriousness of your accident right after it happened, and I couldn’t understand why. Even after the first day in the hospital when you couldn’t elevate the bed more than a few centimeters without extreme pain, and Dave and I were taking turns feeding you soy milk a few drops at a time, I figured as long as you were still alive and the prognosis allowed for optimism, things would be okay. But it got more real when the numb wore off and we had a better picture of how lucky you had been. I clearly remember Dave telling me how someone had said that for every eleven thousand people who sustained the same kind injury you had, eleven thousand of them usually wound up either paralyzed or killed. You being the one to make it past those kind of astronomical lottery-ticket odds was too much to think about. I began to internally flinch away when those near-miss fact examples came up, because hiding in denial was so much easier.
During the first days in the hospital when you had to constantly see the fresh shock on the faces of the people who came to visit you, your blunt and defining pragmatism (not to mention your sense of humor that can out-darken mine at times) rose through the painkiller haze even then, when you’d simply reply to their commiserations and genuine pity by saying, “Beats being dead.” From that point, every tiny benchmark was a celebration: She can move her fingers and toes; she can sit up; she can stand on her own; she can walk; she can go home; she can go out for Christmas Eve; she can go shopping; she can knit again; she’s getting better.
Now at the end of this part, I find occasional moments when things are catching up with me. I don’t know, maybe everything we had to endure with Erin taught me to be practical in the moment and store the emotion for a more convenient release -- it likely did. But tonight I am so very happy for the day you have coming tomorrow when you finally get that thing taken off. And I am especially happy that you didn’t die. Because if you had, I would have been completely, irreparably broken.
When you were given March 4th as the official halo removal date, I knew it was time to start putting together the celebration some of us had talked about back at the beginning, and now the party is only days away. If anyone needed proof of how happy I am you’re still around, remember that I am allowing you to bring both Karaoke and cilantro into my home.
Just be sure that when the party is over, you take them with you....
Sunday, March 1, 2015
The Art of the Playlist
Earlier this week I was telling some colleagues the story of when my cousin and I got stuck at a train crossing for so long that we listened to both sides of Genesis’ “Abacab” album on cassette. Just hearing the word “cassette” brought back memories for those of us old enough to remember what they were, and the delicate operation of taping favorite songs off the radio, or copying records onto blank tapes and hoping the needle never skipped while you were doing it, or how the pause button was always just a little bit looser than the other buttons from overuse, or what an amazing invention the dual cassette deck was since it opened up the songs in your cassette collection to mix tape inclusion.
From the day I had access to a cassette deck and cared enough about music to make it worth the effort, I was a master of mix tape creation. Some of them were about putting my constantly-updated collection of 45s into a more portable format, or weeding out the filler from favorite albums, or creating a soundtrack of necessary songs to keep in the car for the summer, or just putting together a compilation for a someone when I was certain how hearing those particular songs in that particular order was going to change their life for the better.
There were a lot of things to consider when putting together a mix tape: Which songs were better suited for Side A, or Side B? What was the strongest way to introduce whatever musical theme was running through the entire collection? How did you suck the listener in and keep them engaged enough to want to hear what came next? When was it best to change the pace with a slower song (usually the 3rd or 4th one)? How many songs from the end of the side did the emotional closers start to appear, and how many closers could you even get away with stacking on each side? (Three in most cases, but even that was pushing it.)
I still remember the day I walked into my local Best Buy and first saw the cassette section of the music department had been reduced by half to make more room for compact discs. Back then there was no way to record music onto a CD, so this wasn’t a good sign. But as soon as personal computers caught up, I was back in business. Mix CDs were a different animal altogether. The best you could get away with was about 15 songs, and without any Side 1/Side 2 break to define the emotional pacing, you were forced to rethink the whole format. CD mixes were so cheap and easy to make they almost became an afterthought.
As technology moved on and CDs slipped into the obsolete, it became all about the playlists for me. Playlists were the greatest since the only limitation was access to the music, and, music nerd that I am, this hasn’t ever been much of an issue. Playlist creation is a favorite hobby of mine now, to the point where I’ll invent reasons I need specific playlists just so I can justify making them. There’s a party at my house this weekend to celebrate my sister’s recovery from her car accident from earlier in the winter; I figure 50 songs that she would like will probably be enough to get through the evening...especially since I’m allowing her to bring her Karaoke machine into my house that night, which really should be enough evidence for anyone of just how much I love my sister. After the party is over and the work week begins again, I’ll have a Work Day at school to look forward to. Work Days are those blessed days we get at the end of each trimester when the students stay home and teachers get the whole day to work on report cards and catching up on everything. A nine-hour playlist should work for that day, since going a little bit over the amount of time I’ll spend at school will be enough to give me the element of surprise about which songs on the playlist will actually get played. And once I’m done with my grading and I'll be able to devote even more time to hammering out the last few revisions, I’ll have eleven different writing playlists waiting for me created specifically for my current manuscript, each representing different tones of the story.
As you can see, this is all something of a problem. But it’s the kind of problem I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without.
From the day I had access to a cassette deck and cared enough about music to make it worth the effort, I was a master of mix tape creation. Some of them were about putting my constantly-updated collection of 45s into a more portable format, or weeding out the filler from favorite albums, or creating a soundtrack of necessary songs to keep in the car for the summer, or just putting together a compilation for a someone when I was certain how hearing those particular songs in that particular order was going to change their life for the better.
There were a lot of things to consider when putting together a mix tape: Which songs were better suited for Side A, or Side B? What was the strongest way to introduce whatever musical theme was running through the entire collection? How did you suck the listener in and keep them engaged enough to want to hear what came next? When was it best to change the pace with a slower song (usually the 3rd or 4th one)? How many songs from the end of the side did the emotional closers start to appear, and how many closers could you even get away with stacking on each side? (Three in most cases, but even that was pushing it.)
I still remember the day I walked into my local Best Buy and first saw the cassette section of the music department had been reduced by half to make more room for compact discs. Back then there was no way to record music onto a CD, so this wasn’t a good sign. But as soon as personal computers caught up, I was back in business. Mix CDs were a different animal altogether. The best you could get away with was about 15 songs, and without any Side 1/Side 2 break to define the emotional pacing, you were forced to rethink the whole format. CD mixes were so cheap and easy to make they almost became an afterthought.
As technology moved on and CDs slipped into the obsolete, it became all about the playlists for me. Playlists were the greatest since the only limitation was access to the music, and, music nerd that I am, this hasn’t ever been much of an issue. Playlist creation is a favorite hobby of mine now, to the point where I’ll invent reasons I need specific playlists just so I can justify making them. There’s a party at my house this weekend to celebrate my sister’s recovery from her car accident from earlier in the winter; I figure 50 songs that she would like will probably be enough to get through the evening...especially since I’m allowing her to bring her Karaoke machine into my house that night, which really should be enough evidence for anyone of just how much I love my sister. After the party is over and the work week begins again, I’ll have a Work Day at school to look forward to. Work Days are those blessed days we get at the end of each trimester when the students stay home and teachers get the whole day to work on report cards and catching up on everything. A nine-hour playlist should work for that day, since going a little bit over the amount of time I’ll spend at school will be enough to give me the element of surprise about which songs on the playlist will actually get played. And once I’m done with my grading and I'll be able to devote even more time to hammering out the last few revisions, I’ll have eleven different writing playlists waiting for me created specifically for my current manuscript, each representing different tones of the story.
As you can see, this is all something of a problem. But it’s the kind of problem I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without.
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