The complexity of teaching is not something I ever feel able to capture. The experiences that Patrick and I enact with kids are not reproducible, nor are the experiences of the students, or the way it feels when things go well or do not go well. Over the past semester the process of documenting my teaching has been one of the more intense teaching experiences of my career. However, the site that attempts to capture this complexity is the result of those efforts. Although I believe that this site captures the multiple forces intersecting in our classroom. I do not believe it captures those moments in our classroom when I am saying in my head, “you need to remember that this students needs something different today, she is behaving this way for a reason,” or the significance of the day that Octavia walked up to the board and erased Johnny’s name from one group and put hers there instead because the class was arguing about how the group would work together. The emotional “stuff” of a moment is deeply complex and as a reminder, for me and for the reader, it seems pertinent to explain that this is not a prescription that can be reenacted with another group of students. These are some ideas. We tried a lot of different things, purposefully. There is not a day in this class that I left feeling hopeless. For the most part, this diverse group of students has offered me the most growing experience of my career in terms of pushing myself to leave school everyday and ask, “what do we need to do tomorrow?”
For the first time, I experimented with not having a plan. That is not to say that I didn’t have a goal for the course. But for the firs time, I did not do daily lesson plans a week before. Instead, I began at the beginning and thought of the class as a negotiated journey. The theme, mathematics, was laden throughout the year, but the individual lessons and projects, what I call challenges, emerged as the year went on. I would use some of these again. While others, such as the Metrocard challenge, seem appropriate to time and place. Students questions often offered me insight into where we might go next. Were these students not ninth graders, and were I more comfortable with this particular type of journey, I might spend more time making explicit the connection between their questions and the assignments. For now, the question remains an invitation into something students might be interested in or find important.
Challenges, however, are only a small part of the curriculum we enact. I draw heavily from the mandated state curriculum because I know that students will need to know the language of the Regents examination and will need to speak that language fluently in order for them to be “successful” in high school – to graduate. Although I would much prefer that we did not live in the time that we do, that high stakes testing was not the “way out” for students, the students here face that reality head on. The inclusive classroom in which we enact a curriculum is filled with many different life experiences. Although much of the literature talks about “overcoming the odds,” namely, that students from low SES pass the same exams as those students from affluent communities, it would be naïve for me to think that every student will be at the same entry point and exit point. All students are different, what they need is different, the pace we move at is different. This is not to say that all students in this classroom do not find success, we just find it in different ways. For a student who attends school only one day a week, we celebrate the weeks that he attends five days in a row, for him, that is success. These are the stories, I believe we ignore if we only teach a standardized curriculum. For a student who has a hard time transitioning from a self contained classroom into an inclusion setting, he has gym during the extra math period at the end of the day. On Fridays, we meet one-on-one to talk about math. These are not insignificant successes, to me. Students are learning something more than mathematics. I believe they are learning those habits that will help them learn.
For their mathematics learning, it means that we do not follow a standardized pacing guide where students are expected to learn and retain a topic a day. In this small school setting, with 20 students in my class, I am afforded the freedom to enact the curriculum I believe will help students transition into their setting. Although the content itself is test driven, I am allowed to use a variety of methods, differentiate when necessary, and cover the material I believe is developmentally appropriate based on previous years of teaching. In this setting, I am afforded the rare opportunity to be trusted as a teacher. Yet, there are no guarantees. I know that my students continue to struggle with symbolic manipulation retaining the vocabulary of mathematics. However, I have never met a ninth grade who does not struggle with these things.
Thus, when I am allowed also to engage in my own inquiry and make my teaching and students at the school public, I am trusted. I am trusted, but the process is never talked about again. The days I go home and watch video tape that allows me to see differently the classroom we are creating—to make the familiar strange I see students engaged, but I also see things that we need to be working on as teachers. I see a student who I maybe needed to connect with more on a specific day. The video camera stayed in our classroom for about three weeks. Some days, I chose not to film because we needed to go back to having some normalcy in our classroom. Other days, I carried the camera with me as students worked in groups. On still other days, a student, in an effort to redirect focus, or make work meaningful, carried the camera. This site, reflects the ways I approach teaching mathematics as the means of teaching learning as participatory. As Patrick reminds me, we do not know what students take away until many years later. Perhaps the revised autobiographies they complete at the end of the school year will give some insight, I simply do not know.