Rule breaking!

So, I break rules. To anyone who knows me, that may come as no surprise. I don't do it all the time, only when I believe it to be a rule that inhibits what is in the best interest of others, or when its not officially written down (blue hair story).  Ok, so let me justify it before I tell you the rule I broke, or acutally I didn't break it, the students did at my request. So, I want the kids to take over more of their own learning. I want them to learn how to learn using the content of my class. I explained this to them when I was explaining changes to the way things were working in our school with grading and homework and classwork and all the things we have been dealing with as instructors. Anyway, if students aren't going to be going to me to get information, where should they go? Not a difficult question for any of us who grew in the digital age, we google it, or bing it or whatever. We get the information from the internet. There in lies the problem for me. See, I have what would be considered a lot of technology in my classroom for our school. I have 7 computers. Yep, I'm a computer hog. In fact, we science teachers like to hog the computers in our school. So, not a problem right, at least if you only have 7 students or maybe 14 at the most, but I have anywhere from 25 to 28 so that doesn't work too well for impatient middle school kids. So, I explained to the kids that in order for them to do what we need to do, they were going to have to break the rules. I said, " anyone with unlimited data could get their phones out and use them to began working on learning and exploring the I can statements." In the first couple of classes there were students who had both unlimited data and a wifi hotspot and they set up the hotspot for the students that didn't have unlimited data. OH YEAH, I forgot to mention that students and staff in our district are not allowed on the district wifi with personal devices, hence the need for the work around. The kids pulled out their phones (which of course were not in their pockets because we have a no cell phone policy at our school and they are supposed to be in their lockers and not in class) and got to work. I did inform them that we had to be responsible about the use of the phones and not text and stuff because if we got found out "the man will shut us down" and that we will lose the privilege to use them. Guess what? They actually learned stuff on their own. One student came up to me and said, "Hey Mr. Covey, the protons match the atomic number. Did you know that?" I was like "they do, is it like that for other ones or just the one you are looking at?" and I walked away while he went back to his work. Today, our second day on the job like this, I had a girl say, "come here Mr. Covey. We learned something on our own. The Atomic Mass is the same as the number of protons and neutrons added together." They were actually looking at the relative average mass so I asked them what they meant, and what the protons and neutrons were. So they went back to look that up. I walked by later and they snagged me to explain the structure of the atom and how the atomic mass related to the number of protons, neutrons, and electrons. So I asked them how the atom was related to the elements, and it just kept going.  Now, I could have waited until we had 1-1 technology to have the students learning like this or I could break the rules a little and have them doing it now with the technology sitting in their pockets. I think I'll break the rules thank you.

Grades that say nothing! They made me a better teacher.

So, I jumped into a couple of new things. I developed my I can statements for an introductory mini unit on the periodic table, and decided to punch it up to letting the students work towards the I can statements without me direct teaching it. First, why the changes? They have come to expect the 4, 3, 2, 1 leveled assessments from me but were surprised when it started showing up in other classes. So, I decided that I had the ability to explain the changes. Now, I explained to them that this was not some overnight thing that I had cooked up and that this had been rolling around in my head for the almost decade that I have been teaching. The way my class has been set up from the beginning was an attempt to set up a class where a student like me couldn't do well just by playing the game. I want my kids to really learn. I told them about the AP Calc class in high school that I dropped out of after a semester because it was the first time that I had been challenged to learn and have to get teacher help to be successful at and I didn't know how to do it so I just didn't. In the end, after spending a good chunk of class time plotting coordinate points into my TI-81 graphing calculator to make an animation of  an arrow shooting a target, I had to approach the teacher to tell him that I was switching out. Here's what he said to me, and I still remember it after all these years, "I don't know what grade you actually have but I won't give you any lower than a C." Why did he do that? He gave me a C, when if he had assessed my learning would have found that I probably was more on the low end of a D. He gave me a grade because I had turned in work and had completed everything for the class because I was doing it at home trying to figure it out on my own. That's not the worst part. When I went to college and took the math placement test guess what math they wanted to place me in? ALGEBRA! So, somehow I had gotten all the way to AP Calc in high school and could only test into college Algebra. How did that happen. I had a 3.95 in high school and that one semester of AP Calc was the only non A I got. That would say that I was advanced at the curriculum but yet I couldn't even get placed beyond college algebra. You don't even get credit for that, its a remedial course. To this day, I can't get that out of my mind. So, when I became a teacher I committed to make a class where the students left my class understanding the material or they didn't get a grade. I explained that this is why I don't demand that they complete everything, and that all they have to do is the assessments, and I had been saying this to students over and over again for years, but something in this round finally clicked with students. Maybe it was me relating learning in school to learning outside of school in terms of skateboarding and mountain boarding. Maybe it was because I told them that I didn't like formal education and that I wasn't going to go back to school to get my masters until college became less boring scoring and more about learning for the sake of learning. Maybe it was the I can statements, maybe it was the rule breaking. What??? Rule Breaking? OK maybe that's the next post.

Why can't I always answer the why?

Why is it absolutely important that every student in my class have to know this? This question is always a real struggle for me. I mean, some small percentage of my students will actually work in a field where the content that I teach them will be an actual part of their life. So, why do I teach it. The easy answer is because I have to. It's on the test and it's important for understanding science, but that doesn't suffice to explain to a student why they should care about learning it. I read somewhere the other day, I don't remember where, someone said something to the effect that school should be important because it's where we are presented with problems from all points of life and we learn to solve them through all different means. What do our classes look like when that becomes the focus of every class? What's some topics that you have no clue why your students would really need them to be successful in life? Should we be asking the what do we plan to teach the kids to do through this content? That seems like something more like  I would like to do, but what does that look like?