## Observations: Socratic Dialogue or Socratic Monologue?

(This is from a short series of posts about some of the things I learned from a year of observing and being observed with a colleague)

(hey, I’m a math teacher, not an artist).

Has this situation ever happened to you? One thing that my colleague and I talked about over and over was how we engage in Socratic dialogue portion of our classes. What kind of questions are we asking? What kind of answers are we getting? What do these answers actually tell us? One thing that we both noticed was that occasionally you can get in a flow where you keep a learning conversation going by taking one word student answers and fleshing out their thoughts fully, or just finishing their sandwiches sentences for them. It feels so good because it feels like THE WHOLE CLASS is on this EFFICIENT AND WONDERFUL thought train going at just about the same pace as someone who is basically an expert in the subject. And as “duh” how counterproductive this is to learning, it’s something that I totally didn’t notice until I had someone in my classroom to point it out to me.

What’s the whole point of Socratic dialogue in the first place? Well, for you, it is a way for you to check for understanding. Are students listening and understanding what is going on? And for them, it is a way to get them to think. Are they just taking in what you are saying or are they turning it over in their heads and taking it to new places? If we finish their thoughts for them, we are not only robbing them of the opportunity to think and learn, but we are deceiving ourselves about what they actually know and understand.

### Here are some strategies that we discussed to avoid this:

HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE: Turn that into a full sentence please. Try that again with better mathematical terminology.

FOLLOW UP QUESTIONS: How do you know that? What do you think of _____’s answer? (Crucial to do this for both incorrect AND correct answers).

ASK BETTER QUESTIONS: Explain…. Why… How… If the question can be answered in one word, it’s probably not a great question.

STRUCTURED RESPONSE: Think-Pair-Share. Quick written reflection with cold calling.

I grew more and more aware of this as the year went on and I think I got much better at not only asking better questions but eliciting better responses from my students. I think this heightened the level of mathematical discourse in my classroom, and also gave me a much better idea of where they actually were in the learning process. It didn’t mean that students wouldn’t try the age old SHOUT ANY MATH WORD YOU CAN THINK OF to answer a complicated math question, but at least they understood why I pushed them further.

## Observations from Observing: Methods

This past year, I had the distinct pleasure of serving as a mentor to an excellent new math teacher who was an absolute pleasure to work with (and is definitely going to be a superstar). All of the teaching fellows at my school took a seminar with an administrator, and then each one had a mentor who observed them and generally gave them advice. Though we did some lesson planning together, and we worked a little more closely at the beginning of the year, our main form of interaction was weekly observations.

For the whole year, she came to my class once a week, I went to her class once a week and then we met once a week to debrief. Sure, she tells me she learned a lot, but this was also the best professional development possible for me too. I learned so much over the course of the year and engaged in so many excellent conversations about teaching – I grew so much from a commitment of a little over an hour a week.

It makes me realize that I should have been doing this all along with a colleague, apart from the whole school appraisal process. Though it seems so easy, and I of course exchanged the common “I’d love to come visit your class” with so many colleagues, it never happened before. I think the thing that made it work with us was a structured commitment, and the formation of a habit in our schedules (it didn’t feel like something ON TOP of everything else, it was part of what I did every week). Any observation program, even if an informal agreement between colleagues, needs to be structured and scheduled so that we don’t push it away for the million other things we can do with our time. It can’t be something like “Go and visit someone’s class in the department at least once this term.” In my experience, that just does not work.

As I pore over my notes from the past year, I am going to dedicate the next few blog posts to my major takeaways from a year of observations. But first…

## How We Observed Each Other

There are a million different ways to do observations, but here is how we did it:

• All visits were mutually scheduled beforehand, at the beginning of the week. We got so comfortable with each other that knowing someone was in the room was REALLY not a big deal, and wouldn’t change how we would plan our lesson.
• We did this so we could touch base beforehand to see if there was anything that the observer should look for. This was helpful when we were workshopping a technique, trying out a new type of activity or just wondering about something that is happening in the classroom.
• The observer would always take notes in the following format, which is something we developed based on other formats, and which we found simple and effective:

The time column really helped us pay attention to something that is often the last thing you pay attention to when directing a classroom. The middle column helped us talk about what happened and helped us remember everything that happened in a class. The column on the right was an acknowledgment that we aren’t just robots sitting there, but have helpful opinions and suggestions, but it helped us focus our subjective comments by basing them on what was actually happening in the class.
• Then, we would find a time to exchange notes and just talk about everything that happened in a comfortable and frank manner. We would talk about the objective things that happened in the class and share ideas and observations based on those. It wasn’t hard to talk for 45 minutes about teaching, but we could share notes in 15-20 minutes if pressed for time.

## The “One Cut” Problem

What can you do with this?

Today, we did what I thought was one of the coolest explorations I have seen in a while. It is called the “One Cut” or “Fold and Cut” problem, with inspiration from Patrick Honner (@MrHonner, this part of his website). The premise is simple: you have a shape drawn on a piece of paper. How can you fold the paper so that you can make one straight snip with the scissors and cut the shape out?

Weirdly enough, there is a theorem that says that no matter what shape, this is possible (concave, convex, numerous closed figures, as long as the sides are all straight) . Which totally blows my mind. Because it’s really friggin’ hard in practice (though, the star above is pretty easy). Check out some patterns for some other shapes here.

With one group today, we started doing this problem as a way to see what vocabulary they knew with polygons and to talk a bit about symmetry. I printed out little shapes on 1/4 sheets of paper and the levels went as follows, getting a bit harder as the levels go up:

Equilateral Triangle –> Square –> Isosceles Triangle –> Rectangle –> Regular Pentagon –> Regular 5 pointed Star –> Scalene Triangle –> Arbitrary Quadrilateral

They were TOTALLY hooked. Every single kid was working on their own and kept either having the “YAYY, TEACHER LOOK!” reaction or laughing hilariously at the silly shapes that they made by accident. The kid in the picture with his hand over his face kept yelling out “AGHHH, TRICKY TRIANGLE, TRICKY TRIANGLE” because he couldn’t do the scalene triangle. But he wouldn’t accept a hint from me because he wanted to find out on his own!

45 minutes later, the classroom was a total mess, and I was wondering where all the time had gone…

Now, working with the regular polygons you might get duped into thinking it’s pretty easy. But try a scalene triangle. Or a non-special quadrilateral (i.e. most quadrilaterals). It’s actually VERY difficult. And I think the solution is pretty fascinating, because my solution to it (which I got after about 10 triangles and an hour) heavily involved the triangle’s incenter (the intersection of the three angle bisectors). Which made me think that this would be a super cool thing to do in a geometry class when talking about angle bisectors. Are there multiple “incenters” on shapes with more sides, even if you have to define the idea in a different way?

I won’t share the solution but just post a picture to show you that YEAHHH it’s possible.

### Geometry or other math teachers… where else could this go in the classroom?

(If you haven’t heard me bemoaning how much energy it takes to do math for 2.5 hours with 11 and 12 year olds at a summer camp, well then FYI: I am currently teaching at a summer camp for 6th and 7th graders from China who are here doing an academic program that is half ESL, half math. It’s getting more and more fun, but certainly has been an adjustment from teaching seniors in high school for only 45 minutes at a time).

## Building a Better Review for the AP Calc Exam

Both years I have taught AP Calculus AB, I have kind of dreaded the couple weeks of review. They are hard to plan for and probably really boring for students. On top of that, last year, I felt like I squandered the review time. I mostly gave them free time in class to do whatever they needed to do, and I am not sure how effective this was. 45 minutes straight of studying really dragged and I felt like students didn’t really even know what they needed to work on. In addition, the lack of structure I think prompted some students just to look at answer keys instead of struggling through problems themselves.

This year, I was dreading review again, but it really went much better and I think was much more engaging and effective. A few things I changed this year:

1. We started reviewing in class earlier, even before we finished all the material.
2. Review was more structured by me at first and slowly led to more independence, with opportunities for students to see which topics they needed most work on.
3. I spent literally 1% of the time explaining at the front of the classroom and 99% of the time having them to do the work.

The learning structures I used for review:

• 5 MINUTE SKILL DRILL
• TIMED FREE RESPONSE QUESTION
• MULTIPLE CHOICE JIGSAW
• MOODLE MULTIPLE CHOICE
• MOCK EXAM
• and then…. FREE TIME WITH PAST QUESTIONS

#### 5 MINUTE SKILL DRILL

For about 3 weeks before we started review (i.e. while we were still doing DiffEQs, volume etc), we started class with 5 to 6 quick skill based questions. I tried to put a range of topics, from evaluating limits to writing a tangent line to finding the average value of a function. Students pulled out their notebooks and worked on the questions silently (or as silently as I could get my 85%-chatty-bro class to work). They did the ones they could do and tried the rest. After the timer ran out, I would scroll down and show the answers and show what Standard that the question corresponded with. Then, after explaining anything that needed explaining, we would vote as a class on whether to retire a topic if they felt confident or keep it on for the next day. This took about 10 minutes at the beginning of class.
I loved
this because even though it ate up class time during the end of the year and forced the actual material to take longer, by the time we were ready to review, students had already brushed up on the skills and could focus on big ideas.
Next time, I will try to be more organized about it and have a booklet printed, or sheets for them to glue – I was improvising with this and I felt like it took students too much time to copy things down from the projector.

(this is sort of what it looked like below, but this is for integrals earlier in the year – I’m between computers right now and don’t have all my old files!)

#### TIMED FREE RESPONSE QUESTION

At the end of  many units towards the end of the year, we would do a 12 minute timed Free Response Question, and this is something that we did almost daily during our review time. I would hand out a free response question on a little slip of paper, they would glue it into their notebooks and work on it for 12 minutes silently. If they didn’t know how to do it, they would just try as hard as they could, struggle through it and write down what they know. Then, after 12 minutes, I would hand out the answer key and they would grade themselves, AP style.
I loved that this forced them to struggle through a question and see what they actually know, and I loved that this got them used to AP grading (I had a much lower incidence of unit-forgetting and less-than-3-decimal precision). The trick for both of these benefits is in really holding out on the answer keys until the end of the time!
Next time, I will try to coordinate the 5 minute skill drill with this so that students can recall the topic before a tricky free response question, as I had some students who were so stuck that they didn’t really write anything down and got nothing out of the exercise.

#### MULTIPLE CHOICE JIGSAW

I find multiple choice harder to integrate into class than free response, but one learning structure I liked for multiple choice was Jigsaw. For those that don’t know this (I assume it is fairly common), there would be a set at 12 questions and groups of 3-4 would all work on a third of the questions together (1-4, 5-8, 9-12). Once every group got through theirs, I would rearrange the classroom so that each new group had one person who had worked on each of the sections. Then, they would either work on the rest of the questions individually and then check with each other when they got stuck, or they would just take turns and teach the other members of the group their questions. Some students reported to me that the process of explaining a question out loud really helped them understand what was going on.
I loved the interactions that this activity prompted and I loved how efficient it was for getting through many multiple choice questions (students could do this much faster than working on them on their own).
Next time, I will try to deal with the awkwardness of groups finishing at separate times and weak students incapable of explaining questions to their classmates, though I am not sure how.

#### MOODLE MULTIPLE CHOICE

I didn’t trust my students to do free response questions at home. They would just look up the answers and get NOTHING out of the process! But we did do a lot of multiple choice questions at home, through Moodle. It is super easy to set up quizzes, so I would just upload images of the questions from a multiple choice collection I had and set the correct answer. I would do 15 questions in a quiz, and it would take my students about 40 minutes to do. We started this about a month and a half before the exam, and then all the homework during the review time become these online multiple choice questions. Before the test, every single student did about 130 multiple choice questions, which amounts to about 3 full tests, and then many did more questions on their own outside of that.
I loved that the work was immediately self checked and automatically graded, as I think this did a lot for their learning from these questions.
Next time, I don’t think I would do so many of these as I think they got a bored with them. Also, I felt like some students were just clicking through the questions, so I would try to think of ways to get them to take these learning opportunities a bit more seriously.

#### MOCK EXAM

This is, of course, nothing original, but if you have the luxury of stealing a few hours from your students on a weekend for a Mock Exam, do it! Correct it for them, but don’t put a grade on it so that it can be a truly diagnostic tool. This was the most helpful thing for my students in prepping for the exam, because, on top of everything else, the Mock really helped them figure out their weaknesses so that they could really be productive when finally I gave them…

#### FREE TIME WITH PAST QUESTIONS

By the time I was giving them large chunks of time to work in class on their own, most students knew what their weaknesses were (from the Mock, timed Free Response, Moodle Multiple Choice etc). Whether they needed to improve their multiple choice or their free response, or they needed to work on specific topics (and could with a packet I gave them with AP Free Response questions split up by type), I felt like most students REALLY used the time well, to the point where a lot of students didn’t even bother studying the night before the exam. All the structure and diagnosing we did at the beginning, and all the work that THEY were doing instead of me talking helped them become far more independent and effective in the review process. I hope it worked – I will find out in a few weeks!

## Volume in Calculus: Conceptualizing before Formalizing

One of our PD sessions in the past was about how to support students with learning differences. One of the points that the presenter made was that most pedagogical tools that you would use the better serve these students are great tools to reach all learners. This struck me especially because I teach almost entirely students for whom English is their second language, and sometimes when I do something specifically to help students with the language of mathematics I come to larger and more general pedagogical understandings.

For example, this past week, I introduced solids of known cross-section in AP Calculus in a way that I thought would ease my students understanding of the tricky language involved in the problems, but what I ended up doing was really effectively let them develop their own conception of how these solids are formed and THEN interpret the AP problem language and integral notation in those terms. Conceptualize and then add mathematical formality to their own conceptual framework.

Here’s how it worked. I put 4 of these solids out around the room:

1. First, I gave them 1-2 minutes to SILENTLY write down in bullet points how they would describe to someone else how the solid was formed.
2. Then I gave them 2 minutes to share ideas in groups.
3. Then I cold called on 7 or 8 students via a deck small cards with their names on them (which is by far my new favorite teaching tool). After I called on some students, I called for volunteers with any other ideas.
4. LAST, I asked them to flip to the back of the paper and read the actual description.

During the “share” part, students said some of the craziest, random stuff, but most of the important parts of the description were said by various students. When it came time for them to read the description, at first they were like “whoa” because the language is still a bit daunting. But after a minute or so of close reading, they connected everything in that description with things that they themselves had said. So when it was time to do the actual integral, the intermediate notation I use made 100% sense:

So general pedagogical moral of the story? Letting students conceptualize something on their own before bringing in mathematical language and notation makes it more likely that the notation will aid in their understanding rather than provide another hurdle in learning.

A teaching fellow (a first year teacher) was observing my class (and has been observing periodically throughout the year). Afterwards, she remarked that she felt this was one of the most effective 10 minutes of the year, and I agree! And I think 10 minutes on this (instead of just 1 minute reading the question) will save lots of time in the future. Next week, I hope to try the same strategy with solids of revolution!!

## Whiteboard Experiments: Modified Mistake Game

I have used Mistake Game a lot in class. Students write up the solution to problems on whiteboards and purposely make a mistake in the solution. Then they present their solutions to each other, presenting their mistake like they meant to do it. Then, students ask thoughtful questions to try to find the mistake.

This works great with topics that are conceptually rich, but less so in topics that are more mechanical, where mistakes tend to be a bit harder to see and are less rich to talk about, like implicit differentiation for example. I did a modification of the Mistake Game that worked really well for this:

1. In groups of 2-3, students write solutions to a problem on a large whiteboard. After checking their correct answer with me, they go back through and make a mistake in their solution.
2. Students then flip over the sheet I gave them that had their answer and write what there mistake is, kind of like a mini answer key.
3. Groups then rotate around the room and try to find the mistake in the solutions in front of them. Once they find the mistake and check their answer with what the group wrote, they move on to the next board.

I wanted to train them in the art of looking over a solution and checking its correctness, and I think that this did that well. Compared to the mistake game, I felt like more students were active at any moment, more students could carefully follow complicated work, and it took much less time (20 minutes as opposed to 40)… but we also didn’t have the great mathematical discussions that we normally have during mistake game. I guess it really depends on the topic at hand which version is more appropriate, so I’m definitely going to keep this one in my teaching toolbox.

## Whiteboard Experiments: Practice & Reflect

I tried something new in class this week that I think solves a few random problems:

1. Sometimes, when working on whiteboards, one student hogs the marker and does a lot of the work (and thus the learning)
2. With whiteboard work, students don’t have anything in their notebooks to study later
3. When we practice things like derivatives in our notebooks, I feel like their notes become almost useless because it is a mess of 15-20 examples.

________________________________________________

## Practice and Reflect

I put the whiteboards out on the desk and left them there the whole period. We were learning the derivatives of exponential and logarithmic functions of bases other than e so I wanted to go back and forth between the whiteboards and their notebooks a few times.

After teaching them a derivative rule as a whole class, I gave them a sheet of 15-20 problems that definitely got more difficult as they went along. I gave them 12 minutes to practice (I put a timer on), and they worked on the problems with partners on the whiteboards, which gave them a chance to discuss, erase mistakes and see problems in large format with different colors.

Then, I asked them to put the markers away and open up their notebooks and gave them 3 minutes to reflect. I told them they could do whatever they want with this – copy down a few problems that were tricky, write down some things that they want to remember, write down steps for the problem. With this, I feel like their notes were a bit more focused and useful. I also felt like the whole routine was efficient, in that it kept a vast, vast majority of the students moving and engaged. I’ll definitely try this again.

## An Anchor Problem for Riemann Sums

I like to start most new units in Calculus with an “anchor problem,” a common sense, every day problem that motivates new techniques and serves as a base that you can constantly refer back to. Some that I have used in the past, to varying degrees of success, are Infection for Inflection, Your Speedometer and the Intermediate Value Theorem, and Predicting Stock Prices with Differentials.

For Riemann Sums, and integration in general, I use the question that really inspired integration in the first place: how do you find the area of an irregular shape? I tell my students:

You work at the glass company. You are given the task of replacing all the glass on the front of this beautiful building, the Duxford Aviation Museum. How much glass do you need? All we know is that the building is 90 m long and 18.5 m tall in the very center.

(This task was partly inspired by this post from Shawn at ThinkThankThunk).

(isn’t this building beautiful??)

I have it printed on two sheets of printer paper for every group (so big enough to draw on and mark), and I give them 10 minutes to come up with an estimate. Every group writes it on a piece of paper, and then I put it in an envelope. About a week and a half later when we learn the definite integral, we calculate the actual area (using a parabola fitted to the top of the building) and the winner gets…. well nothing. But I announce it at least?

Most students struggle a bit at first and then eventually just start to try something. Some students try some sort of bizarre modified equation for the area of a circle (which I always find really interesting), some turn it into triangles, but most use the maybe-not-that-subtle hint that the window is broken up into square panes.

Right after they are finished making their predictions, we discuss. I ask them what their strategies were and how they could have made their predictions more accurate. I try to get them to come up a couple of points (that sounds manipulative):

• ### The smaller our shapes are and the more of them there are, the more accurate our estimate would be. In fact, if we could use infinitesimally small shapes, we could be perfectly accurate.

I think that this activity really shows them how difficult the problem that we are trying to solve is, and primes them to know why we set up Riemann Sums the way that we do, but to be unsatisfied with this solution to the grand area problem. Prepped and primed for Riemann Sums, but with some foresight to know where we are going.

## Whiteboarding Mode: Simultaneous Show and Tell

Side note: Simultaneous Show and Tell is a terrible name for this whiteboarding mode (because it kind of sounds like a lot of whiteboarding). Forgive me, I cannot think of anything better. So… propose a better name?

[update 11/25: Andrew in the comments suggested "Function Iron Chef" which is definitely the winner. That's what this whiteboarding mode is called now]

Students are in groups of two at a whiteboard with a VERY LARGE set of 3 X 3 axes drawn up on the board. They are sitting in a U shape so that if everyone put up their boards, every student could theoretically see everyone else’s. I put up a prompt like this:

Draw a function such that…

• $\lim_{x \to -2}=3$
• $f(-2)$ does not exist
• $\lim_{x \to 1}$ does not exist
• and $f(1)=-3$.

I put the timer on. Students are given a few minutes to draw a function (any function, lots of correct answers!) that fit the prompts. Then, at the end of the time, everyone puts their markers down and puts their board up. We spend a minute silently looking around the boards to look at everyone else’s work. Then, after a minute is up I allow the students to ask questions of each other (i.e. not just say “THAT ONE IS WRONG”). If they don’t ask questions about some that are suspect (or some that are totally correct), I will ask questions at the end to talk about specific boards. We then do 5 or 6 other rounds like this.

POSITIVES: We have done this so far with limits, continuity vs. differentiability and will do it in a few weeks with graph sketching – I think that making them do things the other way around, making them create (instead of just identifying limits or whether a function is continuous) really forces them to think harder. I also like this because when students have to show their work to their classmates, they often put a little bit more focus into making sure they are proud of what they have (and just about every student is engaged in the process, especially if you make them switch markers). I also love times to showcase mistakes as part of the learning process - we try to be as open and supportive as possible in correcting the boards. Lastly, having a discussion in a math class is always a really nice change of pace.

ISSUES: Students can get a little crazy during the discussion process and some can phrase things negatively. Not all students are good at following along verbally when discussing, and will wait for others to point out mistakes in the board. A few times the whole thing has taken a long time with all the transitions, but it has gotten better every time. I’m not sure how the weak students feel about this activity (having their work showcased and critiqued). Also, I’m not sure that this type of activity would be great for anything but a topic where the students already have some fluency and mastery.

## Tuesday, November 13, 2012

I am a math teacher at a boarding high school right outside of Amman Jordan. This is a day in my life.

## Tuesday, November 13, 2012

7:00 – Wakeup. The nice thing about living literally 2 minutes (walking) away from classes is that my wake up time is a little later than everyone else’s. But as I walk out of my apartment, a student grabs me to unlock the storage room – the downside of living in such close proximity?

7:30 – Breakfast. Sometimes, I eat 19 meals a week in our dining hall, which saves a ton of time and money (Why only 19 you ask?  Well, when you wake up at noon on the weekend, there’s really only time for 2 meals). Tuesday is bagel day which is my absolute favorite (ah the small pleasures in life)! This morning, a student asks me to tie their bow tie for them, which is actually a fairly common occurrence. I have to say, bringing the bow tie to our school has been one of my proudest accomplishments.

8:05 – Class starts. Except that I have two prep periods in the morning on Tuesdays, which makes life kind of nice. This year, because I am head of one of the dormitories, I only teach 3 classes, which makes for tons of prep time during the day (but lots of stuff to do in the evening). This morning, I made tests for my non-AP Calculus class and began to cobble together review materials for my AP class for our upcoming final.

10:45 – 12:20 – Back to back to back classes. I have three 45-minute classes in row, switching between non-AP Calculus and AP Calculus. Normally I find only having 5 minutes between classes stressful and exhausting, but today was pretty relaxing as my AP class was working hard on a packet of Related Rates problems, and my non-AP class was reviewing for a test the next day.

12:25 – Advisee Lunch. Two days a week, we eat lunch with our advisees (and every other day is formal, rotating assigned seating lunch – I have duty for one of those days). My advisees are four freshman and two sophomores from the US, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Nigeria. They are an awesome group of kids, and a real breath of fresh air from the jaded older students (who are the only ones I normally interact with). I really love spending time with them, mostly because I feel like some of the things they say should be published in a book.

1:05– Class meeting. I’m associated with the twelfth graders so I trudge into the Lecture Hall with the senior class. I feel like my week is really filled with meetings. We have school meeting 3 times a week for 5 minutes and once a week for 45 minutes, class meeting once a week for 45 minutes and advisor meeting once a week for 45 minutes. Today, the class gave announcements and then watched a TED talk.

1:55 – One more prep period. That’s right, 3 prep periods in one day… I used this one to make reassessments for my Standards Based Grading system. Right now, I’m averaging almost exactly half of my students reassessing every day (I only teach 45 total, but still… making 2 standard checks each for 22 kids every day is ridiculous and takes forever).  Luckily this is an end-of-the-term-my-parents-will-see-my-grade-soon phenomenon.

2:45– Arabic Class. Three times a week I take Arabic class, which they offer to the ex-pat faculty (a little less than half of our faculty is ex-pat, and about 15% of our student body is non-Arab). I love these classes. It is fun to be a student again, and we learn a lot. I’m in the most advanced level, so we usually just sit around and talk in Arabic for 45 minutes about really random things. Last year, I took class with the students too – I took 9th grade Arabic – which was quite a trip. It’s funny to me that teachers are really the worst students. We don’t do homework, we’re always late for class, we forget about tests etc etc. Bust at least we’re enthusiastic?

3:35 – Reassessments. 23 students reassessed today, crammed into our math classroom, which fits about 18 comfortably. I find these times so stressful – I sit up front and correct their reassessments when they are done, but a line starts to build up and then I feel like students who are still taking reassessments take advantage of my attention being diverted to cheat. It’s frustrating and stressful, but I’m not really willing to give up the learning opportunities for many just because some people are complete jerks.

4:45 – Faculty vs. Student Swim Meet. Normally we have co-curriculars in the afternoon from 4:45-6. I advise the newspaper, and we meet once a week (which is an incredibly light load for co-curriculars at my school). But the co-curricular season ended last week, so this week we had a faculty vs. student swim meet! One of the boys in my dorm talked so much smack to me the night before, it was unbelievable… and then I completely crushed him in the water, muhahaha. Overall, it was very fun event, and one that must be repeated because we ended up losing to the students 75-72.

6:30 – Dinner. Again, my meal occurred at the dining hall. The food wasn’t very good, but I put up with it to avoid shopping, cooking and cleaning. Sometimes, I just don’t want to see students at night and get frustrated being there in the thick of it, but other times it’s kind of fun to be eating dinner at the table next door to some of your Calculus buds (I’m sure that’s how they think of me). This is when my day usually ends unless I have duty…

8:00 – Meeting with a student. One day a week and one weekend a month, I do evening duty in the dorm from 7:45 pm until 11:15 pm. Those days are long, and not much gets done during the duty time so you have to really plan well to get your work done. But even though tonight is not my duty, two students needed to schedule a makeup quiz so we did it at night. I was feeling sick because I have a sinus infection, so while the student sat at my kitchen table doing the quiz, I was lying on my couch with my hood over my head listening to RadioLab. My student must have thought I was nuts, but I guess that’s what they get for invading my house during chill time. Another student came at 9:00, so I didn’t really get time to myself until around 9:30.

9:30 – Colbert. Daily Show and Colbert come on at 9 and 9:30, which is awesome. I try to watch one every night. It’s sad, but it’s one of the best ways of keeping up with American pop culture.

10:00 – Finish prepping. I didn’t finish my test earlier, so I spent about 45 minutes putting the finishing touches and sending it off to our copy dude who prints our copies for us (amazing luxury).

11:00 – Read. I always read before I go to bed, every night, no matter how late. Right now I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I’m liking enough, but is going really slow.

11:30 – G’night. I’m pumped because this is on the slightly early side for me.

One of the best things about being a teacher is that whenever you had a bad day you get a chance to do it all again better, but one of the frustrating things is that whenever you have a good day, it’s almost like there’s no time to stop and celebrate your victory. Moving forward, onward and upward… a new day begins.