Hug Your Children

I was mentally referring to myself as childless the other day and then I realized that is wrong.  I have hundreds of children.

Today twenty children who were very precious to their mothers, fathers, grandmothers,
teachers. . . were shot and killed in a school shooting along with seven of their teachers.

When something terribly tragic like this happens (and it happens so often now) the instinct of any parent is to want to hug their children.

I found out about this tragedy today while I was at school, via whispers from another teacher.  I had no intention of telling the kids - better they hear about it from their own parents if they are old enough for it to be appropriate.  Not a minute later I had two happy four-year-olds on my lap, so it was a cinch to give hugs all around. I am not childless - my life is overflowing with children.

The four-year-olds and I were spectators at a glow-in-the-dark fashion show, wearing highlighter bracelets that shone under the black light and cheering as twenty girls pranced down the "runway" made of tables in their hand-sewn outfits. And everyone was so very vibrantly alive.

Earlier today I accompanied a group of students to visit an archeological dig at an Underground Railroad site, an old Albany house that is being restored into a museum.  We pawed through mud and looked at old pottery shards, a tobacco pipe, and a gunflint.  The kids climbed piled of dirt and peered down into holes.  And everyone was so vibrantly alive.

That house hosted formerly enslaved fugitives who were on their way to Canada in the 1840's and 1850's.  Corey, the head archeologist, who is also the husband of a teacher at my school, told us about the African-American people who owned and lived in that house, and their neighbors.  He told us about all the work they did providing food, shelter, and clothing.  We saw a bulletin from the meetings of their Fugitive Aid Society.  Corey encouraged us to think of them not as stiff formal people from a stuffy era, but as social activists.  He encouraged us to think of the enslaved people escaping as activists, too - people who worked to author their own destiny.

Gun violence kills children every day in this country.  In Chicago alone 24 children were fatally shot during the 2011-2012 school year, 28 in 2010-2011.  319 children were wounded by gunfire in Chicago last year.

As a teacher who has worked in neighborhoods plagued by gun violence, I want people to acknowledge that gun violence does not only happen to children during high-profile mass shootings.  In some communities it happens every day, although a lot less attention is paid. And every single child who is a victim of gun violence was precious to their mother, father, grandmother, teacher. . .

When I worked in Woodlawn, in Chicago, I arrived at school one day during my first year of teaching to find the window broken.  A shoot-out between rival gang factions had taken place in front of the school the night before - thankfully no one was at school.  Police found over a hundred shell casings on the ground.  My students found the bullet later that day, where it had ricocheted off the ceiling and landed in the corner.  I kept it for a long time as a reminder that things can always get worse, and that no matter how rough the day was, at least we were all still alive to try again tomorrow.

A few years later when I worked at Amandla, we had to keep the kids inside at the end of the day because of a shooting reported down the block.  One boy complained about having to stay in, and our vice principal told him, "I am trying to protect you from bullets.  I am not about to let you go out there and get shot."  And the boy replied, "this is Englewood.  This shit happens every day." I still think about him a lot, about where that resignation came from and whether it could ever be undone.

When a gun goes off no one in its vicinity is the author of their own destiny any more.  But in the wake of such events, and among them, we must still try to build the communities that will heal us, and the citizens - adults and children - that can heal our communities. 

A Day in the Life - Teacher

Cutting a sewing pattern for glow in the dark fashion show.

I arrive at school at 8:20, running a bit late even though my commute is only ten feet - my back yard adjoins the playground.  I have a cup of coffee in hand and I load up on breakfast - mini bagels, fried eggs, apples, and leftover bread pudding from yesterday's lunch.

All around me kids are eating breakfast in the upstairs big room and when the are done, the littler ones climb on the indoor jungle gym.  The bigger kids go downstairs and play magic cards, finish homework, or just talk.

At 8:45 I begin breakfast cleanup, which is my job today.  I clear abandoned dishes and wash the tables before folding them up and stacking them on the side of the room.  The room will become a cafeteria again at lunch.  I sweep the floor and am greeted excitedly by an arriving three year old who shouts, "Lauren!" whenever he sees me.

At 8:55 I duck into the office to photocopy a set of problems for junor high class, then I head up to their loft room for class.  Six of nine kids are present - one is sick and two are late, which is an unfortunately common problem with students this age.

We are solving problems related to extending patterns and writing algebraic rules for the nth term.  Here is one: a series of pictures of L-shaped arrangements of squares.  The first pattern uses 1 square, the second figure 3 squares, then 5 and so on.  What is the rule for the nth term?  Everyone sees that it goes up by 2 each time.  Putting it in terms of a variable is tougher.  Do we multiply by 2? That gives even numbers, we want odd numbers.  We don't finish all the problems- we will pick them up again tomorrow.  Some students entrust their paper to me for safe keeping.

On my way downstairs to prepare for my fourth grade class, I pass a crying four-year-old.  He is lying on the floor under a table.  He weeps for the spider man costume he wants to wear, which today is being worn by another boy.  I pull him into my lap.  Kids that age are grappling with the reality that they don't always get what they want.  Nothing upsets them more than scarcity.  I try to encourage him to empathize - won't the other boy be so happy to have a chance to wear the costume? He grudgingly admits this but is still sad.  All I can do is repeat, I know you are sad over and over until he calms down.  Some adults have a saying, "you get what you get and you don't get upset," but here it is more like "you get what you get and it's okay to be upset." I remind him that he will get the costume again on other days, but the concept of other days is hard when you are four.

Fourth grade class begins with multiplication tables, and then we work on extending patterns.  These are much simpler than the ones the junior high students are working with.  The students write the next few terms of a pattern on a whiteboard slate.  Then I let them take turns inventing patterns for other students to extend, which is more mathematically provocative than I had imagined it would be.  Some of their patterns are not fully determined - if they only give the first few terms it is impossible to differentiate between a repeating pattern and one that keeps increasing.  I don't force this vocabulary on them, it emerges naturally in the conversation. Math with groups of students so small tends to be more conversational. There are only five kids in class today out of seven - the other two have gone to the school's land in rural Grafton to have a day in the woods.

I end class by showing them the Fibonacci sequence, which stumps them good. I tell them they can keep pondering it until tomorrow. At the end of class they decide to research it, rushing to the computers to google it. They come to the Wikipedia article and try to make sense of its adult notation. One student finally makes sense of the recursive connection between the terms. They are excited by their discovery and try to stump another teacher.

Ordinarily after fourth grade class on Thursdays I would have a brief class with the kindergarten and first graders, but most of them are at Grafton. I hunt for the two girls who stayed at school and find one of them in the art room.

The room is all a-bustle because students are preparing for the project runway fashion show tomorrow. The theme is "glow in the dark," no I am not kidding. Students pin, hot glue, and sew skirts and wrap-type-things with varying levels of skill and glitter. Glow-in-the-dark paint is being liberally applied. The kindergartner I want to do math with is working with modeling clay.

I ask if she wants to practice counting and she enthusiastically agrees. We are joined a few minutes later by her first grade sister who is already an adept counter. I have noticed that teaching kids to count is surprisingly difficult. There are all kinds of unforeseen difficulties. This particular girl tends to count in the correct order, adhering rigidly to a rhythm with her voice while her finger jumps all over the page so that she arrives at an incorrect number.

Yesterday we practiced by having me dole out marbles while she counted them. I doled them out at a maddeningly irregular pace and reminded her again and again not to count the marble until I put it on the cloth. She seemed to make the connection after a little while but today we are back to square one. Sometimes she counts a single dot twice. Sometimes she skips dots. We are still practicing.

At 12:10, after about twenty minutes of counting, we hear the lunch bell sound. Everyone rushes to put away what they are doing and runs up the stairs to lunch. We eat curry potatoes and chickpeas, corn bread, carrots, apples, and cabbage salad. Plus leftover enchiladas from yesterday. An eclectic, satisfying lunch.

I eat at a table with whatever adults aren't busy helping kids with their food. Today the conversation centers on some junior high students who didn't seem to be taking much ownership for their learning or their behavior toward others. Bhawain, their teacher, is frustrated and despite many talks with these students and in some cases their parents, things don't seem to be changing. Junior high years are challenging everywhere.

 As I finish my lunch a four year old comes over to me as he does every day and asks if we can go on the computer when I am done eating. The kids love to play games with letters and numbers on the Starfall website. The hard part of using the computer is taking turns and the same boy who was crying earlier over the Spiderman costume cries again because he doesn't get to go first. I hold him in my lap again and we play with miniature animals while he waits for his turn on the computer. We make a herd of nine zebras and he acts out battles between a dolphin and a bear.

I often stay with the preschool kids for the whole afternoon but today I go back up to the junior high loft to have some students complete a make-up quiz.  The quiz is about solving equations.  The girls alternate between working earnestly and mock-whispering in a joking attempt to distract each other.  We round out the last few minutes of the day with parodic dancing to melodramatic music - they dance, I am a spectator.  Hair is flinging everywhere and by the end everyone is laughing hard.  Another girl comes up to get her things from her locker and the dancing girls bump and jostle her playfully.  I have a feeling that reminds me a lot of how I felt in school growing up, that the purpose of all of us coming together in the school building was partly to learn but also partly to keep each other company.

After school I have a few minutes of relaxation before we began our staff meeting, late as always.  Our meetings are always very long, this one especially so.  There is a lot to talk about because the school does not have any administrators - all administrative tasks are done by teachers, although everyone does not necessarily do the same amount of work.

We talk about snacks and finding a Santa for the holiday party. We talk about Deirdre's kitchen project to make gingerbread houses next week and whether it would be possible to make egg-free icing for a student with an allergy.  We talk about the ongoing struggle to get parents to pay tuition on time.  We talk about how to best communicate with a three-year-old boy who is deaf in one ear, and what to do about an incident of racist teasing that targeted an Asian-American student.  All of these conversations are long and detailed - since many staff members have after-school jobs this is the one time each week when we are all available to talk to each other.

Then we do our weekly check-ins about how the kids are doing.  Each teacher shares about their homeroom students and there are usually several issues to discuss.  This week we spend a long time revisiting the junior high kids we had talked about during lunch.  Bhawain, their teacher, still feels frustrated but is ready to move from the venting phase of the conversation into problem-solving.  We talk about Monday's council meeting.  Many staff members were unhappy with the motion students passed and feel that the issue was symptomatic of a larger problem with a lack of respect and caring from certain students.  This problematic group of junior high students has been involved in lying, unsafe roughhousing, ignoring younger kids who ask them to quiet down, disturbing classes, having inappropriate conversation with younger kids around, etc.  It is suggested to have another council meeting about these issues, where we would also invite students to speak up about the things these older students are doing that are bothering them.  Many teachers feel this might need to a long meeting because the students in question are not eager to talk or to acknowledge the ways their behavior is harming others. We talk about what we as adults might want to say in the meeting but also about how it is detrimental to have adults control too much in council meetings.

And then it is 7:00 pm and the staff meeting still isn't over.  While I certainly feel that our meetings could probably be more efficient, I am glad that everyone is willing to take the time to have the conversations about the emotional well-being of individuals and our school community.  It is difficult to know how to reach young adolescents sometimes but no one is giving up.

I finally get home at 7:45.  Thursdays are the longest days by far, on other days I come home at 3:45.  I eat crackers and salami for dinner and drink bourbon out of a coffee mug since I don't own a proper whiskey glass. I am tired and a little bit wired from the long meeting.  I do not dread tomorrow.  I remember to put my glow-in-the-dark nail polish in my bag.  I have promised it to some fashion designers.

Conflict and Council Meetings

This morning I sat on the floor for twenty minutes while a six-year-old chairwoman led some fifty of us, teachers and students alike, in an important meeting.  We were assembled to figure out what to do about graffiti etched in a bathroom window saying that a fourth-grade student "sucks."  And we were going to stay in the meeting until the insulted student felt satisfied that the problem was resolved.

In other schools, adults might badger those suspected of writing the insulting words, or compare the handwriting.  Or, unable to establish a culprit, teachers might lecture the class or just throw up their hands and do nothing.  Or permission to use the bathroom might be regulated more tightly to give troublemakers fewer opportunities.

None of those things happened in this meeting.  The adults spoke very little.  A culprit was not established, nor did anyone confess.  And at the Free School, the only time anyone ever needs permission to go to the bathroom is during one of these meetings, and they have to ask the chairperson, another student.

The motion that was made and voted into policy by the students was that everyone will have to take a turn cleaning the bathroom until whoever did this fesses up.  The schedule will be created by the student who was insulted by the graffiti.  This motion was made by an eighth grade student and there was little dissent, only some healthy debate about the specifics.

Welcome to a council meeting.

I mentioned briefly in an earlier post that when students have a conflict, one mechanism that the Free School uses to solve it is an all-school council meeting.  Now that I have had a chance to see a few of these in action, I want to tell you more about them.

Students have a lot of freedom and are often relatively unsupervised at the Free School.  Teachers are always nearby but with the exception of pre-schoolers, kids can be in classrooms by themselves, can play on the playground without an adult, and if they are fourth grader or older, can go in a group to nearby parks without a teacher.

Conflicts are inevitable in any school setting but in the Free School there often aren't adults immediately present to squelch them.  And even if adults are in the room, their first course of action is to stand back, watch, and see how the kids do.  Students are empowered and expected to solve conflicts on their own.

If students are unable to work it out themselves, they can approach a teacher, who coaches a student on how to handle it themself.  I might say, "tell him how you feel about that," or "talk to him about what you want in this situation." Often after a little coaching students can then work it out, no further adult intervention necessary.

If they still haven't solved it, students can ask for a mediation.  The students and a teacher get together privately and the teacher helps to mediate the situation.  Sometimes older students do mediations with younger students too.  Mediations aren't about adults telling kids how to work things out or assigning blame.  My role in a mediation is just to help the kids talk to each other more productively.

If a mediation doesn't work or a student doesn't want a mediation, another possible step is a council meeting.  Students will sometimes skip mediation if they have repeated conflicts on the same issue or with the same person, or if the problem is a whole-school issue.  It is always the student's decision whether they want a mediation or prefer a council meeting.  Teachers can also call council meetings.

Council meetings are a big deal because the whole school has to drop everything they are doing and get together right then and there, so they are called infrequently - about once or twice a week.  Unlike most activities at the Free School, they are mandatory - if you skip one, you are sent home for the day.  The kids enforce attendance upon one another. 

Here are some examples of reasons we have had council meetings this year:

*Some fifth and sixth grade girls were engaged in cliquish behavior that made another friend uncomfortable.
*Two junior high girls got mad at a classmate for telling on them when they had gum and candy.  They called him names and several adults and students were upset about this.
*A fourth grade girl and a fifth grade boy got into an argument about sharing art supplies.  He called her names and they yelled at each other.
*A teacher was upset because students had not been completing their lunch clean-up jobs in a timely fashion.

A council meeting begins with nominations for a student chair to lead the meeting. The chair then asks who called the council meeting and what the problem is that led them to call for a meeting. If the problem is a conflict between two students, both students tell their side of the story.

In schools where I have worked before, calling students out on misbehavior was always difficult. Kids tend to lie and become defensive to avoid getting in trouble, and as an adult it was my job to try to get kids to own up and take responsibility. I sometimes didn't know whether to trust a kid or whether they were lying. I often didn't have time in a classroom of 25 kids to maintain the conversation long enough to diffuse defensiveness and get to the real heart of the matter - sometimes my conversations were more expedient than productive.

Council meetings establish accountability in a completely different framework. Kids are more likely to be honest because there are not punishments at stake. Students are not only accountable to adults - they hold each other accountable as a community. They push for the truth and question details of a story that don't make sense.  They publicly empathize with one another, affirming that they know how an injured student must feel.  They take each other's problems seriously and they expect everyone else to do the same. When faced with the social pressure of the whole school, most kids who are on the receiving end of council meeting scrutiny drop the defensiveness and try to make the situation better.

Sometimes the exact details of what happened or who did what aren't necessary to know, because the focus of the council meeting is how to solve to problem. Students ask each other, "what will solve this problem?"  and "does this solve your problem?"  The answer to the last question has to be affirmative before the meeting can end.

Voting for a chairperson

Sometimes our butts get really sore from sitting on that floor.  Sometimes there is a long, awkward silence while the six-year-old chairwoman tries to remember an older kid's name to call on them.  Today there were dozens of those silences.  Sometimes a kid talks to much.  Sometimes someone makes a suggestion that seems like a bad idea from my adult perspective.  But this is what democracy looks like and at the end of the meeting, everyone is grateful that their struggles are not only theirs alone.

Ms. Beitler Goes Back to Chicago, Part 2

Students in Ms. Gluckman's class color the layers of the earth.

The emphasis in science is on the dynamic earth.

Students performed an experiment with food coloring to see how heat energy causes motion.

The library in Ms. Gluckman's classroom.

In my previous post I wrote about how I spent my Monday morning, visiting the Ancona School and seeing two Montessori classrooms.  After I left Ancona I got on the 55 bus and rode west for about forty minutes to the Gage Park neighborhood to visit my friend Laura Gluckman's sixth-grade science classroom at Sawyer elementary.  My neighborhood is relatively diverse, primarily white and African-American.  As I rode the bus to the west I passed through neighborhoods that are all African-American and then into Mexican-American neighborhoods even further west.  Chicago's racial segregation is striking - cross Western Avenue and the neighborhood demographics shift suddenly.

The building that houses Sawyer Elementary is one of many in Chicago that were built around the turn of the 20th century.  They tend to be large and echo-y, with high ceilings and wide hallways.  I have taught in two such buildings and the space is more imposing than friendly, although teachers do their best to make a welcoming environment with displays of student work and bulletin boards in the halls.  Sawyer has about 1,900 students.

I climbed many stairs to the third floor and found Ms. Gluckman's room as lunch was ending.  Students eat in classrooms because the cafeteria is not large enough to accommodate all of them together.  Lunch is delivered to each room in large plastic bins.  Students were noisy but it was a cheerful buzz.

Students transitioned to their next class and a group came in for science.  I counted twenty-seven students, far more than the fifteen I had seen in Sylvia's room.  Students collaborated in groups just as they had in Sylvia's classroom, but they needed to stay in their assigned seats.  The classroom was too crowded to allow much moving around.  They started class with a warm-up that asked them to name the layers of the earth in order and tell which was the thickest.  All of Ms. Gluckman's students are english-language-learners, and some of them did not at first understand the directions.  Ms. Gluckman explained to a few students one-on-one, and others solicited help from their classmates.  One boy sat with a blank paper until I sat next to him and helped him.

Most of class time was spent coloring posters showing a scale model of the layers of the earth.  Students used proportions to figure out how thick each layer should be.  I asked students questions about the layers of the earth and found they had a lot to say.  They knew the center of the earth was hot and had high pressure and they knew there would be no air to breath if one tried to journey below the surface.  During an activity reading from the textbook, which I expected to be dry and dull, students asked many lively questions, speculated on answers to each other's questions, and were generally very engaged.  Ms. Gluckman wrote down questions that students raised in a notebook if they could not yet be answered.  Many were about earthquakes - can the Earth's crust crumble?  Can it break?  Ms. Gluckman took their questions very seriously and I could tell this encouraged them to keep asking more.  Despite the fact that many students in the class had limited English, they were all eager to speak.

A second class came in and did an experiment about the movement of heat using hot and cold water and food coloring.  Unlike my Amandla kiddos, who would have needed careful supervision so as to avoid turning food coloring into a weapon, these students were independent and respectful of one another.

The last part of the last class involved students getting up to talk to partners around the room about heat.  At the end of the activity, Ms. Gluckman asked students if moving around made the room warmer.  I had noticed the cold in the room but I thought it might be due to a broken heating system, but Ms. Gluckman told me that because of budget cuts, the heat had been turned off.  Lucky for us it was a warmish day for November, but no amount of kinetic energy on the part of the children could really offset the cold.  This was one of those moments when I felt angry.

Ms. Beitler Goes Back to Chicao, Part 1

Students in Sylvia's Class Prove and Disprove Conjectures

A nice meeting space for older students.

Some students in Sylvia's class matched cards with equivalent fractions and percentages

Students complete independent projects investigating social issues using statistics and graphs.

I came to Chicago for last Saturday's Teaching for Social Justice Curriculum Fair.  I attended this event once before and found some useful resources, but this time I was especially impressed by the energy of everyone there.  We saw inspiring speeches by parent and student activists (I'll post video if I can find some online) and I sat at a table chatting with people about the Free School.

Since there were only a few days between the fair and Thanksgiving, I decided to stay in Chicago and take the time to visit the classrooms of some colleagues.  My first stop on Monday morning was the Ancona School, a Montessori school in Hyde Park.

I first visited the pre-school classroom where my housemate Rachael used to be the assistant teacher.  The current assistant is her friend Gilad, who I had met several times.  What Rachael and Gilad had described to me about teaching pre-school using Montessori methods sounded very intriguing.

I was immediately impressed by how relaxed the children seemed.  The first part of the morning was devoted to a story about animals in the Sonoran desert.  Some kids were a bit wiggly as you would expect of three-year-olds, but they remained calm and didn't cause major disruptions.  There were between twenty and twenty-five students in the class.  As Gilad read the story, Myriam, the head teacher, greeted students who were arriving.

The classroom space was not extremely large but was very carefully arranged.  There was a big rug in the middle surrounded on all sides with stations where students could do various activities.  A small desk held writing materials.  Miniature couches and chairs were stationed near bookshelves.  Other tables were arranged near blocks and math manipulatives.  I could see that this school had resources and also that the teachers took great care in arranging the space.

After storytime the students sang songs in Spanish led by Myriam, and then a guest teacher came in and led movement activities.  Then it was time for the students to choose their work, which is at the heart of the Montessori method.  Students were called on in turn and told Myriam what they wanted to work on.  Some students pulled out boxes with pattern blocks or letter shapes into the middle of the carpet, others found a station around the room.  Students were quiet but not silent, and seemed calm and interested in their work.  I mentioned this to Rachael later and she said that one main goal of Montessori teaching is to help students develop this relaxed concentration.

After observing the pre-school classroom, I went up to see a fifth-sixth grade math class taught by my friend Sylvia.  Pictures of her classroom are shown above.  The class I observed is called I-Math, which happens for students once every three days as a supplement to regular class time. During this independent math time,  students finish homework, have time to complete projects, study for skill-based quizzes, and work on the computer using a program called Scratch or Geometer's Sketchpad.

Again I saw the same relaxed concentration as in the pre-school.  A few boys had trouble settling into an activity but most students got right to work.  Students did not have the same level of choice that they would at the Free School - Sylvia instructed them on what work to start with - but once required work was complete students also had their own projects to do.  Students seemed to take ownership in their work and to go about it happily.

Again I saw that the classroom space was very supportive of students' learning - there were whiteboards for them to access to write on together, plenty of table space, six computers, and a meeting area. 

It used to upset me to visit schools with such rich resources because it just underscored the extent to which my own students, almost all of whom were living in poverty, were being underserved.  This time I was able to put those feelings aside enough to appreciate what I was seeing.  But those feelings are not gone.  They re-emerge at other moments.  In my next few posts I will tell you all about visiting some very different Chicago schools and what students experience there.

Halloween!

Rosie the Riveter

The devil herself.

An evil veterinarian

Raggedy-Anne

Newsie and Cat-cop, above.  Below, a ghoul.

A little pony, the Mad Hatter, and of course Dorothy

As you might imagine, Halloween at the Free School is pandemonium.  The morning follows a normal schedule.  I wasn't there due to still feeling sick but I suspect that between missing two days of school for the hurricane and being wound up about candy, not too much was accomplished.  I arrived just after lunch, as everyone was getting into their costume.  This involved a lot of running about, face painting, and posing for pictures.  Then we all paraded through the neighborhood where various parents and neighbors sat on their stoops passing out candy.

After the parade there was a party in the big room upstairs, with music and candy-trading.  A wonderful time was had by all.  I was a feeble bunny.  One of the kiddos suggested I looked like the energizer bunny but I felt far from energized and I didn't even make it through the whole parade.  At least I got to experience the spectacle.

Our Math "Curriculum"

Breaking counters into stacks to think about factors

Using geoboards to create rectangles and think about factors.  At this point it had devolved into a bit of free time.

Playing multiplication memory

This Saturday we are hosting a conference called "Free School 101" where we will share with participants the ins and outs of how our school works. I am *not* giving a workshop about math at the free school, which is great because I feel like I am just getting a handle on all the possibilities that are available in teaching and learning math in a Free School setting. I *am* setting up a table display with posters and some samples of kids work. So I have to figure out what to say about our math curriculum.

It says something about the way math has been prioritized here that I, an intern, am the de facto math teacher. The two teachers who work with younger elementary grades do math with their home room classes but for grades 4 and up I am it. It seems a little shocking to me, coming from a school where kids did math for about two hours per day, that math was not necessarily a regular activity for most kids in previous years. On the other hand, kids here learn all kinds of things that kids at my old school did not - cooking, music, art - many of which include math.

For the most part I have undertaken to plan and execute my lessons on my own. I have a lot of autonomy and that is ok with me. But it does mean no one gave me any outlines for what teaching math at the Free School should look like. At the beginning of the year I thought about what I value when I teach math.

• I want students to learn to solve problems that take a variety of forms and types - I want them to learn to think flexibly.
• I want them to use logical reasoning when they solve problems. Especially at the Free School where students naturally want to understand they why of everything, I want students to learn to do math based on their own thinking, not recipes. 
• I want students to develop the habit of perseverance. 
• I want students to get in the habit of looking for patterns and testing conjectures. 
• I want students to learn to connect concrete representations of numbers with abstract ones and work within systems of abstractions. 

Okay, that's a long list of goals. Where to begin? I started all three of my classes of older students doing similar things - multiplication and multiples. I tried to get a sense through informal assessment of students' abilities.

In fourth grade, it seemed like we needed to keep practicing multiplication, so we did times tables, multiplication memory games, multiplication array pictures, and word problems. After a couple weeks of that I also started to teach kids how to find factors by making arrays, drawing rectangles on dot paper or creating them with geoboards, and using skip-counting. On any given day we will do two or three activities, a mix of word problems, hands-on explorations, games, drills, and worksheets

(Aside - I am not anti-worksheet as such.  I think sometimes kids just need to practice a skill.  I think it's a mistake to do worksheets to the exclusion of other, richer forms of teaching.)

The menu of options is similar in my 5th/6th grade class but we are covering topics at a quicker pace and have already done least common multiple and greatest common factor. The mix of activities skews more toward word problems and cooperative problem-solving.

I am finding that the students complain just as much as those at my old school when things are "too hard" but they have a greater ability to improvise strategies and try a variety of methods - a more robust bag of conceptual tricks. These may have been taught to them but I also think Free School students tend to be flexible thinkers in general because they spend so much time in self-directed play.

In my junior high class we have now begun a unit on fractions. We do hands-on activities less frequently - once a week instead of nearly every day. The students in that group have much more well-developed number sense and can understand new concepts abstractly rather than always needing a concrete grounding with manipulatives.

So how is Free School math different than good math teaching anywhere else? Sometimes it is not. I am re-reading "Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching," a UTEP favorite, and finding it to be a great guide.  I do feel that there are fewer limits on my teaching here - my classes are small, the students are generally pretty motivated, and I do not need to lay out my scope and sequence with the goal of getting through as much as possible before the state tests.

We are taking longer than I expected with certain topics because the students need more time to master them. There have also been moments where I teach and topic and know that it has not been mastered but we move on anyway because I can tell the topic is not compelling to the kids and I don't believe it is one of the most important things for them to learn. An example of a topic we gave up on was greatest common factor in 5th/6th grade. I know it will come up again when we do fractions and it will be a lot more useful to them then, so we don't need to master it now. I have a lot of flexibility in what I am teaching.  But I don't ditch a topic just because students are struggling a bit - if I feel that the struggle is interesting and productive I encourage students to keep on. 

That flexibility is a bit worrying to me too, though. No one at the Free School ever talks about accountability, which is refreshing, but in practice it means that there is no formal system by which we track students' progress or communicate with them or their parents about that progress. Some parents and teachers take a very relaxed attitude about learning math - they believe it is important but they accept that every student learns on their own timetable.  This is awesome but sometimes I worry that students could go through school without getting the basic skills that they need. I don't know whether it is my place, or whether it is possible for me, to try to create systems of accountability. I do know that it is my place to care that students are learning, but how much learning is enough?

Ultimately, I do not have total control over what my students learn, because at the Free School kids have the option of not participating in a given class or activity. I have been thinking a lot about "opting out" and so I want to write a full post about it later this week.

Readers, please feel free to ask me questions about teaching math at the Free School, either in the comments or via e-mail.  It will help me clarify my own thinking.

Food

Nugget, biscuit, mashed potatoes.  Plus salad.

One thing I am really enjoying and appreciating about the Free School is the food.  Wait, what?  School food that is tasty?  Yes, it's really true.  Deirdre, the cook and kitchen manager, makes breakfast and lunch from scratch every day.  The food is so good that everyone, including teachers, chooses to eat it rather than bring lunch from home.  Everyone eats together in a family-style arrangement.  Teachers keep an eye on kids but they do more than just supervise - they socialize with kids and with each other. Deirdre encourages and cajoles kids to eat vegetables along with the things they most like and it works - every day I see kids eating spinach, carrots, corn, peppers, and other healthy stuff.

All by itself, this would be enough to improve the culture of the school - you can see the impact that a healthy diet without so much red dye 40 has on kids. But there is more to food at the Free School than just eating. Kids are also involved in gardening and cooking. Deirdre manages the garden and kids are frequently joining her in pulling weeds and harvesting. Deirdre also teaches baking and cooking lessons, sometimes organized in a formal class and sometimes spontaneously.

The picture above was taken after one such spontaneous cooking moment. Three middle-school boys were inspired by this YouTube video to create a lunch featuring handmade chicken nuggets, biscuits, and mashed potatoes. For the whole school. They did almost everything themselves. And it was delicious.

Dress code

Zuleika, my roommate and co-intern, teaching a still life drawing class.

 

Building a pretty good branch fort in the woods across from school.

A nice adjustment for me in my new life is thinking about what to wear.  Those of you who went through UTEP with me know that the words "professional dress" can strike fear into any teacher's heart.  There is a certain pressure, especially in high-performing charter schools, to dress you like you work in an office as a way of showing you take your job seriously.  Of course, you also need to ensure you can bend over without your cleavage or lower back showing, raise your arms without exposing your midriff, and simultaneously stand all day in your chosen shoes without keeling over.

The Free School has a different implicit expectation about what it means to dress like you take your work seriously, and it applies to kids as well as teachers.  You need to wear clothes that could get dirty!  So everyone dresses comfortably, and I don't care about the kids seeing my armpit hair because they've seen armpit hair before and don't find it strange.  I still keep the cleavage under wraps I guess.

Playtime

Ramps and marbles - endless fun.

Mitch writes chords for a second-grader's song while others practice accompaniment.

Just dump the whole bin of duplos on the floor.

As a public and charter-school teacher I had to struggle and fight to squeeze time for play - both structured and unstructured - into a school day.  I worked at schools where core academic subjects were considered to be the most valuable use of time, and sometimes I agreed with that prioritization.  But the longer I worked with kids who had a hard time sitting still, struggled to get along with their peers, or couldn't easily improvise new ways to solve problems, the more I felt that play should be an integral part of school.

High-stakes testing tends to squeeze play out.  Primary and pre-school kids spend more time learning the fundamentals they need for literacy and math at an earlier age.  And I understand the urgency to teach them those skills, because as educators of low-income kids and children of color we realize that kids' success in school may give them a better shot at success in life when the odds are stacked against them.  And once kids get to fourth or fifth or sixth grade, we often don't even think about kids'
need for play.

At Amandla I organized an enrichment class called "board games," and I assured my administrators that we were playing educational games like scrabble and set.  But secretly in my mind I named this time "free time" and let the kids do pretty much whatever they wanted.  Sometimes that was an intellectually stimulating game of scrabble.  Sometimes it was thirty minutes of gossip in the corner.  Sometimes it was inventing weird fantasy scenarios involving monsters who destroy towers of dominoes.  All are necessary for kids development.

Let me say a little bit more about development.  I believe that self-directed play helps kids develop imagination, self-conrol, spatial skills, the ability to negotiate conflict, and many other important skills.  It is no coincidence that if you go to the elementary school in Winnetka, one of the most affluent suburbs in the nation, you will find kids playing in every classroom.

At the Free School play fills all of the nooks and crannies of unstructured time.  And there are many.  Time passes here in an unhurried way. It is not uncommon to see a kid who is six years old spend over an hour on a single activity, because each student marches to the beat of their own attention span.  Kids rarely express impatience for school to end.  When they are bored they get up and go do something else - boredom is not an outside force but rather something they try to solve themselves.  The sense of initiative they maintain is in my opinion the single most valuable thing about a free school education.

I am still worried about making sure everyone knows how to read and do math.  Maybe that anxiety is a leftover from my previous job, maybe not.  I do know that many of my current fourth-graders write some of their numbers backwards; on the other hand they are quick to recognize patterns such as the fact that all multiples of four are even.  One of the ways the Free School makes up for the time that kids don't spend in a formal class setting is a ton of informal learning - the low student to teacher ratio means that kids spend far more time each day talking to adults, and that rich environment of conversation gives them a leg up in developing their academic skills.  But it remains to be seen whether my new school is doing enough to ensure that every child gets the basic skills they need.  I will report back when I gather more data.

For those of you who are reading this who are, in the Karen Lewis parlance, "real" teachers, working in public or charter schools where you have a large number of needy students to contend with, working in play can be a real challenge.  I hope you keep at it.  You may not have ukeleles but you can still sing.  You may not have space for ramps and marbles but you can have a table with blocks sometimes.  You may not have endless hours for kids to be kids but I hope you can find a few minutes here and there.

Writing class

A kindergarten student's story about riding bikes.  

I tried to offer a poetry class yesterday but I only had one taker - Marina, who is five.  So, change of plans, she drew a picture and wrote a story to go along.  I started to write for her but she also wanted to add her own writing. I wrote "I was biking with my sister and my friends."  She added, "I love my friends." Pretty impressive for a student who is just starting kindergarten.

Cool as a cucumber

I watched an interesting interaction between two boys on the playground this morning.  Xavier, who is six, and Patrick, who is three.  Patrick was riding a toy car around the concrete area of the yard for a long time.  He left his car to go peer through a hole in the fence. Xavier came along and got onto the car. Patrick ran over and started screaming at him to get off, yelling that he wanted it back.  Xavier stayed calm and just said the most worst words in the playground lexicon, "you aren't my best friend anymore," and walked away. Patrick was devastated.  Of course, five minutes later they were playing happily together again.  What's amazing to me in this situation is that it isn't my job to intervene - even if Patrick is screaming and being unreasonable.  Xavier handled it himself and I think Patrick learned the consequences of being a jerk.

There is no one alive that is youer than you. . .

The eighth grade girls painted this Dr. Seuss mural during the first two days of school. 

Activities!

The activities board shows the schedule for the week.

The week started with an activities meeting, which happens first things every Monday morning.  Someone calls the meeting to order, nominations are taken for a student to lead the meeting, we elect a meeting leader, and then the leader calls on people to share their ideas for activities.  Some of these are classes, like my Junior High math class which will happen first thing every morning, a schedule I agreed upon with the students prior to the meeting. Other activities are trips like a field trip to the art center or a wilderness class at the nature center.  Other activities are one-time events like collaging the covers of notebooks to use in a gardening class.  Sometimes the kids request activities - even from other kids: today a second-grader asked a fourth-grader to offer a songwriting class that was offered last year.

Most of these classes are open to anyone, while some are for a specific age group such as a fifth/sixth geography class.  And you can see that there is a still a lot of open space in the schedule.  A few activities have a sign-up sheet because there is limited space - after the meeting students clamber for pens to sign up.  The activities board stays up in a prominent place in the Big Room.

Our First Community Class

Trying to pass the hula-hoop around the circle.

The Stop Rule

So far, one of my favorite things about working at the Free School is that I don't have to give punishments or consequences for students' behavior.  There are two reasons for this.

First, the Free School is non-coercive, meaning they don't make kids do things.  There are a few exceptions - council meetings and community class are mandatory and I will tell you more about those in later posts - but for the most part activities are chosen by kids and are completely optional.  So no one is punished for not participating, not doing an assignment, or not attending a class.  Students do what they are motivated to do, and as you saw in my previous post about Melody, they are actually motivated to do quite a lot.  In our first few days I saw students spontaneously begin art projects, paint murals, request a teacher to help them make a stop-motion movie, and of course, demand math lessons.  Students were so eager for their first social-studies lesson that they requested homework!

Day two of the math class Melody demanded - she brought friends this time.

Impromptu painting time on a Friday morning.

The second reason I don't have to give punishments or consequences is that the Free School empowers students to resolve most interpersonal conflicts themselves.  The centerpiece of this is the "stop" rule.  If a child is bothering another child, the child who is being bothered can say "stop" and the person bothering them has to stop what they are doing.  The kids are really good at enforcing this rule on each other.  So if a child pushes another child on the playground, my first response is not to intervene but to watch closely.  Usually someone says, "stop," the pusher stops, and that is the end of it.  If a child comes to me with a complaint, I say, "did you tell them to stop? Go tell them to stop" and send them back to deal with it.  Or I might add, "tell them you don't like that."  For the most part, kids respect each other enough to listen.

If telling someone to stop doesn't work, kids can ask an adult to help mediate.  The adult is not there to dole out punishments or say who is right or who is wrong, but really to listen to both parties and help them come to a resolution that they are okay with.  The kids don't come to me for this yet because I am brand new, but I have overhead Caroline, one of the most senior teachers, talking to a first-grader and a second-grader.  The second-grader is new and I think she expected that Caroline would take her side, but Caroline merely encouraged her to think about how her behavior had upset the other student.  A tough message but an important one, and it means that by the time the kids get to be a bit older, they rarely need adults to help mediate.

If mediation still doesn't solve the problem or it persists, a child can call a council meeting.  In a council meeting, the whole school gets together to talk through a problem.  We haven't had a council meeting to resolve a conflict yet but when we do I will tell all about it.

Update

A few minutes after my previous post, Melody, a sixth grader, came up to me as I was sitting on the couch and said, "are you the math teacher?" She wanted math.  I invited her to join the junior high group but she hesitated so I offered to form a group for her with the fifth and sixth graders.  I asked if we should start next week and she said, "sooner," so we went to the white board in a nearby classroom and started doing exponent problems, at her insistence.

The First Day of School

Our first council meeting started with nominations for students to lead the meeting.

Students played outside at the beginning of the day.

Here we are on day one. I feel pretty useless - our day has been devoted to reviewing the rules, creating teams to do lunch cleanup, and catching up on our summers. Unlike previous first days where I ran everything on a tight schedule, here the kids take charge and time flows at a leisurely pace. The kids are far more interested in each other than they are in me. All around me chaos reigns, but it is a cheerful kind of chaos. I know that at my previous schools this much noise and disorder with no real direction would have made me nervous, but here the kids seem to get along. As eager as I am to "get down to work" and dig into learning projects, I am also relishing being in the background just watching.