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.