Teaching

I taught a bad lesson this week. It’s not unusual. I teach hundreds of lessons every year: Some go very well, most are just fine, a few go poorly. A successful school year has its ups and downs, for students and for teachers, and you take the bad days with the good.

This week was the area of a circle. It’s always a challenge teaching a topic that students already know: It can be hard to get students to engage deeply with an essential question like “How do you conceive of the area of curved things when your notion of area is based on straight things?” when they’ve been using since 6th grade.

I took a standard approach and had students explore area relationships between a circle of radius 1 and various inscribed and circumscribed polygons. The goal was for students to engage with the essential question while sharpening their area-computing skills and previewing some important arguments they’ll see again in calculus.

Usually this lesson works just fine, with occasional moments of greatness. But this year I had to trim the area unit a bit to accommodate the schedule, so prior to this lesson we just hadn’t done enough with polygon area. As a result, the conversation bogged down in the early stages of the exploration and it was hard to get unstuck. And because the remaining schedule is so tightly packed, there really wasn’t really time to stop and regroup. We just had push through.

It wasn’t a disaster: We did math together, students grappled with and argued about important ideas, connections were made. But the lesson didn’t go as I’d hoped, and that was a downer. On the other hand, it was comforting to realize that this lesson went bad for some very normal reasons. It didn’t fall flat because my wifi went out or because I couldn’t share my screen or because I had no idea how to access student thinking on a computer. The lesson didn’t work for the same reasons most lessons don’t work: I misjudged prior knowledge and tried to execute a plan that was too ambitious and too rigid. It might have been a bad lesson, but it also might have been the most normal lesson I taught all year.

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I’m proud I covered the curriculum this year.

“Covering the curriculum” is one of those phrases that’s been around so long everyone in education has turned against it. Curriculum coverage has become synonymous with prioritizing the delivery of content over student success, or fixating on what the teacher presents rather than what the students learn. “You shouldn’t cover the curriculum. You should uncover it!” says the education influencer, getting 1K retweets every time.

Of course curriculum planning should center student experience. But it should also embody a clearly defined set of concepts and tools. Covering the curriculum should mean delivering that full set of ideas to students in a coherent and meaningful way. And covering the curriculum was not easy this year.

In September I had to plan for a year of unknown unknowns. Our restructured school schedule included a switch to block periods and a 33% overall reduction in instructional time. Double periods are not as simple as teaching two lessons back-to-back. Losing a third of my class time was going to have a substantial impact on what we could do. There was a lot of uncertainty about what the courses I’d taught so many times before would look like. More fundamentally, there was a lot of uncertainty about what each day of class would look like. I had no experience with live remote instruction, and I had no idea what could be accomplished in a 55-minute Zoom class.

Putting together a pacing guide in September was flying blind. Our Geometry team worked together to streamline the sequence and differentiate core concepts from peripheral ones. I consolidated units in my combined pre-calculus / calculus course hoping for more efficiency. I made my best educated guesses based on my 20+ years as a teacher, but I really had no idea how the courses would unfold.

As unusual as the year was, one thing was the same: Like every year, I tried things, I got feedback, I learned, and I adjusted. I slowly got a feel for pacing and a feel for the day-to-day. And quite remarkably, as we face down the last month of school, I can say that the plan worked. It wasn’t easy, but I taught the courses I set out to teach. Students learned what they needed to learn, and they will be ready for what comes next. I covered the curriculum. And I’m proud of it.

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I keep a Word document open on my computer that serves as my planner. Inside is a table I use as a calendar, and I look ahead as many weeks as rows can fit on the page. It’s crude and dependable, like many systems that stick around.

I update the calendar, and the file name, as weeks and months pass. A recent update to May Plan.docx put the final instructional day on my calendar. Visualizing that day was a powerful moment.

Eight months ago it wasn’t clear how even the most basic elements of school would function. How was “hybrid” instruction going to work? How many students would be in the building? How many teachers? Which courses would be taught, and which dropped? Visualizing the last day of instruction would have been impossible then.

Even after the basic elements were set, it took me months to feel even slightly competent at my job, and months more to feel like I was starting to be effective. Now I’ve figured some things out, and I’m having enough day-to-day success to feel like a teacher again. And as I plan for the end, I realize that, for the most part, I’ve successfully executed the curricular plan I put in place in September, when I had virtually no idea what lay ahead. Being able to imagine the final day of instruction at all feels like an achievement, and to see it as the end of something successful feels a bit like a miracle.

The stretch run to the final day is always an exciting and challenging time. Usually it’s a time for me to experiment, but since everything’s been an experiment this year, I’ll be content with my small successes, delivering the courses I set out to deliver, and deleting the final row from June Plan.docx.

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I stopped asking “What did I do last year?” months ago. In some ways it’s true that good teaching is just good teaching, regardless of the circumstances. But designing remote instruction is so fundamentally new to me that, as I’ve slowly figured out what I’m doing, it’s been easier to start from square one when planning a lesson.

This has required a lot of work. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to worry about every single lesson I teach. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling: Throughout my career I’ve always taken on the challenges of teaching and creating new courses. But creating a mathematical computing course from scratch is easier when the geometry and calculus courses I also have to teach are already in good shape.

But a month ago we passed the one year mark of remote learning in NYC, which means the answer to “What did I do last year?” is suddenly relevant. Last year I made short videos explaining key concepts. I created auto-graded quizzes to use as formative assessment. I wrote documents that placed essential course content into the context of our year-long conversation. These are all resources I can plug into what I’m doing right now, usually with only minor changes.

The ability to use pre-existing materials as is has provided some much needed relief. There’s still so much to do each day and week, but every resource I can reuse amounts to a small reduction in the stress and burden of planning everything anew. And with the home stretch ahead of us, every little bit helps.

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I was at school twice this week: First to proctor the SAT, then on my rotation day (The school is required to have a certain number of teachers in the building every day, so available staff rotates through the responsibility.)

It was nice to be around students, even if it was just proctoring an exam with nine kids in a room, or walking around the cafeteria, smiling and saying hi as they worked on their laptops.

There was an especially nice moment at the end of the day. About twenty 9th graders gathered in the halls after the final bell rang. They were talking, laughing, making plans, looking at their phones. Apart from the masks, it all seemed so normal. Like a time not too long ago, or a time not too far in the future.

I have been moved by the resilience of students throughout my career. When the world disappoints them, they figure out how to move forward. When I disappoint them, they give me another chance. I often find strength in their strength.

Students have suffered greatly this past year. I’ve seen it. I’m seeing it. But I’ve also seen their resilience. It will carry them. And maybe us, too.

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