Today we celebrate a Permutation Day! I call days like today permutation days because the digits of the day and the month can be rearranged to form the year, as seen in the above animation. Today can also be considered simply a Transposition Day, as only a single transposition, or exchange of two numbers, suffices.
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In our course team meeting this week a colleague was discussing intervention attempts with a student who was resisting offers of support. “Why do you think the student won’t accept tutoring?” I asked. It’s a question I should probably be asking myself about some of my own students.
My colleague wasn’t sure. The student was exhibiting a pattern of odd behavior: Unexplained tardiness; unexpected evasiveness; non-responsiveness. “There’s something going on,” my colleague said. “But I can’t put my finger on it.”
My colleague did put a finger on how I’ve been feeling. There are things going on with some of my students behind their zoom avatars, their emails, their chat messages, but it’s hard to know exactly what. So much harder to know than when you’re standing next to someone, when you can ask them to look you in the eye, when you can pull them out into the hallway for a quick check in.
Before I began teaching a mentor offered some powerful advice in the form of a warning: You never know what someone is going through. It’s good advice in life, and even better advice in teaching. And right now it’s harder than ever to know.
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Today we celebrate a Permutation Day! I call days like today permutation days because the digits of the day and the month can be rearranged to form the year, as seen in the above animation.
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We just started the Spring semester and I asked students to reflect on the Fall. As usual, I received lots of great feedback, both positive and constructive. And as usual, I was reminded how difficult it can be to think broadly about education.
Here are two comments taken from adjacent rows of my spreadsheet.
“You should use peardeck. It’s really interactive.”
“I would say don’t use interactive slideshows like peardeck”
The responses contained more apparent contradictions. You should require students to have their cameras on in breakout rooms . . . Thank you for not requiring us to have our cameras on . . . One of my teachers created a name wheel to pick on students randomly; please don’t do this . . . You should consider using a name wheel.
I say apparent contradictions because there is no real inconsistency here. These comments are all reasonable, thoughtful, and grounded in truth. It’s just that different students have different truths. Each student experiences education in their own way. What works for one student may not work for another. What works for one teacher may not work for another. What works today may not work tomorrow.
I wrote this last year when I collected feedback at the end of emergency remote learning. This is part of what makes teaching, and thinking about teaching, so difficult. There’s no single problem that you can find the answer to. It’s about dealing with the many different problems and their seemingly contradictory answers every day. But this is also part of what makes teaching such energizing work, even if it’s hard to imagine what you do working at scale.
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I was preparing my Area / Volume unit for BC Calculus and I pulled up last year’s lesson on the Shell Method. I started preparing a new remote teaching plan by transferring what I could from the existing face-to-face version. I chuckled when I reached this line in my old lesson.
“Provide overview of Shell Method.”
I have what I call a “Problems First” approach to lesson planning. The most important part of my plan is designing the specific problems I want students to engage with. First I need an accessible problem that motivates the big idea at the start of the lesson. Then I need a variety of exercises that highlight a technique’s features and obstacles. Finally, I need extensions that push students to make deeper conceptual connections.
Having these specific problems means I have a solid plan. But designing these problems takes considerable time and effort. When it comes to time, teaching is a zero-sum game, so this means other elements of my plan might be, shall we say, less detailed. Like “Provide overview of Shell Method“.
Now, I love the Shell Method and don’t find it difficult to provide an extemporaneous development of it, as my “plan” suggests. But I’ve discovered that an important part of that improvisation is being in a physical classroom, face to face to with students. In that setting, I can pick up a few markers, jot down a few diagrams, ask a few questions, circulate, and conjure up an interactive derivation of the Shell Method.
I just don’t have the feel for that kind of improvisation in remote teaching yet. I find that I need to have many more logistical details explicitly prepared ahead of time when designing a remote lesson: Not just the problems, but the text that maps out the connections, the slides for the transitions, the multi-stage diagrams. There’s so much more that can go wrong, and one little blunder can turn a lively improvisation into a plodding mess.
I don’t think my teaching suffers from the increased scripting. It’s just one more adaptation I have to make. And I’m still improvising, but just in smaller, more targeted ways. More targeted than “Provide overview of Shell Method, anyway.
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