Definition of insanity...

is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I wonder about this with respect to reteaching.  In one of the classes I'm observing, the students who do poorly on tests get pulled aside be to retaught the material, while the others do some sort of enrichment activity.  The students may have failed the test for a variety of reasons:  a bad day, absence from school beforehand, careless mistakes, or not understanding.  The reteaching is done in the same way that the original teaching was done, and does not seem to help the kids who tried but didn't get it the first time around.  This seems exactly the time to try something different, as you have proof that it didn't work the first time around...

Fun in math...

I love the three periods I spend in 7th grade math.  The teacher uses math talk and her own personality to build a safe, friendly classroom community.  In some periods this is harder than others, but even in the most rambunctious class, there is still community in her classroom.   

Some examples of the way she makes the classroom fun and warm - these won't sound as joyful in writing as they are in person, but they truly convey a happiness to be there:

She has the kids answer her phone when it rings during class with: "Mrs. Doe's classroom.  Student speaking.  We love math!"

Good answers get a "Kiss your brain!" which she models by kissing her hand and tapping her head.

She wears a special math lab coat on test days, which has a variety of math equations written on it with permanent marker.  She wears it to bring in the good math karma.

When students don't have a pencil, they get to borrow one from her if they leave a shoe on deposit (so far the kids all treat this as silly). 

She stamps homework and worksheets with a custom rubber stamp which says "Mrs. Doe approves!"

Limited by its public nature?...

Each week as I think about the time in my placement, there are always a bunch of incidents/conversations/ideas which I need to think through, and would welcome the perspective of the rest of the cohort.  But, because I worry that somehow, someday, a teacher from my school will randomly come across this blog, I don't write about it.  Does anyone else worry about this?

Certainly this limits what I blog about to safer topics - and that also generally keeps it away from the topics that I am working and worrying about at any given time.

Got a kick out of this, posted in my 8th grade cooperating teacher's math class:

What's in a name?...

I learned last week that Hispanic last names often have 2 names.  I had never really thought much about 2 name last names, but last week I started my stint in middle school, where the kids rotate through subjects, so I tried to begin to learn the names of the 150 kids who come to my cooperating teacher for science.  She gave me a copy of the class roster for each class, organized by assigned seat.  But, the class roster only had room for 20 letters for “last name, first”, and for those kids with 2 last names, the first name was cut off.  I spoke to all the kids whose first name  was missing (which was itself an easy way to start a conversation) and most all of them had Hispanic names.  (As an aside, what's up with having the class roster system cut off names ever?)

So, I came home and researched the practice of 2 last names.  A Hispanic child is given the first last name of his father followed by the first of his mother.  Usually when a woman gets married, she keeps her first last name (the one from her father) and replaces the second with her husband’s first last name (explained in detail here ).  

And then I was looking over the student directory of my daughter’s school, where there are 2 students with the last name Suresh.  Both have their father’s first name listed as Suresh, but none of the  parents’ last name is that.  My internet research only turns up Suresh as a Hindu name, but not the naming convention.  It’s a puzzle to figure out when naming conventions have been mangled by American forms and data entry, and when not.  I wish I knew...

Does anyone out there in cohort 18 know any other naming conventions, and the rules for appropriately using first and last names?