by jphilo | Oct 1, 2009 | Out and About
Who’da thought this math-phobic would do back-to-back posts about statistics? But this one has nothing to do with the Amazon book sale stats. (Though if you really want to know, Different Dream is now #60 in the category where it’s been wrongly placed.)
This post is about a math project Jeff Wells, a high school math teacher in our school district, and I created during my teaching years. We called it Stat Buddies. Each fall, my fourth graders collected data on twenty-odd different things: how many light bulbs in their houses, how tall they were in inches, how many blocks they lived from school, to name a few. Once the data was all in, Jeff and the students in his Probability and Statistics class would come to our school. They used the data to teach fourth graders about median, mode, graphing, estimating, and so forth.
The project was a win-win situation for everybody. My students learned statistics from people who understood them instead of from their teacher who didn’t. Because the seniors had to teach kids about statistics, they had to know their subject matter thoroughly. But the benefits went far beyond math. Both age groups were engaged in learning. Relationships developed between students. Behaviors improved.
A few weeks ago Jeff emailed and invited me to come see what Stat Buddies has become. It’s part of the fourth grade curriculum now, he said. All fourth grades in the district participate in it, he said. You gotta come see it, he said.
So this morning, I visited three Stat Buddies classrooms and was tickled pink to see the project working better today than it did six years ago. But what tickled me most was seeing some former students teaching a new crop of fourth graders about statistics. One of them is in the picture – the guy in the purple hoody. Another ran up and gave me a big hug.
As a result, I’m on a statistical, humble high, the kind that comes when you see how your bumbling attempts to mask your weaknesses (in my case math skills) impact others in positive ways.
Thanks, Jeff, for the invitation. You made my day. And thank you, God, for working through my weakness.
by jphilo | Aug 4, 2009 | Daily Life
For most of my life, August has been a torturous month, and not just because of the almost unbearable heat and humidity that makes the corn in these parts grow while the people wilt. For my sixteen years as a student and my twenty-five years as a teacher, it marked another unwelcome event: the return to school.
When I left teaching six years ago, August became one of my favorite months. No return to a hot, sticky classroom for me. No abrupt loss of freedom, piles of papers to grade, endless teachers’ meetings to attend, or reluctant students to corral. Every August I kicked up my heels, said a few prayers for my teacher friends, and typed away, though it took three or four years before my stomach quit twisting into knots at the sight of the back-to-school ads.
So far, this August has again been sheer torture. Why, you ask, when A Different Dream for Your Child will be released September 1? Isn’t your life exciting and fun now?
No, and I’ll tell you why. Preparing for the book’s release, which is the only thing on my to do list for the month, and more specifically, getting www.differentdream.com, the book’s companion website, up and running, is sheer torture. And to make matters worse, I’m paying a web designer good money to enter the torture chamber and turn the screws. He’s a very polite and knowledgeable young man who has yet to snicker at the inane questions I ask him, though there’s no hidden camera recording his behavior after our phone conversations end.
But, he’s a pretty tough task master, none the less. He even offered to assign homework and deadlines if I needed more motivation. I declined since September 1 is plenty motivating. Under his insistent, patient tutelage, this old dog is learning a whole lot of techie tips, and the website is taking shape.
Will it be up and running by the book release date? Yes, in fact you can go to it now and see how it’s progressing.
But will the site be perfectly complete? No. And something I learned during my teaching days keeps my perfectionistic self from imposing unrealistic expectations this torturous August. One long ago day, when I was stressing myself out by trying to be ready for the entire year before the first day of school, the realization dawned that I didn’t need to be completely ready. I only needed to be ready for the first day, or maybe for the first week. Immediately, my stress level plummeted, along with my blood pressure and crabbiness. The last bit made my family very, very happy.
If I can keep that lesson in mind this August, maybe the whole month won’t be sheer torture. Maybe the web designer and I will even become friends, though that’s doubtful. In my opinion, he’s in the same category as my gynecologist.
Enough said.
by jphilo | Feb 13, 2009 | Current Events
Today is Friday the thirteenth. Listening to the radio this morning would have sent me into a tailspin if I was superstitious: the stock market was down again, too many people were killed in a commercial airline crash in Buffalo, the bloom is off the stimulus package rose, and a snowstorm is bearing down on the “Highway 30 corridor.” Since I live 100 feet north of Highway 30, my town is in for it.
But I am not in a tailspin because today is Valentine’s Party day at every elementary school in America, and I am not in a classroom riding herd on a passel of kids aiming for the mother of all sugar highs. Many of my friends in this town are are, and I’ve been feeling sorry for them all week. With the snowstorm moving in (one snowflake floating gently to earth outside a classroom window has the power to whip the most placid child into a frenzy), I’m feeling even sorrier for them. Thankfully, tonight’s not a full moon (kids get weirded out when the moon’s full), or I’d feel obligated to enter the lion’s den and give one of them a hand.
Instead, all I have to do is feel sorry for them, pray for their perseverance and sanity when I think of it, and keep writing. In my book (no pun intended), this Friday the thirteenth is a marvelous, wonder-filled gift I don’t deserve. I’ll try to use it well.
by jphilo | Feb 14, 2008 | Reflections on the Past
There are some days when all you can be is grateful. Today’s one of them for me. Not because I’m anticipating a Valentine’s gift from my husband. We’re pretty low key about those things. I’m grateful because I’m not doing what I did every Valentine’s Day for twenty-five years which was to supervise a classroom crammed with love-crazed elementary students eating their ways to a sugar high. The kids in the picture above are high school seniors this year. When I see them at their graduation celebrations, they’ll barely recollect how goofy they were on Valentine’s Day.
For me those high energy days are unforgettable. So I’ve been thinking of my friends who are still in the trenches in the district where I once worked. For them, this is a triple whammy day. It’s Valentine’s Day, it’s the beginning of a three day weekend for kids because of teacher inservice tomorrow, and the temperature is dropping like a rock as the wind shifts from south to north. Weather changes make kids crazy.
And here I am in my very quiet living room, working at my keyboard, living my dream. Every now and then, little bubbles of guilt rise to the surface of my consciousness. I try to pop the bubbles by offering prayers of gratitude. My method is marginally successful.
I’m looking for new ways to ease my guilt. I’ve toyed with the idea of nominating all elementary school teachers for sainthood and write the Vatican. If the pope spent one day, preferably a party day, in a classroom he’d see teachers working miracles by the minute. Approving the nominations would be a no brainer. But since I’m not Catholic, he might not listen to me.
Maybe you can help. Today, do something nice for the elementary teachers you know. Tell them thank you. Speak softly as they are suffering from PTVS (Post Traumatic Valentine’s Syndrome). Give them chocolate, lots of chocolate. If you’re married to an elementary teacher, give your spouse flowers and lots of chocolate.
But don’t tell them I put you up to it. Just show them how much you appreciate them. They deserve to know.
by jphilo | Jan 22, 2008 | Daily Life
A glance at the side yard through the dining room door made me smile. Snow covered the top of the old birdbath. I admired the perfectly shaped mound for a moment. It caught my eye later as I lugged groceries into the house. But it wasn’t until I put the apples into the crock pot and saw the birdbath again, this time from the kitchen window, that I understood what I was seeing. White grace on a still, cold morning.
For years I rushed to work and didn’t see the grace. Even on days when school started two hours late, like it did today, I went to school early to prepare, to be ready to give my students what they needed and deserved. All day long I pushed aside the ideas inside my head, the stories that begged to be written down. By the time I got home at night and cared for my family, I’d forgotten the words. Still grace was at work, but when I slowed down enough to see it, I fell asleep instead.
Four years ago, when an opportunity arose to pursue the ideas and stories that had survived my neglect, I left teaching. It took a while, but eventually I remembered the words I’d forgotten. I learned to put the words together so people could understand them. I grew to cherish the time I’ve been given to do so. I slowed down and began to dream and imagine again. This morning, I slowed down enough to marvel at a gift I’d ignored too long.
White grace, undeserved and beautiful, perched on the birdbath.
Thank You, Father.
