Parental Priorities

This one’s not exactly about math. It’s kind of about math, but more education in general.

I’m not one to judge right and wrong ways of parenting. A lot of things have to depend on the individual child’s needs, the family’s background and values, etc. But I have some observations about different types of parents.

There are parents who apologize profusely for their kids missing school for legitimate reasons, like medical issues. Then there are those who check their kids out of class to go get smoothies.

It’s not like either extreme is always great or always terrible. Sometimes the kids who miss for doctor’s appointments aren’t great about getting caught up on what they miss, and sometimes the smoothie-getting kids are.

Still, I wonder what message the smoothie-run parents are trying to send. That they’re a cool parent? That sometimes you have to give yourself a mental-health break? (I can agree with that on occasion.)

What message are the kids getting? Like I said, those kids are often okay with making up what they miss. They’re usually kids who clearly believe school is important, at least to some degree. But what about other students, who know why their classmate misses a class or two in the middle of the day? What does it say to them about where their priorities belong?

I don’t know. I do know that with math in particular, if you miss a component or two and don’t catch it up, you risk being very lost on concepts that follow. If you don’t solidify basic equation solving, for instance, you’ll have a very hard time with most other topics in algebra.

Most parents do the best they can, especially considering the bull-headedness of some teenagers. Some teens already understand the importance of their education, even the parts that don’t immediately seem relevant. Others take a while to figure that out.

I just hope parents aren’t delaying that understanding.

Epiphany of the Week: Hot Girls Can Be Smart

Not my epiphany … that of a 9th grade boy. A very girl-crazy 9th grade boy. (“Aren’t they all?” you say. No, not really. Not like this.)

The student in question was in my room, discussing with another student how astounded he was to discover this older girl (cheerleader, no less) is super-smart and able to help him with his math homework. I said (uh, pretty sarcastically), “Incredible, isn’t it? A hot girl and she’s smart?”

He could’ve really dug himself into a hole then, but he managed a save. “I know! But then I thought about it, and there’s [names several girls in his grade who fit in the cute-and-popular category and have high academic achievement].”

It struck me that teens can be a little one-dimensional in their thinking, but they can also add dimensions to their view pretty easily when they let themselves.

It parallels the experience I often have when students find out I write fiction. “But you teach math!” Like they’re these mutually exclusive things. Like I have to fit neatly into a stereotype.

Then there was the time a student reported that one of the English teachers had said English is harder to teach than math. (I hope she was joking around. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know.) I teased back that he should tell her we can switch places for a day and we’ll see what happens, because I know a thing or two about English.

Really, though … why must we try to fit people into these boxes? The analytical side of me can see the appeal of simple categorization. It keeps things organized. Much easier to split things into hot blondes (in the blonde-joke sense) and ugly nerds, math people and English people, jocks and band-geeks.

Real people tend to have overlap somewhere, though. More often than not, a lot of overlaps. That’s trickier to wrangle with, but makes life a lot more interesting.

On a quick writing note … I’m always glad to see characters that reflect the kind of multifaceted-ness I see in real-life teens. Sometimes, though, I find that one or more of those blended aspects lacks authenticity. The cute, popular girl who reports she loves math/science and is good at it … but doesn’t show any of the thinking processes that go with skills in those areas. Not that she can’t still make stupid decisions—all humans do sometimes. But saying she’s “that kind of smart” isn’t the same as behaving like a person who really is, with all the complexity that includes.

I guess that makes another case for “Show, Don’t Tell.”

Spell-Check is Your Friend. Seriously.

Long before I ever thought I was creative enough to write any kind of fiction, my relationship with the written word held a particular distinction. I was English Student of the Year in 9th grade. That was the year of sentence diagramming (among other things).

Let me tell you, I diagrammed sentences like nobody’s business. I don’t remember a lot of the specifics now, but it did give me a pretty solid hold on some tricky grammar, comma rules, and the like.

That was me and English for a long time. The Technician. I wrote perfect essays that were exactly what my history teacher wanted to see. I wrote killer research papers and aced my technical writing class in college.

These skills still come in handy now. Just ask Mindy McGinnis, whose comma splices I’ve helped hide from her editor.

In the effort to develop my inner novelist, though, I try not to dwell on those technical aspects. I even make a conscious effort sometimes to let them go, allow myself to make “mistakes” for the purpose of flow and voice. (This was easier once my linguistics professor taught me the difference between Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar.)

That aspect of my journey has helped me ease up on the “Fix It!” button every time I see a grammar or spelling error. (Okay, the reaction’s still there. But not as violent as it used to be.) I’m sure other novelists are very in-the-creative-moment, especially when drafting, and leave those things to be cleaned up in editing/revising. To stay in that creative zone, they may even turn off the spell-as-you-go feature that pops up with those red/orange underlines when you misspell something.

Awesome. Whatever works for the individual writer.

But some seem to forget that we do need to run a spell-check eventually.

I know, spell-check isn’t perfect. It’s annoying when it dings every one of your proper names, or made-up words for another language, or even perfectly spelled calculus vocabulary. And it won’t catch misspellings that happen to be proper spellings of other words. It won’t save you on a “phase-vs-faze” debate.

I’ve heard some say they don’t worry about such things, because that’s what editors are for. Sure, editors should be able to catch the errors so subtle, your eye glides over them. But leaving flat-out wrongly spelled words that five minutes with spell-check could catch?

That makes it look like we don’t care. It doesn’t look professional. It doesn’t look like we respect the agent/editor/other human being we’re sending our work to.

So, my plea for the week. Save someone a headache. Show them you care.

Run a spell-check. 🙂

Catching Your Glitches

We all make mistakes. Ideally, we learn from the mistake and don’t make it again. Realistically, there’s a certain type of mistake that we make over and over again. I’ll refer to that as a glitch.

Some glitches we’re aware of. I have plenty of students who see “three squared” and automatically think the answer’s six. But they know they have that tendency, so they catch themselves and say nine before I say anything.

Other glitches sneak around, leaving us oblivious until someone else points them out. Sometimes they turn into the first kind after they’ve been pointed out. But sometimes they stay rooted, refusing to be corrected.

Students who continue to combine unlike terms no matter how often it’s marked wrong. Or who say X plus X is X-squared.

It’s not just in math, I’m sure. We fail to shift from second to third gear properly with our manual transmission. We mix up “lay” and “lie” or “affect” and “effect.”

With the math, at least, I suspect part of why the glitches keep happening is because the student doesn’t understand the foundation of why it’s a mistake. Attempting to memorize arbitrary rules without understanding their basis is rarely effective.

Unfortunately, students are often so used to thinking of math as a matter of memorizing arbitrary rules, they don’t shift into looking for meaning. At least, not easily. All I can do is try to open their eyes to the hows and whys behind the what-to-dos.

The Transition from Cooties to Couples

Yes, I’m back with more observations from Project People-Watch: Junior High Edition.

For the last several years, I’ve been at a school where I’ve mainly been working with the older high school kids—anywhere from 16 to 21 years old. Even when I had 8th and 9th graders, it was such a tiny school that the dynamics weren’t always what most teenagers would consider typical.

Now I’m back in a large public school. I have one 8th grade class (smaller, honors) and five 9th grade classes (large, full spectrum from overachievers to strugglers to I-don’t-cares). Those 9th graders are top of the heap at this school, but would have been among the youngest I taught previously, so it’s an interesting perspective.

The most interesting thing, regardless of class, is to watch what various students (and groups of students) do during a stretch of free time at the end of class.

The 8th grade class has The Great Wall of Gender Divide running down the middle of it. They chose their own seats, and it’s girls on the right, boys on the left. During free time, the girls will talk—about play practice, homework and events in other classes, whatever. The boys will play cards.

One exception is a girl and boy who sit next to each other on the divide. The girl will alternate chatting and joking around with him, and chatting with the other girls. Don’t know the history there, but the pair seem like they’ve been friends for a long time.

The only further mingling is a type I saw just this week after they all finished their tests. Several girls asked if they could draw on the whiteboard. (Last day before break—why not?) One of the girls favors the in-state rival over the more local college team. The boys take exception to that. So when she drew her team’s logo on the board, it turned into a bit of a battle.

The rest of the girls continued doodling funny faces and writing names in fancy scripts.

Then there are the 9th grade classes. During free time (or even homework time), there are four major groups, with a few people who float between them.

First there are the girls sticking with girls, much like my 8th grade class. They gravitate to their friends in the class and chat about things from the silly to the serious.

Then there are the boys who stick with boys. Again like my 8th graders, card games are often popular, or some of the puzzles I keep in the classroom. They chat, too … more likely about sports, video games, and such.

The other two groups are those where girls and guys intermingle, much more commonly than with my 8th graders. My gut tells me there are two distinct groups here, but the difference is hard to describe.

I guess I’d say one group is the Flirts, and the other is the Friends. That’s not to say there isn’t flirting and crushing going on amongst the Friends, but it’s somehow less obvious, not the be-all end-all of their interactions. With the Friends, I see more genuine talking, less posturing.

With the Flirts, one glance tells me this guy is trying to be clever or smooth as a way of showing off, trying to impress the girl. The girl is laughing and acting cute as can be to keep him at it.

At any rate, I don’t see anything like the Flirts in my 8th grade class. Aside from the one exceptional pair, I don’t see the Friends there, either. Maybe because of its size? Just the dynamics of the people in there? Or the age, and what a difference a year makes?

Some possibilities to keep in mind if I ever write characters quite so young.

Yes, You Can Love Books TOO Much

Heresy, you say?

Hear me out before you brand me a traitor to writer-kind.

With a lot of kids, I’m thrilled when they want to read something that’s not required by a teacher. At my last school, we had a small amount of dedicated reading time every day, regardless of what class they were in at that time. Sometimes I had a class of reluctant readers, and any time they didn’t put they books away the second reading time ended, I didn’t mind letting them carry on a bit.

There are kids at the other end of the spectrum, though. Kids who always want to read. Some of them know how to prioritize. They pay attention to lessons, work hard to get their tasks done so they’ll have a bit of free time to read at the end of class.

That’s fine by me.

But some kids don’t have that self-control. Some will read straight through class unless someone steps in and stops them.

That someone would be me. The big, mean, book-closing teacher.

Forgive me, my fellow bibliophiles, but kids need more than books … they need math, too. Among other things.

Any suggestions on helping certain students see that need for balance?