And then winter break was over. Adjust my wake up time by about 5 hours. The first day is complete and I have to congratulate myself just for getting through it. I gave a new unit pre-test to each of my classes… “A test on the first day? But we haven’t learned anything yet!”

Trying to explain to students my rationale for giving a test before teaching reminds me to try and be transparent in my methods. I realize I’ve let my blog go dormant for a long time and haven’t shared about the richness and monumental challenge of last semester.

If you know me, then you know I have so much to say about teaching and opinions about almost everything. But I’m also shy and a bit afraid to broadcast my thoughts and reflections to an audience I don’t even know who they are.  However, I’m intending to stretch out much more this semester and attempt to write a reflection after every school day, even if just  for myself.

You see, I’ve committed to completing the National Board Certification for Early Adolescent Science, and it involves a lot of writing and reflection. Before I won the Fulbright DAT and then took a year off from the process, I cranked out three of the four components, so in theory doing Component 4 shouldn’t be too mysterious. The NBC process is filled with contradictions for me. In a profession built on personal relationships and unmeasurable exchanges between people (ie love), NBC requires documentation and a unique kind of technical writing. It’s not really fun and it’s hard to get motivated to do it, especially because it’s mostly lonely work.

There are support groups I’ve joined, and it helps to have others push you along and review your work, but getting started is a solo job. Also it’s all got to be original, so sharing online is a gray area. So my goal is write often and not filter too much. Hopefully the mass quantity will contain glimmers of enough quality reflection to later craft  the necessary narrative.

Component 4 is called Effective and Reflective Practitioner.  The 1st component is a standard multiple choice test at a charming Pearson testing center.  I’ve finished that. The 2nd component was writing up three lessons from a unit to show… I forgot now, I’ll have to look it up! Basically it’s to demonstrate that I’m a “highly effective teacher.”  Sometimes I think am that, but most of the time I feel like I’m struggling just to be a decent teacher.

It is true that some people who earn the NBC start to believe in the hype, even put the ‘NBC” tag on their job title,sort of how the Fulbright inflated my ego a little bit. Lots of people seem to eventually use these accolades to pivot out of the classroom, because let’s face it: classroom teaching is hard, it’s so hard, it is HARD! A sane person would seek relief. Teachers are generally not sane people. We definitely get a buzz from helping light students up, but it can come at a high cost of blood pressure and peace.  As if NBC is not ambitious enough, I’m also considering doing the application for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. It’s similar to NBC so why not go for the $10,000 cash and a sweet certificate signed by President Whoever. Of course it’s doubtful that this will be funded anyway by the current guy and I’m sure I’ll choose climate change as the topic I teach and write about, but…  It would be one more thing to put on a piece paper if the classroom teaching in a big public school gets to be just too much.

The 3rd component was showing two videos of my classroom and then writing about it in a technical way to “prove”, you know, that I’m a highly effective teacher. Can you tell I don’t take it all too seriously? And yet I am very serious about it because it’s very difficult to see all the way through. I’m not sure what the success rate is but it has to be less than 50%.  Also this whole process is expensive, a teacher has to foot the bill in addition to doing all the work. Most people do it for the bump in pay that you get, particularly as it increases your retirement, or so they say.  I confess to not having done the math. To me it’s just a mountain that’s there to climb.

By getting back on the blog horse now, I’m hoping to hold myself accountable and to chip away at Component 4 from now until May when it’s all due.  It may not be a very good or entertaining read, so if you’re not into teacher reflection and possibly complaining as well, don’t subscribe! SPOILERS: I will complain a lot. The thing is it’s not complaining really, it’s just noticing things that are wrong. If you don’t notice things that are wrong, how are you supposed to make the world a better place? So inside every problem is a solution, maybe even a scalable one that could help someone else, maybe even make some extra cash?  So if I ever sound too complaining in the weeks ahead, my rationalization is that in order to problem solve I first have to problem identify.

The problem of Component 4 is pretty big. Beneath all the nice language it boils down to demonstrating with evidence that I make a great effort to learn about my students and use that “data” to sculpt my instruction. Most importantly, I use the knowledge about my students that I’ve collected and acquired to constantly assess and tweak those assessments. It’s all the things good teachers do all the time, but rarely lock down evidence in a systematic process. To that extent, this NBC is a great thing, and that’s the approach I’m trying to take, try to have some fun with it, think out loud in a reflective blog and hope some of it is usable.

This component is a little of the kitchen sink: in addition to learning about the students, and doing assessments like a pro, its to demonstrate lots of Professional Development, community involvement  and something they call a “student need”. I’m still trying to figure that part out. The smart thing to do would be to make these separate elements overlap and relate to each other. Here’s a screenshot from a webinar that tried to explain it.

So today I gave a pretest to my students. I decided to do that just last night, as over the three week holiday I could not bring myself to do much of any work. I get so tired after every day of school, I just wish I could have a few days off after each day to digest the millions of stimuli that were recieved. Today it was great to see my students again, but after the 2nd class I was pretty spent and probably so were the students. We will go it again tomorrow and the next day and the day after that so we there it a do-over if a lesson sucks. It’s like the baseball season.

Even though I barely planned and didn’t do much physical prep, I still got through the day pretty well and am ready for tomorrow. Tuesdays are our “short” days for students and long often miserable PD for teachers. There is a sense of relief on keeping a lesson as lean as possible for a Tuesday. Sometimes we even have “minimum days” where the classes are just 30 minutes long. It’s usually glorified babysitting at the end of the year or on Back to School night or whatever. I tend to go all out on those days and demand “maximum effort”. If it were up to me, I would make classes only 20 minutes long and I would make each student have each class twice a day. So I’d see students in the morning and afternoon. It’s a good idea but would be hard to manage all that moving around.

One theme I’ll be reflecting on a lot is the use of technology in the classroom. I have a class set of Chrome-books and my students are used to having them. Of course they do all kinds of nonsense besides school work whenever they can get away with it. But I’m pretty proficient with Google Classroom and Forms and lots of other ways of getting that “data” we worship. If I’m not using tech then I’m probably spending 30 minutes or more a day hulking over a finecky copy machine, hoarding my reams of paper like cigarettes in prison. I DO prefer that students  write by hand, and I DO have them work in a real composition book. But gathering up those books, reviewing them, giving feedback, making it “count” for the grade obsessed students…. Or make all the copies, hand them out, collect them back, stamp them with the date received, scan them at home, return them, grade them from the scan, enter the grade online (I’ve been doing all that the last three years!).  It’s sooo much work. I did have a digital copy of almost all the student work which really helped me make my parent conferences efficient.

We’ve been promised “adaptive” tests, a test with AI that analyzes answers before it spits out the next question. It’s the dream of everyone to find a magic algorithm for replacing a teacher.  I’m talking about your fools gold, Khan Academy. I’m not worried about it, but at the same time I too could benefit from any of these algorithms. If it’s any good, I might be able to  ever so slightly be “more efficient”. Teachers and nurses are always going to be needed.  In the end, being human is going to be our most valuable trait, so bring on your algorithms. It sure would be nice, though, if we knew more about them. The standardized testing racket is all so mysterious. No one really knows how Smarter Balanced or facebook or google or youtube or even bitcoin supposedly works.

I digress… which is my student’s #1 complaint about me but also what they like best about my class, so deal with it. The most magical algorithm of all would be to grade student writing. No one works harder or suffers more than English Language Arts teachers. I have it easy compared to them. I can cheat on the writing part and science is basically lots of playing with toys. It’s not that hard a sale. But writing…  red-lining, rewriting, rewriting again because it’s junk and you could say it better. These might be dying arts, and English teachers have to deal with that. They might be fervently longing for an algorithm shortcut but no one really thinks these is even a 1% chance of it ever working. When we start reading and writing to satisfy an algorithm, an aspect of our culture will wither away and that’s scary.

If nothing else, at least my ramble here is algorithm-free.  But writing for NBC is very much about pleasing an algorithm, a rubric, even if it’s “scored” by a human being I’ll never meet.  So I’m intending this semester to post blogs here often, to reflect and be as transparent as possible. To remind myself that I DID get it all done today: made the copies in the morning, organized the materials for the magnetic cannon for the 8th graders and the thermal expansion demo for the 6th graders. Came back to rusting scalpels and loose dissection kits from the frog and fetal pig dissections we did on the last days of the previous semester. My room is large but so are my messes and finding stuff that I know I have can drive me crazy.  For Wednesday I have this set of Newton’s Cradles for the 8th graders to play with.

They’re cheap ones that came with the IQWST unit I earned last year. Now I know that those darn things are worse than Slinky’s when they get tangled. After school today I saw one hopelessly tangled and had to throw it in the trash. So in addition to all the demands of teaching and the fun of using toys for physics and chemistry and models and tech etc…  there is the reality that kids break things. Regularly, and it can be expensive.  Tomorrow I’ll tell you what I learned today about why some students race to my class to be the first ones there. Let’s just say it’s not exactly because they can’t wait to get to the learning.   Thanks for reading!