The All-Lettuce Diet (Accounting 101)

On Friday I only see half of my classes. Last week, I talked about budgeting with my classes, so this week I gave the same lesson to the rest of my classes. It worked well for a few reasons:

1. Every time I mention money, students for some reason start listening to what I'm saying.
2. Budgeting is an important life-skill that I wish I would have learned and practiced repeatedly in school, and my students especially need to hear it.
   
3. We've been talking about unit rates, and there are countless applications in budgeting. If rent is $800 for 1 month (unit rate), multiply by 12 months in a year to find what we'll pay annually.
4. I didn't have to prepare much at all. Booyah.
   

We started by looking at a chart of different income averages based on educational level. Next, we used the chart to figure out how much money you would earn in 50 years depending on your education. I made sure students noticed the positive correlation between education level and income level.

But during the first class, a student commented, "So I could drop out right now and make $15,000?" which led to a good discussion about averages, since he probably wouldn't make that much right away, even if he was able to find a job as a 12-year-old.

...but yeah, you're right, you could drop out right now and over the course of your life you could earn about $15,000 each year, on average. You could earn more if you work hard, and earn less if you don't, but this is the average. That's a lot of money, right?

A few nods and "yeah"s. A hand in the air: "Well it's not a lot if you're old."

Did you just call me old? ...what do you mean, does the value of money change when you get older?

"There's more things you have to pay for. Bills and stuff."

Ahh, I guess you're right. With your groups, let's come up with a list of things you'd need to spend your hard-earned $15,000 on in order to survive.

There is no better feeling than walking around a room full of kids that are all falling into my trap of learning what I want them to learn, meanwhile they're all under the impression that they're the ones who came up with the idea.

I asked for a student to come up to the board and keep a list of everything we came up with, while students took turns sharing their ideas. "Shelter." "Food." "Water." "Light Bills." "Car." "Clothes."

Hmm, do you need clothes or do you want clothes?

"Need!" "Want!" "Both!"

What do you mean 'both'?

"Well, like, I need clothes, but I WANT cool clothes."

Ah, ok. Well, let's make another list of some of the things we want to spend our money on.

And so it went for a while. We came up with two nice lists. The Pre-AP class even added "charity" to their "Want" list. I got to drive home the point that we'll need to pay for all of the things on our "Need" list before we can think about looking at the "Want" list.

Another of my favorite moments in every class was when we got to discuss the big item missing from the "Need" list: taxes.

How much of your $15,000 do you think will go to taxes to pay for schools, roads, police, firefighters, and so on?

"$150?" More. "$200?" More. "$500!?" More. Alarmed looks: "$1000?"

It will probably be at least $2500 each year for taxes. It's not all that hard to do, but I love blowing their minds.

So we started our budget by listing the income, subtracting taxes and looking at our Net Income.

We worked out how to use unit rate to calculate yearly rent as a class, if we know how much we'll pay each month. I gave the students a few different choices for rent, depending on how nice of an apartment they want. After we subtracted rent from our net income, the amount left over was already looking tragically small.

Next, students worked in groups to come up with an annual food budget. Some students arbitrarily chose an amount for each month, while other students tried to figure out how much each meal would cost each day. In my Pre-AP class, one group was using $100 per month. I asked them what they would eat each day. When a few of the girls started listing off some meal ideas and recognizing that $100 wouldn't cut it, I asked another student what he would eat each day. "Lettuce."

Once they had an annual amount for food, students subtracted it from what they had left, and most had already run out of money.

Well we still haven't paid for the other things we need. What can we change? Can we get rid of the food? "No." Can we get rid of our apartment? "No." Can we just stop paying taxes? "No."

So what can we change?

"Income?"

What is something we could do to help change our income?

"More education."

In the Pre-AP class, students were asking a lot of questions about the different degrees listed on the chart. They asked about different professions and what kind of education they required. At the end of class we had time to summarize.

What are a couple things we can take away from this activity? Something you learned or something that surprised you.

"It's important so we can make sure we pay for the things we need so we can still do some of the things we want."

"We can appreciate what our parents do more and not get upset if they can't always give us everything we want."

Piano Teach For America

Today between my 6th and 7th period classes, while I was standing at the door waiting for my Pre-AP class to pile in, an 8th grader approached my room and was saying my name. Non-7th-graders knowing my name isn't incredibly uncommon, but it does still freak me out a little.

As far as I've been able to tell, somewhere in the distance between 7th and 8th grade the shoulders get broader, the voice gets deeper and quieter, the movements get somehow even slower, and the personalities get a little more defined/less ridiculous.

"Mr. Camann?"

Yeah.

"Can you give me piano lessons?"

What? Do you play piano?

"Yeah... a little."

You mean you play in music class? Or what do you play?

"Well, mostly classical. It helps me relax."

Hmm, nice. Do you have a piano at home?

"Yeah. Well... a keyboard. Sometimes I stay after school and play the piano in the library."

I shooed him off to class, but not before we decided to meet for a little while after school on Thursdays. After dismissal, I was cutting through the office to get back to my classroom to plan when I happened to glance through the window into the library. There he was, playing the piano.

I stopped in and asked him to keep playing whatever he had been playing. For Elise. Rough, but right away I could tell he had a great ear. Then he pulled some Japanese sheet music from some video game out of his backpack and described the way he had been trying to learn it. He had the right hand pretty solid, but the left hand rhythm was tricky enough on it's own, let alone putting the two together.

After watching him play and talking to him for a couple minutes, I could tell pretty much where he was at. But I spent a little time breaking down the rhythm of the left-hand in order to get a better idea of what kind of music theory knowledge he had. I found a scrap of paper and diagrammed a measure by splitting it into 16ths. Then we plotted when the notes hit and tried clapping the rhythm while counting.

I hesitated. I was beginning to get that little knot of guilt. Here was a kid who likes relaxing by playing some music. He has his own little method of discovery that has been working for him, but obviously has a ceiling. I instantly had ideas of how to guide him through that ceiling... but at what cost? In 5 minutes, I had reduced his relaxation tool to an exercise in clapping.

He must have sensed my hesitation because he nodded at the scrap of paper:

"This is going to make it so much easier."

Sweet. I began piecing together some of the next steps in my mind. I will find some music that is still challenging but that he'll be able to play through with both hands. We'll work on reading music using familiar songs at first because his ear seems pretty developed. Reading rhythms, dynamics, pedal control... eventually the finer parts of music theory and then I'll open up the world of songwriting. Booyah. I felt my mind racing, so I chuckled and asked him.

So, what do you want to learn?

"Everything you can teach me."

Good answer.

Sub + Space Cadet = C-Squared

About time for an update, don't you think? I can't believe that I've been teaching for over eight weeks. Even stranger is the fact that I can't tell if that feels far too long or far too short.

Another Lanyard

Last Thursday I attended the Texas Association of Bilingual Education conference (TABE) at the Westin in the Galleria Mall here in Houston. The glitz of the mall is in ridiculously stark contrast to my school. The conference was actually pretty sweet - I was able to check out a couple sessions about math education, plus I got a ton of free stuff from the booths in the expo. I could have gone without the constant, light Central-American elevator music that was piped throughout the Westin, but oh well. Que sera, sera.

Being out of the classroom was an experience of total physical, emotional, and mental relaxation. I found myself in a room full of people that I wasn't legally responsible for. I was not speaking and not standing the entire day. At one point, a hotel worker came in during a session and tried getting the speaker's attention about something. It took a second, but then I realized I didn't have to respond or react or even realize what was happening, so I just leaned back and looked at the pictures in a brochure about a software package that my school would not be able to afford. Bliss.

Substitution Cypher

Prologue to the blissful day off: the frenzy of preparing to miss school.

A multitude of things have surprised me about teaching. Case in point, the art of substitute teaching. First of all, substitutes are saints - make no mistake. But substitute teachers should not be teaching new material to students. I never noticed this when I was growing up, and I don't know why it surprised me so much. They may know nothing about math. They probably know nothing about what my kids know about math or should know about math. Since I know nothing about the person coming into my room and will likely never see him or her again, I can't make any assumptions.

How can I boil down my school, my students, class schedule, lunch procedures, dismissal procedures, restroom procedures, nurse forms, and on and on... into a document that any person can pick up blind and survive a day in my classroom? What can I plan that my students will (1) take seriously or care about at all, (2) know how to do, (3) not cheat on, and (4) be able to finish more or less in 55 minutes with no direction, and (5) maybe actually benefit from?

Missing a day of instruction is equivalent to forfeiting a baseball game. Sure there are 162, but when the season could be decided by one, and when momentum plays such a big role, every inning is magnified. Cheesy baseball analogy over.

It was a little nerve-wracking to leave my students in the hands of someone else, but it turns out that everyone survived.

One day, I hope this happens.

Give him the stick, DON'T GIVE HIM THE STICK

The range and intensity of emotions that I go through during a given day surprises me, but (i think) I'm pretty good at staying at an even keel externally. It isn't uncommon to momentarily feel like the best teacher in the world and the worst teacher in the world during the same day (or even the same class.) Though both are far from true, I think that's just one of the perks of teaching. So now we can add "complete emotional instability" to "free post-its" and "10% off at Borders."

I promise to share more specific examples of hilarious emotional outliers, but for now, one student that never ceases to provide both is JL. He is the squirreliest kid in the world. I vividly remember my mental reaction when I first encountered him during my first day. "For real? This is a real human being? How am I going to do this?" I wish I had the words to describe, but the English language can't contain him. JL is interesting and ultimately lovable because he's never trying to be a complete space-cadet - he just is. He doesn't concern himself with what other kids or teachers think about him because he's too busy inadvertently being the biggest spazz in Houston. And that's at least a little admirable, isn't it?

Other teachers have wondered aloud what movies are currently playing in JL's mind. One teacher even assigned another student to be the JL-Manager for the day. That is, to sit close to him and poke him every several seconds whenever he got off task. Apparently this JL-Manager type of thing is frowned on in the teaching business, but knowing the kid, I can see completely where the teacher was coming from.

JL is always doing one of 7 things:

1. a strange arm stretch that involves spastically flapping his arms behind his head
2. searching frantically in his backpack for a pencil or a phantom homework assignment or some other unidentified object
3. holding a piece of paper, pencil, or object mere centimeters away from his thick glasses, presumably trying to make sense of it
4. absentmindedly spinning or flinging his pencil, eraser, or papers on his desk until they ultimately land somewhere other than on his desk
5. leaning on his chair in a way that I previously thought was physically impossible. I'm talking up on one chair leg, with both knees on the seat... He's like a 12-year-old Cirque du Soleil.
6. putting objects (pencils, id badge, etc) in or around his mouth
7. asking "we had homework in this class?" "am I in trouble for not having my homework?" or any question on a completely different wavelength than the current topic
   

Discovering Pythagoras

Today I had the best moment of the year during my Pre-AP class. It was at a perfectly quick pace (just barely beyond the comfort of previous understanding), it was mostly student-guided, and the few words I spoke met their mark perfectly.

Students worked through a packet that I stole from the 8th grade math teacher, who stole it from some other teacher. The packet guides students toward discovering the Pythagorean Theorem. By the bottom of the second page, students come up with "a squared plus b squared equals c squared" on their own, without yet realizing it's significance.

I basically stayed out of their way, except to give them the amazing push of time constraints ("work with your group on questions 9 and 10. I'm setting the stop-watch at 3 minutes. go."), and to come back together occasionally and summarize and synthesize their progress ("so if you're telling me this square has an area of 25 units, what would we have to do to find out the length of one of its sides?").

It was challenging, but not so much that students shut off. The lesson progressed beautifully and I think the students could feel the excitement culminating. At one point I even said, "I don't know if you guys can tell, but I'm loving this." Right when I had them on the hook, based solely on truths that they had discovered, I pointed to the equation that they came up with and unveiled it as "Pythagorean's Theorem."

"So you've shown me that whenever we have a right triangle, we know that the square of the two legs adds up to the square of the hypotenuse... This is what Pythagoras discovered twenty-five hundred years ago, and you discovered it in 40 minutes today. This is a big moment. You opened a door today that you will be able to use for the rest of your lives. And once you see the things we can do with it, it's going to blow your mind."

There must have been an urgency in my voice because the students were beaming and burst into a round of applause. It couldn't have been scripted any better, and it all came together organically, almost magically. As challenging as teaching has been, these little rewards are amazing.

Open Mic Requests

This Thursday from 7-11, my favorite coffee shop, Coffee Groundz, is hosing an open mic competition. Winner receives a gift card... and I want it.

The really cool thing about this place is that they will broadcast the open mic live online.

I've decided that I haven't played much music lately, and the best way to force myself to play is to tumble headfirst into a performance.

If you're in the greater Houston area, come on Thursday, enjoy the drink specials, and cheer me towards that gift card. If you're not in the area, check it out online.

Either way, if you're reading this and have a song in mind that you'd like to hear, leave a request in the comments and I'll try to make it happen.

Some options that I'd probably be able to dust off by Thursday include: New Kind of Magic, Forgetful, Monsters in My Head, Dirt and Water, or No Better Time to Go

Andy Camann - Significance

Andy Camann - Significance
He turns, there's something wrong, he
Forgot to lock the door.
That's all, it took him twenty
Seconds, nothing more.
All day he's fifty feet behind where he'd be otherwise
But now he'll cross her path and she'll finally catch his eyes.

It's simultaneously the least significant
And most significant occurrence
In the history of the universe.

Black ice, she crosses over
Double yellow lines.
Her life, in bits and pieces
Rushes through her mind,
Like some guy she knew in college seven years ago.
She braces for an impact that he will never know.

It's simultaneously the least significant
And most significant occurrence
In the history of the universe.

New calm, washes over,
Laying back his head.
New dawn, rises over
A land of doubt and dread.
As he realizes that every moment, every day
Every last decision that he has ever made

Is simultaneously the least significant
And most significant occurrence
In the history of the universe.

Eat Fractions, Sleep Fractions, Drink Coca Cola

I'm currently sitting in class while my students are taking their Unit 2 Test on Fraction and Decimal Operations. I can tell that my students would be fine if they never saw another fraction for the rest of their lives, and I can't entirely blame them. Lucky for all of us, we'll get a temporary change of pace with integer operations and exponents in the next few weeks.

Let's revisit the Great Lumber Problem we looked at last week. Since we were looking for 2/3 of 4 1/4, we'd find the answer by multiplying 2/3 x 4 1/4, which is 2 5/6 feet of lumber (or 2 feet and 10 inches - or as Adam put it, 34 inches).

While working on the problem in class, I was surprised by some of the reactions and strategies. I wasn't surprised by the universal instinct to divide. We're cutting the piece of wood, so everyone wanted to subtract or divide. Nobody thought to multiply. This whole idea of the word "of" meaning "multiplying" - even if you're trying to get a smaller number - is an initially strange one, and I distinctly remember the light bulb clicking on sometime in middle school and changing my life forever. It's one of those 7th grade moments that NEEDS to happen, just like the awkward encounters at the dance or the debilitating bouts of acne.

No one knew what lumber was. No one. One student made an attempt, "I drew a piece of string. It's like a piece of string, right?" Wrong. Another was closer, "It's like a big piece of metal." Nope.

Once I opened their eyes to the world of lumber, they thought I was some kind of wooden god. I drew a piece of wood and referred to it as a "2 by 4" and they stopped me. "I thought it was 4 1/4 feet long?" My students might not be picking up on the math, but darned if they don't know a thing or two about lumber now.

"Jeez Mister, how come you know so much about wood?"