Takeaways From Teaching High School Math For 2 Months

My Experience

The timing could not have been better. A position for grade 9 math and two grade 12 calculus courses was posted a week after completing my master’s degree. The position was at Franco-Cité high school, where I did my first teaching internship. I loved the school and I was stoked to be able to land a long-term offer instead of having to supply teach a new class every day.

I loved my experience. It flew by. It confirmed that teaching was a good fit for me. It was eye-opening to see experience how much work goes into being a great high school teacher. I barely had to do any preparation and still found myself having to dedicate significant chunks of time to work outside of school hours. I think it is crucial for new teachers to temporarily make peace with mediocrity and things being good enough. This iterative approach is the key to optimizing for the long haul.

Takeaways

Course Design

1. Teachers should not have to continually reinvent the wheel. It does not make sense that new teachers have to prepare entire courses from scratch when these courses have been taught thousands of times. I got lucky. The math department at my school believes in the power of sharing their lesson plans. As a result, I got to spend most of my time thinking of ways to better deliver and improve the lessons.
2. Backward planning is superior to traditional planning. The steps below are from this article.
   • TRADITIONAL LESSON DESIGN:
     1. Step 1: Identify a topic or chunk of content that needs to be covered.
     2. Step 2: Plan a sequence of lessons to teach that content. 
     3. Step 3: Create an assessment to measure the learning that should have taken place in those lessons.
   • BACKWARD LESSON DESIGN:
     1. Step 1: Identify what students should know and be able to do by the end of the learning cycle.
     2. Step 2: Create an assessment to measure that learning.
     3. Step 3: Plan a sequence of lessons that will prepare students to successfully complete the assessment.
3. Having a plan of what needs to be learned during the course is a must. Here are a few pointers.
   • You can share your plan with your students and their parents to increase transparency and autoregulation.
   • Many teachers create and share their long-term plans using Google Sheets or a Google Site. This allows them to add links to all relevant materials.
   • A bad plan is better than no plan. Don’t be scared to modify the dates as needed. Students may learn a topic faster or slower than expected. Be water. Adapt to the current situation with the end goal of maximizing students’ success and well-being.
   • Expect the unexpected. Build in 15-20% wiggle room in your dates. It’s much easier to add content near the end of the course than trying to cram material. For example, there was an unexpected storm that took out the power grid for a week.
4. Spiral education aligns with my learning philosophy. One way to sprinkle some spiralling in your course design is to add one or two problems from previous lessons to each homework. We could also design a spaced repetition system with a daily problem to start each lecture.

Class Management

1. Student phone usage was out of control. I had some students who said that they enjoyed the lectures and found the content meaningful but still struggled to stay off their phones. Most students managed to keep their phones away during instruction but failed to do so during work timeslots. For grade 12s, I opted to let them decide how they wanted to use the class time. I tried to engage the students on their phones by asking them more questions. For grade 9s, I had to negotiate with them a no phone while teaching policy (with one warning per day). The current school policy is that phone usage in class is left at the discretion of each teacher.
2. There’s much wisdom to be drawn from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Sun Tzu’s Art of War. I believe there is a way to teach and manage your classroom in a dance-like fashion. It is easy to get caught in the swamp. It’s much harder to let things settle by practicing non-action. Using the minimal amount of force necessary has also proved to be effective when managing a classroom. Setting clear expectations combined with clear instructions and a favourable classroom environment prevents many issues before they arise.
3. I stopped answering lazy questions for my grade 9 students. It is easier to answer such questions than not to. However, by always answering impulsive thoughtless questions the teacher enables a dependence relationship that cripples the student in the long term.
4. Automated parent communication is a good practice. This is especially true for students who are struggling in the course.
5. It’s useful to print an entire unit’s worth of notes and distribute it on the first day instead of printing and distributing them before each lesson. I noted the same thing during my second internship. Printing everything at once saves tons of time and headaches in the long run. It also gives students a better idea of the trajectory of the course. Students tend to like structure. If printing the entire unit is not an option, it still helps to distribute the sheets before each lecture. This eliminates a window for students to take out their phones or disturb the classroom. You can also ask the students who show up early to pass the sheets for you. I have observed that students like to be given responsibility. It is a great way to build trust.
6. Don’t wait till the last second to print your photocopies. Unexpected issues with the printers were common. This is another reason to prepare an entire unit worth of notes in advance.

Instruction

1. I have found that fill-in-the-blanks type notes work well for math. All the examples and key terms are left blank. The teacher can post the filled notes on the online long-term plan to encourage students to pay attention in class while benefiting from the benefits of taking notes.
2. Students appreciated when I dedicated the first 5 minutes of a lecture to reviewing the previous concepts. It seems to help them see the big picture of the course and to help them build on their previous knowledge.
3. The teacher should focus their efforts on helping the bottom third of their class. I found it useful to split my destreamed grade 9 class in two after demonstrating a concept. The majority of students seemed bored and were ready to start the problem while a few others looked lost. It worked well to extend the lecture component for only the students who needed it.
4. Asking specific students questions worked better than asking the entire class.
5. The flow of the lectures always went smoother when I wrote down a timestamped plan for the lesson on the board. Students like to know where they’re going.

Evaluation

1. Report card comments are a pain. It is much better to write them throughout the semester than to write them from scratch. Slow burns are better in the long term than heavy lifts. Using an automated customized comment generator may be a good starting point.
2. Hard tests, easy marking. I like this philosophy. The students also seem to respond well to this approach. They benefit from the challenge of high-level teaching and evaluations but don’t get punished too harshly.
3. Google Forms assessments are great to save on marking but are worse to provide feedback and get a sense of how the class is doing.
4. The grade 9 students wrote their provincial math test online. It seemed to work well while being more efficient for analytics than marking the paper copies.
5. Marking one page or one question at a time worked well to reduce bias in marking.

Technology & Tools

1. Some useful tools:
   • Pear Deck: This is like Kahoot for math teachers when integrated with Equatio.
   • You can buy kits to teach the surface area and volume of solids. For example, you can make the students guess how many conic scoops of rice fits in a cylindrical container of the same height. Students enjoy guessing and verifying their hypotheses experimentally.
   • Desmos and GeoGebra were used on a near daily basis. GeoGebra came in clutch to visualize vectors and planes in 3D. Desmos was superior for quick visualizations and row-reducing matrices.
   • Google chats were a better alternative to email for quick communications during the classroom.
   • Classroom Screen was useful to display the time on the big screen during a test. It was also useful to set timers when giving 5 minutes for students to solve a problem.
   • Google Classroom is pretty sweet. This is especially true if your district uses the Google Suite.
2. Striving for a paperless classroom is a worthwhile goal. That said, many students report that they already spend too much time staring at screens. Not all schools have the privilege to lend a Chromebook to all students. Furthermore, having to use a phone or computer to do homework is an invitation to use the technology for other usages. A school-only device may be needed to increase user engagement. More reading gets done on a Kindle than on an iPad because the iPad offers other more passively stimulating activities.
3. Smart Boards are becoming obsolete. It’s hard to tell what is going to be the next big thing. I have found that a Surface Pro + TV/projector setup is very effective. Microsoft also sells casting devices to go wireless if needed. I find this setup to be a more versatile and cost-effective alternative to something like the 85″ Surface Hub 2S or Smart Boards.