So that “Who Am I?” puzzle was fun. (Summary: there are a few pairs of statements about a number. Each pair contains one true and one false statement. Figure out what the number is)

Part of what made it so was the need to weave back and forth between the pairs. A major simplification would be to make deduction possible from some pair on its own.

For example, what if one pair said: I am a multiple of 3/I am even. Now we would know that the number should be even or a multiple of 3, but not both. Listing: 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16,… A kid might express this strangely, but he will get it: the number is congruent to 2, 3 or 4 mod 6.

Another example: I am less than 10/I am less than 20. Since we need one true and one false, anything 20 and up fails (both false) and anything under 10 fails (both true!). Looks a lot to me like (x-10)(x-20) < 0. Neat.

Another: I am two digits/I am three digits. Just a simple idea to control the search.

Another: I am a multiple of 3/I am a multiple of 9.

So we might try:
1a. I am less than 45
1b. I am less than 16

2a. I am a 2-digit number
2b. I am a perfect square

3a. I am a multiple of 5
3b. I am a multiple of 10

I must have posted this once before, but I forget. And two classes worked this last week. And had fun. So I’ll share:

There are five true and five false statements about the secret number.  Each pair of statements contains one true and one false statement.  Find the trues, find the falses, and find the number.

1a.  I have 2 digits
1b.  I am even

2a.  I contain a “7”
2b.  I am prime

3a.  I am the product of two consecutive odd integers
3b.  I am one more than a perfect square

4a.  I am divisible by 11
4b.  I am one more than a perfect cube

5a.  I am a perfect square
5b.  I have 3 digits

Can you solve this? Can you use it in your classroom?

In mine, I let kids flounder for 10 – 15 minutes (seems like an eternity), quietly dropping little hints… Finally (and finally in one class means after two kids stumbled into the answer, in the other class none had), I said “look, there’s not so many possibilites” and I began listing them (vertically):

Now, I was doing all the work, but saying it out loud, until one, then a few, then half of them were jumping in ahead of me. Every once in a while (and I created four of these, this starts aa, next ab, next ba, next bb) every once in a while I stopped and asked a quiet kid “what next?” — it’s hard to turn off teaching.

And then I asked them to start eliminating impossible variations, and they did. One class got down to 3, the other 4, and then they went back at them, with all this gained knowledge (and technique!)

I tried to keep them (fairly successfully, thank you) from telling each other the answer. And for the next two days I had a trickle of kids finding me in the hall and shouting the answer at me, excited that they’d gotten it.

If I could get the same enthusiasm for adding rational expressions….

Posts here were inconsistent the first two months of the school year. And I completely lost track of the Carnival of Mathematics and Math Teachers at Play. Both were published over the last few weeks, and I’d like to point you towards them.

The Carnival of Mathematics #59 was out longer. Very nice edition. And hosted at The Number Warrior, who does an excellent job.

Math Teachers at Play has scaled back slightly, and the upshot was a nice jump in overall feel. Even though I haven’t been contributing, they included me, which I appreciate (that sum of consecutive integers problem was a good one). And there really is a nice range, and lots of good stuff. If you haven’t visited Math Teachers at Play #20 go take a look now.

Notice, it is “math teachers” but it has not become just elementary, or just high school, or just anything. MTaP has kept some good breadth. And it is lively, and well-illustrated. MTaP is more than the sum of its links: it is a good read in its own right.

Family, teaching in NYC, foreign policy, and family again.

Thanksgiving should be a good day. For everyone, yes, but certainly for me.

In my mother’s extended family (my uncles and aunts, their kids, their kids’ kids, minus her father for decades, and her mother, my grandmother, for just the last three years) – it is the single annual event that we all come to. In my forty odd years, I missed Thanksgiving once – I was in the middle of two months in Turkey – and even then I made a long, long call from Antalya, saying hi to a bunch of those gathered. Likewise, a younger cousin was missing yesterday – but she is working as an au pair in France, and she called.

It is a gathering. Some come early and help cook. Around 1 the rest arrive. Conversation – kids play – a snack or two. We eat, break for more kids playing… some of us go for a walk. Dessert. Games. Turkey soup… We straggle out late. It’s the gathering. It’s our tradition. It’s our day. And my sister tried to make other plans. Ouch. Did some opportunity come up? Maybe, but…. whatever it was, it didn’t happen. But she quietly announced that she would miss next year. Forty years is enough. It’s not that there is something else, it’s that she’d rather be anywhere but. Nasty. I feel worst for my mother.

Thanksgiving was also the day we got to mull over the salvo Bloomberg lobbed at the teachers of New York City. The timing was perfect.

And Thanksgiving also gives us a chance to reflect on the troop build-ups Obama’s about to announce for Afghanistan. More stuff to not be thankful for.

But back to the meal. Our tradition has been to gather. That’s it. And, thinking about it, that’s really perfect for us – a collection of mostly non-practicing Jews, with spouses with a variety of backgrounds, probably the group in its majority agnostic, but a few of us, me included, not superstitious at all. The gathering has been it.

But a few years ago my sister (practicing) got her kids to give thanks at the table. Then she added that each of us should say thanks in turn. I’ve reluctantly participated, or taken a pass. It feels like mandatory prayer, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be coerced into that. (Damned if I do… that’s kind of funny?) Who am I supposed to thank? Anyway, it’s coming up, and I whisper over that I’ll excuse myself, and she says no, I should just pass when my turn comes, and I sit through 20 uncomfortable benedictions, and I’m last and I pass and my she whines at me, out loud, that I should just say something. And she prompts a kid or two to join in.

Having one’s beliefs ignored, and by family? It was hard to put away the bad feeling and relax. I left earlier than I have ever left Thanksgiving before. Awful to say: I won’t miss her next year.

For years I took notes at DAs. What was the point. But I regret not taking notes last week. What follows is from memory. The “quotes” are really paraphrasings.

This was, before I jump in, one of the more discouraging President’s Reports I’ve heard… because we are facing tough times. But it was also one of the most heartening, maybe the most heartening President’s Reports I ever listened to, because the new guy seemed in touch with reality (no matter how tough it was) and showed a willingness to… well, you’ll see.

“How are you this evening/afternoon?” In a few months or a few years, this question will get old. But Michael Mulgrew asks this of each speaker from the floor, and each pauses, decides it is a real question, and answers. It is disarming, humanizing, personalizing.

1. Motion to Authorize our Negotiating Committee to Declare Impasse

This was the biggest item, but almost a non-item. It was not a declaration of impasse, but more like a vote of confidence that the negotiators have been trying, and that the City has been difficult, without filling in any details. Will we declare impasse? I don’t know, but the option is there, and has the support of the DA, if it becomes necessary. Debate was handled well. The objections (look what the fact-finders did to us last time) are real… and must be taken into account. It would of course be better if we were so strong that it was the City that was running looking for assistance. But given the balance of forces, and if negotiations stall, we may need to take this route. At that point, if we get there, we should look at what other options we have (delay a contract, concede on non-concession issues) and make the decision. And we can do so with the confidence of the Delegate Assembly.

2. Race to the Top

I wish I had taken notes. Mulgrew says, we would like the money, but we’re not going to give up core principles to get it, we don’t absolutely need it. I wish I had the wording. In short, he says that if the money comes poisoned, we should pass.

3. Data/Progress Reports

Mulgrew got HS delegates with A’s and D’s to raise their hands, said that teachers in both groups of schools were working hard, mentioned that the DoE was manipulating its own scores by changing cuts, questioned the quality of the data, etc, etc. The Chancellor talked earlier that week about how the schools he created were doing better than the other schools, and Michael’s comment was good, quotable from memory “They are all your schools!”

4. Special Ed/ No Excuses

Update from Carmen Alvarez. Real push for more reporting of violations.

5. Thompson

UFT leadership got called to task for not endorsing Thompson. Fifty-thousand votes in NYC is pretty close, and I can’t promise that the UFT could have made the difference, nor can you tell me that a UFT endorsement would not have made a difference. We could have made it damned close.

So Mulgrew’s response, essentially that the race was not close enough, was wrong. The underlying idea, that we should only endorse winners, was wrong.

But this is the Delegate Assembly, which is sometimes the theater of the Bizarre.

Mulgrew was being challenged on our failed endorsement policy by a leader of ICE – which along with Unity and TJC, did not endorse Thompson.

Only New Action (my caucus) endorsed Thompson, and that was back in June.

And also declares war on discussing policy with the UFT.

“As it turns out our lawyers now tell us after a very close reading of New York’s law, the current law does not actually stop us from using student data to evaluate teachers who are up for tenure this particular school year, because the way it was written it covers only teachers hired after July 1^st of 2008, and those are not up this year.”

“So today, I’ve directed our schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, to ensure that principals actually use student achievement data to help evaluate teachers who are up for tenure this year. It is an aggressive policy…”

A raise, and no harm. Read here.

Taking a look at where readers come from – the primary answer is – IDK. Wandering in? Search engines? Readers? E-mailed links?

But a chunk, maybe 10-20%, leave a trace, and wordpress keeps count. Here’s the top ten all time blog referrers to this site:

The people who made the video also run a website: Rethink Afghanistan.

Story here. I have done no background reading, showed no diligence. Just thought you might like the fast heads up.

(this is the kind of thing that twittering must be good for)

hat tip / link Ken Libby / Schools Matter

This is about the United Federation of Teachers, not the United States. And I’ve started writing this post four or so times since July. Each time would have been different.

In July I would have said that both the old and the new presidents were chosen by the same caucus, so while they look different, there wouldn’t really be much difference. Oh, symbolically a good move putting a teacher in charge.

By the end of August I would have sounded the same tune, but with a little refinement. The new guy has a straightforward way of speaking; you get the sense that you don’t need to run his words through some sort of filter to figure out what he really means. I don’t think I’d have said ‘blunt,’ but certainly ‘direct.’ And he seems to have a better sense of the sentiment in the schools. (Even if that doesn’t translate into policy, it does translate into empathy – and that matters).

After the September DA I would have concentrated on stylistic differences, but ones that I think matter. Meetings start on time? This is going to change how I’ve done business since I first became a delegate.  It’s a little annoying to need to adjust, but the positive, having my time, our time, treated respectfully, that is much greater. And it was shocking after all these years. The auditorium buzzed with surprise as the meeting started. And then there was the way he handled questions/complaints:  when a delegate in deep left field objected to the debate and vote being held while other delegates were standing outside the room, the president just asked them to come in. And then asked staffers to give up seats to delegates. The objection was angry, but the response was calm and respectful. And there was another round of muttering: this was a teacher running a room, and running it fairly well. Not to say there wasn’t unfairness here and there, or mistakes here or there. But 1) this is a huge meeting, and it is tough to get everything right, and 2) anything that was wrong was no worse than what we had before, and 3) a whole lot was better.

October’s DA didn’t change what we saw, but confirmed the style stuff. He handled disagreement in the same way. It looked like his disarming “How are you today?” had become a fixture. Side note: I know it uses up precious time, but I enjoy the reaction, from those who are shocked (how can you be shocked, he asks everybody) to those who pause and answer thoughtfully. He doesn’t get mindless “fine thank you”s in response. Now, he was wrong on the Thompson debate, his whole caucus was. The first time I saw him get flummoxed was when someone tried to call the question before he’d had a chance to call on a Brooklyn CL with prepared comments, but his predecessor handled the same problem in the same way loads of times. And when he went for a pro-Thompson comment and a delegate made a marginally relevant speech instead, he looked for another pro-Thompson comment. Extremely fair (there, unfortunately, was not precedent for such a fair move.) So he let some discussion run, and he kept a good tone in the room. I wanted to write then, but hesitated. I was pretty sure that what we were seeing was real. But after just two DAs….

So I’m leaving out this week’s DA, saving some of that for another post. And I’ve concentrated on style. And on style alone, big improvement. The DA’s are manipulated? Sure. Like before? Not even close. Is our time being better used? Yes. Has the level of respect risen? Absolutely. These things are real, and they matter. And now – and I’ll add in some November stuff – now most of us sense that these changes are real. It’s a small change in culture, and it is completely welcome, completely positive.

But does this translate into changes in the work of the union? Are there other changes going on as well? Policy? Follow through? Practice?

We need to come back to this.

borrowed from Tuttle SVC – a great education blog by Tom Hoffman from Providence (if you like this, go and read more of his stuff)

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Tennessee — eligible for $150 – $250 million from RttT:   The city school board is expected to sign an agreement today with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that will funnel more than $90 million to Memphis for a plan to change how teachers are hired, placed, evaluated and retained.Pennsylvania — eligible for $200 – $400 million: In what officials said would be the largest grant ever made directly to the Pittsburgh Public Schools, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has offered the district $40 million for sweeping initiatives to maximize teacher effectiveness.Florida — eligible for $350 to $700 million: TAMPA — The finish line is in sight for the Hillsborough County School District, which agreed Tuesday to accept a $100 million teacher effectiveness grant if the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation offers it.And remember…  AUSTIN – For the $300 million spent on merit pay for teachers over the last three years, Texas was hoping for a big boost in student achievement.But it didn’t happen with the now-defunct program, according to experts hired by the state.

Second verse, same as the first…

Not good.

1. What do they measure?

I really don’t get why the whole world’s not insistently asking this question. I guess that the A, B, C, D, F is so familiar, that we assume that the reports are measuring how good the schools are. But pretty clearly, they are not.

The scores are an ugly, unjustified mix of the Learning Environment scores (themselves never fully explained or justified), graduation rates, credit accumulation rates, attendance rates, regents pass rates… Each school is measured against the City as a whole, and against a select group of comparable schools – the “peer horizon.” In some categories, kids have extra value/weighting if they are in the lowest third of the school, if they are poor (?), if they are in Special Education, if they are ELLs. With the extra weightings, it looks like the scores go from an arbitrary minimum to an arbitrary maximum (roughly 30 to 105). There is no justification for which numbers correspond to which letter, although they comment that they changed the cuts. Why? Arbitrary.

45% of the high schools got As. What does that mean? It means they set the minimum score for A at 45%. Nothing more.

They claim to be measuring progress towards on-time graduation. I do not think they are actually measuring anything.

2. What effect do these reports have?

High score? Principal gets a bonus.

B, C, D or F? Quality Review (a sort of colonoscopy for the school, but the “doctors” don’t have licenses, and no anaesthesia)

Lousy grade? They threaten to break up or close down or shake up or replace a school. But they only shut what they want to shut. Schools with bad grades stay open. Schools with good grades are closed.

3. What effect do the effects have?

Nervousness. The threats against schools with poor grades make teachers, parents, admins all nervous. That’s Bloomberg’s style – he ran his business this way.

Cheating. Saraceno from Lehman HS got caught, but only because her own staff turned her in. But the massive pressure on credit accumulation, and the massive wink (wink!) towards credit recovery has led some principals to give away massive amounts of credit, to boost progress report scores. Don’t ask, don’t tell, the DoE knows this is happening and chooses not to look. Wink wink. The academic lowest third of your school counts double. At 9 credits the kid counts against you, at 10 they count for you. For you can mean a bonus (at least $7k), against you can mean anything from DoE hassles to getting shut. Which principal, of those not already handing out credits like candy, isn’t thinking about it?

4. Increasing graduation rates

The “accountability” system that includes Progress Reports might raise graduation rates – but not by improving achievement. They might just get principals to award so many bogus and half-bogus credits that kids who are not ready to be graduated from high school are handed meaningless diplomas.

5. Who?

This project is so far removed from the schools and the reality in the schools, you have to wonder who’s running the show. I’m guessing non-educators are central to this Sabremetric stew. But the educators who’ve survived Bloomberg/Klein are, at the top, an ethically unimpressive bunch; I wouldn’t be shocked if former educators had some involvement. I would be shocked if it turned out that any current educator played a role.

6. Typo

I go to nysed.gov to get information from the New York State Education Department. Our DoE got the name wrong on the front page of every single progress report.

New York City Department of Education

New York State Education Department

They got it wrong last year, too.

That’s zero progress.

The United Federation of Teachers is negotiating with New York City and its Department of Education for a new contract.

The union negotiators work with a larger group of union members. There is a committee of 300, and then a smaller group of 30 that sits in on negotiations. A member of that smaller committee explains what the process looks like on the New Action website.

Why don’t we have neighborhood high schools in the Bronx? Why no zoned high schools?

School choice in Manhattan often (not always) means good choice. But school choice in the Bronx is mostly a joke.

Why is nobody responsible for providing each kid for a reasonable default option, if they just want to go to a regular high school?

“Community Schools” are an interesting idea, but shouldn’t we have neighborhood schools first?