Girls in Math

 Hello!

It's been awhile.  I was just reading "Math with Bad Drawings" and realized that the author graduated from college around the same time I did.  Yet he's here, publishing AMAZING books about math.  And I'm... still teaching, but not contributing to classrooms beyond my own the way I so desperately wanted to at the start of my career.  I'm reflecting on what happened.  Why I stopped blogging, why I felt scared to go to professional development conferences and keep shying away from opportunities to grow beyond my school.  

It's a long sad story with two prongs.  I've never had confidence, in math or anything else.  Any acclaim felt gifted to me as a fluke and thinking about striving for more felt like tempting fate.  Pitting myself against.. well.. mostly men in math my whole life has left me feeling very vulnerable to ridicule (the very fact that I saw it this way is telling).  The result has been a contented career as a teacher, but even in teaching circles I feel like I have little to contribute.  That's prong one.  Prong two is personal devastation.  I was blogging and teaching and humaning pretty well I think from 2009-2014.  Then I fell into the oldest of traps: marriage and parenthood.  I loved my marriage and I loved being a parent.  I guess I still love being a parent (I guess... but it's so much harder than teaching!).  I have been shocked however to discover how patriarchal these two frameworks still are.  I mean, I knew they were, intellectually, but I didn't think it would happen to me!  Right?  I mean... it totally hadn't happened to me at all before... heh.  

My spouse retreated from the responsibilities of adulthood.  Collapsed in on themselves when the work got heavy.  I, in my wisdom, was determined not to be one of those wives who nags.  Because that's demeaning to both of us.  I didn't want to demand too much help, I wanted modern adulthood to be fun.  Who cares if the house is a mess.  We should do math instead!  Sure, go work on the game you're designing, I'll take the kids to the park.  Slowly, I realized that housework, the work work, and the childrearing work had all fallen to me while my spouse was playing.  Then I wasn't fun, I was exhausted.  My spouse got bored and left.  There was a little more to it, as in all stories, and I don't want to fall into a blame trap. I was the one who insisted on doing the work because I was so scared that asking for help put too much of a burden on others.  I played into the system by enabling inaction.  I know also the dynamics can be reversed.  Yet I was so shocked and confused to find myself in this 1950s predicament.  It destroyed what confidence I had left in my career.

So why don't girls do math?  For me, decades of subtle sexism combined with one big sexist torpedo undercut any contribution I felt I could make.  I still teach but watching bright girls year after year choose other disciplines and bright boys thrive STILL in 2022 has me bewildered.  Our math department is chaired by two women.  Yet it's our male part-time colleague who is still pursuing studies at a university.  He has much more confidence than either of us "heads".  When he shares videos on youtube with me of math he's playing with, the majority of those videos are made by men.  My favorite bloggers and writers are men.  

I know women are out there, but just like in math class, I can't hear them.  I took a graduate level math class at my local university the year my son was born (8 years ago) and there were about 30 students, 7 or 8 of them women.  I kept tallies all year of how often women spoke in class compared to men.  I'd add a tic to the top of my paper, one column for men, one for women.   It wasn't until the first semester was finished that my cumulative count for women reached 5 tallies.  The few women in math teaching that I know, respect, and crave to hear more from are entrenched in elementary school math.  This high school math world is bleak.  The teaching of it still feels dominated by patriarchal systems of intellectual one-up-manship.  I feel the touch of patriarchy in our grading systems, in our sequencing, in who talks in class and who doesn't, in how I ask my questions.  Yet again I'm facing a calculus class all boys, and two girls, fighting to be heard or drifting out of the space.  As I did and as I still do.  I have many non-binary and trans students as well, but from my anecdotal observations, the way that students had been forced to identify earlier in their life still often paves their pathways through math. 

After reflection, these thoughts made me want to put words on my blog again.  Hesitant words and clumsy words.  Unfortunately, I think I drifted towards math because my skills in disciplines more welcoming to women are less than shiny including my articulateness... and spelling... and general ability to communicate.  Still thought I feel compelled to try.  Math communication is so tricky, a puzzle I keep wanting to solve.  

I know blogging is old fashioned now and teachers don't seem to be sharing free resources anymore.  That's still what I want to do though.  I want to share what I'm doing in the sliver of an improbable chance that it's of value to someone.  

I'm teaching Calculus, Geometry, Graph Theory and Japanese this year.  I'm very interested in sharing my Graph Theory materials as it's not a topic I've been able to find resources on at the high school level BUT IT'S SO MUCH FUN with high schoolers.  

I'd also like to share the systems I'm playing with, including a new grading system I developed for my school and my ever changing methods for organizing curricula and lesson plans.  Wish me luck!

Sunday Funday: Classroom Organization

I guess I'm behind the times as the Sunday Funday Blog challenge prompt I want to respond to is already a little old, but it inspired me to write a post, so here I am.

I want to write about classroom organization, specifically what to do if you don't have a classroom.  There are some of us nomadic teachers out there, shlepping stuff from classroom to classroom, trying to figure out how to connect to the digital projector with the wrong cords when our laptops only have hdmi ports and the projector only has vga.  There are some interesting and unique challenges you face when you don't have your own space.

Challenge #1: Collecting homework.  If you have to move from one classroom to another, to another without much of a break in between, and you need a teeny bit of time for set-up, you don't have time to go stash homework somewhere.  So if you collect homework in one class, you have to shlep it to another classroom, then if you collect homework in that classroom, your homework shlepping multiplies.  It's impossible to do things like notebook or binder checks, unless you try to check it during class while the kids are occupied, but our periods are only 50 minutes which makes that strategy tricky too.

Solution: I don't collect homework.  I've come up with two ways of assigning homework without needing to collect it.

• Way 1: I assign the homework, show them the answer key in class and while they're grading their own work, I go around and give them a stamp for having it done on time.  I use alphabet stamps and go through the alphabet so at the end of the unit, it's easy for me to see when an assignment is missing.  Pros: the kids grade their own work so are more cognizant of their mistakes.  They can get their questions addressed way more quickly than if I collected work and they ask deeper questions because they can see where their work deviated from mine and catch misconceptions they didn't even know they had.  Cons: Takes time away from instruction.
• Way 2: I post the answer keys to the homework on my class website and the kids check their work on their own and come to class with questions.  Then in class, I choose a problem from the homework and display it.  Then I hand out blank note cards and the kids solve the problem from the homework without their homework or notes in front of them.  If they did the homework and checked their work thoughtfully, recreating the solution should be a breeze.  Pros: They have access to the answer key as they're working through their homework so can be more thoughtful and can come to class with really specific questions.  Having to then reproduce the work in class the next day really reveals if they understood it or not.  Cons: cheating is a possibility but as only the note cards are graded it won't help their score.  I also see a smaller sample of their work so I have less info on their understanding.  

  Challenge #2: Navigating different rooms and layouts is hard.  Some have chalk boards, some have whiteboards all are missing writing implements as teachers hoard them.  Also, all the rooms are laid out differently and in some, it's easy to have students come up and use the board, in others the tables and chairs and bodies are too tightly packed to do much moving around.

Solution: Our school does have a digital projector in each room so I bought myself a document camera and with that, my laptop, and a vga to hdmi converter I can reliably use the projectors.  I write a notes template for the lesson that day and have students take notes from that.  Then I can scan in the template each night and they'll always have access to the notes!!!  I don't have to ever argue with students anymore about notes.  If they didn't take them- go check the website!  If they're absent, go check the website!  Teaching this way also makes displaying student work a breeze.  We all had a great time when I had my algebra 2 students solve a quadratic formula problem on note cards.  One by one I showed the cards via document camera and every answer was different!  There was some laughter and a lot of sheepish "I guess you were right in telling us to be more careful"s.

Challenge #3: Classroom management has always been a struggle for me, and I thought I'd finally come to grips with it a few years ago when I was teaching in California.  Teaching without a classroom makes me feel less valid.  I can't control my space, I'm always puffing from one place to another frantically trying to set things up.  I lose authority this way.  I don't have a solution for this one.  It's just an interesting observation.  I do my best, I try to pretend, but without feeling like I own my space I also don't feel as in command of my students (not that I want to command them- gently trick them into doing what I want without them noticing?)

I'm definitely not as good a teacher when I have to teach this way.  But I'm pleased with the grading system and I'm really enjoying the ethical conversations we're having about how to use answer keys responsibly.  Students have so many resources at their fingers, but don't know how to properly use them.  Even with the answer key sitting in front of him a student today couldn't scan through his paper and compare it to the key.  He kept skipping around or missing details.  There are so many hidden executive functioning skills/deficiencies that are revealed when kids have to grade their own work.