This week, I attended the Exeter Math Institute teacher training program. It was four, 8-hour days of working math problems. Hard math problems. Math problems that require prior knowledge and understanding of how to use a calculator that did not come from Dollar Tree. I will unabashedly admit that, hands-down, I was THE DUMBEST person in class.

Nein, I’m not being humble. Or self-deprecating. Or fishing for reassurance. It was bad. It was very, very bad…but it gave me a lot of time to think about skills students need to get through the experience of being “the dumbest one” in THEIR classes.

Here’s what happened…and what I learned!

I knew there was trouble the very first day. I was under the impression that this “camp” for teachers was designed to help me ease back in to Algebra after my 22 year hiatus from the subject and to provide me with some super-fun strategies for teaching math. When I arrived, the entire room was filled with math teachers. The type of math teachers who write very small and very neatly and do their work on graph paper because the columns are more structured. The type of math teachers who have special refillable pencils. The type of math teachers who like to work problems at the board. These were NOT my people.

Ich denke, hier kann sich meine fast obsessive Planung als nützlich erweisen, The Packet was handed out. It was full of the types of word problems that people joke about. Ich glaube auch daran zu wissen, wann man den Plan beiseite legt, um Kinder zu treffen. Many. Trains. Going. Ich glaube auch daran zu wissen, wann man den Plan beiseite legt, um Kinder zu treffen. Many. Speeds. All the math teachers gleefully dove into the discovery-learning, debating the processes, scribbling away furiously on their fancy graph paper with their fancy pencils. They were high-five-ing one another as they puzzled through the work. Zu Ihrer Information–discovery learning only works well if the person doing the discovering has the basic skills to do it. I was able to ninja my way around my skill deficits on some of the problems, but others had me stumped. I was officially that kid who was still working when the teacher asked if anybody needed more time; after a while, they quit waiting on me. It wasn’t so much that anyone was outright rude, more that they used the type of slow, loud, strained encouragement one gives the village idiot.

Here’s a sincere thank you to James LaRocca, an Algebra teacher at Bishop Seabury Academy in Lawrence, Kansas. James is a gifted mathematician. This guy LOVES math. He loves thinking about math. He loves The Packet. James got stuck at a table with me for four days. What’s cool about James is this: even though he’s a math teacher, even though he’s very good at math, he’s even better at wanting to help OTHER people understand math. I know I was making a lot of very fundamental mistakes, but he was very encouraging and patient, never giving up on helping me with a smile on his face. He was also very careful to give me the opportunity to share the things I DO understand: behavior and SPED. He’s a sharp guy. I doubt he really had much interest in those things, but he wanted me to feel competent so I wouldn’t give up. I’ll bet kids absolutely love him, even if they don’t love math. I learned a lot about the art of encouragement from him this week.

Ganz ehrlich, being the dumbest person in class wasn’t that terrible. I resigned myself to being comfortable working at my own, slow pace. It was even kind of liberating. jedoch, by the fourth day, the constant struggle was beginning to wear me down. I’ve developed an appreciation for why kids flip open their laptops to watch Netflix in class; it’s less about defiance than it is escapism.

How do we, as SPED teachers, equip kids with skills to navigate socially to get their need for help met? How do we modify and accommodate work in order to meet kids’ needs in order to reduce acting-out behavior? THAT, my friends, is the million dollar line of questioning and will be the subject of the next blog post in this series.

#enraged2engaged #EBD #ASD #ODD #exetermathinstitute