The Math Team

Today we had content team meetings, meaning I met with all the other math teachers.  Instead of meeting at the school, we instead went to one of the math teachers' houses.  So I went to a new area of Boston, which was cool, but again I was awkward because I was the first one there.  I even thought about this possibility and purposely sat in the T station longer so I wouldn't be the first one.  I try so hard...  Anyway, I spent some time talking to the math teachers until finally everyone arrived.  Of course, my mentor teacher was almost an hour late because she got into a small accident on her way.  (Don't worry, she's fine.)  She commutes from out of state, and she's from New York, so she only got her first driver's license last year.  She was also the first to leave, because she wanted to beat the traffic on her way home.  Anyhow, I was generally pretty useless today, but I learned a lot by listening.  And I ate a lot of snacks.  :)

First they reflected on what they did and didn't do well last year, and then they brainstormed what they wanted to do better this year.  They all had really good points.  Then they had to apply the school-wide goals for the year and figure out how to apply them to the math team, and then they had to develop specific math team goals.  The whole school is very much into setting goals and making sure they improve every year.  They are very reflective and self-aware, and I am constantly amazed at how well they all work together and collaborate.  I am sure that my high school teachers had meetings and professional development days that I was unaware of, but I cannot imagine them all being quite so cooperative.  None of them appear either very stubborn or very lazy.  They all make suggestions, and they all receive them openly and genuinely consider whether or not the idea makes sense.   I just hope I can live up to their expectations and be equally as cooperative and innovative.  The chair of the math team is extraordinarily organized and productive, so he was good at keeping us on track when we got distracted by other things.  Also, one of the teachers had to bring his three-year-old daughter with him today, and I realized that all of math teachers are married, and most of them have children.  I feel so young.  :)

One thing that was funny was that they had to set very specific benchmarks for their goals, so they decided that they way they will measure one of their goals, which is redefining some of the curriculum, is by seeing if I (as a future first-year math teacher) find the curriculum to be clear and easy to use in my instruction.  So I will be the one to declare whether or not they met that goal.  I guess that means they trust me a little?

In the afternoon, they went over their class lists and discussed ways of evening out the number of students in each class, because some classes were as small as 15 and others as big as 30.  (I know, 30 was not big at my high school, but there are fewer students in total here than in my graduating class alone.)  They also went over every student to make sure they were in the correct level course.  I was amazed at how well they knew all the students.  They knew without referencing anything which students had not already passed the MCAS and which students had low skill levels and which combinations of students would be behavior problems.  Of course, I've never met a single student, but I still learned how much every teacher truly pays attention to the individual needs of every single student.  I just hope I will be that alert as a teacher.

So also, I will be helping/observing the development of the Math 2 curriculum.  They just recently changed some things around, so some of the curriculum needs to be redeveloped.  Furthermore, my mentor is the only teacher teaching Math 5, so it will really just be the two of us rewriting the curriculum that she lost last year.  So that will indeed be an adventure.  I don't even know if I remember calculus.  Oops.  I know that a lot of the people who intern here end up staying and getting jobs here, so they must be pretty good interns.  I just wonder if I'll be a good enough intern and if I'll be able to keep up with everything and learn to teach well quickly.  I also worry that no other school that I'd actually get a job in is as highly functional as this one.  I can't imagine there are this many public schools that utilize so much collaboration and reflection and support.  I can't decide if it would be better to teach in a crappy school, so I'd be prepared for the absolute worst.  I guess I'll just hope for a job in a relatively good school.  I think it's also important though that this is a high functioning school, but it is not a school full of students from wealthy families.  It is still an excellent socioeconomic representation of the city of Boston, so by good school, I do not mean a wealthy one.  I mean a public school that does a good job of serving its students.  Anyway, I learned a lot from the math team today.  Maybe I should review some of my math so I can be more helpful next week.  :-/