Somebody out there has a 1,400-day Duolingo streak and still panics when a waiter in Madrid asks a follow-up question. The owl is thrilled, but oh boy, is the wannabe-Spaniard sweating.
Math class produces that same student constantly. Perfect on problems one through four, then completely stuck the second the numbers get moved around.
Christy Vehe has been chipping away at that for a while now. She's Director of Math and Science, Secondary at Valley View School District, where she's spent 21 years, and she's finishing year 24 in education.
"I am working to disrupt the traditional thinking that math is a memorized subject matter," she says.
Her fix takes four steps, one department meeting and zero dollars.
Here’s what’s on the dashboard this week:
Today’s Deep Dive: Four steps to a math class that talks back
Reading Rainbow: Recess petitions + deleted grade points
From Our Desk: A note from a partner school + a sunny team boat day
Watch of the Week: A science teacher saves the sun
Would You Rather: Carts v. fire drills
Four steps to a math class that talks back
Every math department has a student who has never gotten a problem wrong and has also never attempted one nobody showed them first. Those two facts are holding hands.
As a director of secondary math and science, Christy Vehe’s target is the oldest habit in the subject:
Watch three examples, copy the fourth, repeat until June.
Her rebuild runs on four steps, and the order matters more than the activities do.
Name the learner you're building.
Christy's team said out loud what kind of student they wanted before anybody bought a single resource. It takes one meeting and no budget.Change the routines.
Notice and wonder, think-pair-share, anything that puts a pause between the problem and the answer.Hand students the rules.
Kids describe what doing math should look and sound like, in their own words. Then they enforce it on each other, which saves you roughly a full section's worth of energy per day.Debrief the lesson, don't announce it.
Teachers run the activity and ask students what they noticed, instead of explaining the shift to them.
Step one has to land before the other three, or think-pair-share becomes 90 seconds of teenagers studying the specks of dirt on their shoes.
Christy also has a very direct answer for the rigor objection that shows up at every department meeting where this comes up.
Get Christy's full four-step process, plus what happened to her ninth graders, in the playbook below.
Oh, and if you’re interested in hearing more from Christy, 24 years in education gave her a lot of opinions about worksheets. She shares them on our podcast.
Ten Days, Two Minutes, One Kid Who Can't Stand You
Two veteran teachers lay out what to try when nothing has worked with one particular student, including a strategy called "2 by 10" that asks for a two-minute conversation about anything for 10 days straight. The catch is that none of those 10 chats can be about missing work, which eliminates roughly 90% of available teacher small talk.Testing Kids Who Still Need Help With Their Zippers
A Virginia preschool teacher spends close to the entire first month of school pulling 3-year-olds out one at a time for state-mandated assessments while his assistant holds down the room. Kindergarten teachers in a federal study described the process as time consuming, which is the most restrained phrasing available to a person under oath.Spend Day One Designing the Last Day
A high school teacher opens the year by having students answer three questions about what they want the class to be and how they want to feel in June, then hides the document until June. Considerably more useful than an icebreaker where 30 people share a fun fact and everyone forgets all 30 by lunch.Stop Hunting for the AI-Proof Assignment
Andrew Miller argues that no task is safe from AI, so teachers should sort their assignments by how vulnerable each one is and then ask what thinking the task actually requires. He also apologizes in advance for adding one more acronym to education, easily the most self-aware sentence published this month.Parents Are Now Fighting for the Right to Play
Parents nationwide are pressuring schools and state legislatures over shrinking recess, and Tennessee now requires at least 40 minutes of it in elementary schools. The nonprofit organizing much of the push has chapters in 20 states, so this has graduated from a complaint to an operation with a mailing list.The Professor Who Deleted All the Points
A North Dakota State biology professor scrapped her points system for 18 standards after a student holding a 4.75 out of 5 asked how anyone learns when perfection is the bar. Her office hours went from students haggling over half points to students asking about biology, which in higher ed counts as a documented miracle.Final Projects With Zero Trifold Boards Involved
An English teacher lets students pick how they show what they learned, and one turned in a flower bouquet where every bloom stood for a different literary theme. She grades every format against the same rubric, so the creativity has a floor under it and nobody talks their way into a participation trophy.
We can tell you how great we are to partner with (humble brag), but it certainly sounds better coming from our partners themselves. Meet James Whitfield, Ed.D., from Treetops School International and hear about his experience with Subject here.
One thing about us? We take fun as seriously as we take our work. Take a peek at last week's boat party here (and then reach out to [email protected] or [email protected] if you want to join our team 👀)
Missing the villa? We're not, because we have one of our own.
We’re back on the road come September! If you plan to be at any of the following events, please email [email protected] to meet up IRL:
Sept 11: Napa Appreciation Event (CA)
Sept 18: Temecula Appreciation Event (CA)
Our pick of the week: Project Hail Mary
Why We’re Obsessed: A junior high science teacher wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory, no instructions and one job, which is saving the sun. He does it by guessing, being wrong, writing it down and guessing again. It's the most flattering two hours ever filmed about a middle school science department, and it's basically productive struggle with a bigger effects budget.
Recommended lesson integration:
The scientific method, for real this time: Guess, test, be wrong, write it down, guess better. The movie is a 120-minute worked example of exactly this and requires no poster board.
Sorting and observing: Students look at a mystery object and say only what they notice, no guessing what it is yet. Same rule the hero follows, minus the fate of humanity.
Building a communication system with no shared language: Students design a way to explain a math concept without words. Harder than group work and considerably more fun to watch.
Physics of orbital mechanics: Yes, the actual math. Yes, it's hard. Your seniors have been coasting since March and you know it.
Units and scale: Distances in space break every number sense students have. Great excuse to find out how badly a class underestimates a light year.
Pick your poison for the first week back.
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