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Did you ever read a book called “The Number Devil”  by Hans Magnus Enzensberger? If you ever see a copy of it, grab it and have a look. In chapter one, Robert, the hero of the story, meets the Number Devil. The Number Devil explains to Robert that knowing a little bit of arithmetic, such as addition and subtraction, is quite useful for when the batteries of your calculator run out but really it has little to do with mathematics. How often do teachers fail to grasp the distinction? How often do we overstate the importance of the “skills” that we fail to recognize the importance of their application? It’s like a football team that focuses so much energy on their training sessions that they forget to turn up to play their game.

I have started this blog to document, revisit, and hopefully improve upon many of the approaches that have helped me the most over these years. Some of the postings are “mini-lectures” that most of my tutees have probably heard (cue the eye-rolls). Others are musings about the variations in how math seems to be understood or taught.

1. Tardy passes.  The picture below represents all of the tardy passes I have received all semester, along with passes to the nurse and passes to assistant principals for discipline.  That stack represents a lot of lost learning time, especially when you realize that these passes are written for a lot of the same students over and over again.  If learning was really valued, there would be preventative action taken rather then just letting students be late and lose valuable learning time.

2. Announcements during class time.  For the first four years of my teaching career, I worked in a district where it was in the contract that no announcements could be made during class time other than regularly scheduled announcements during a set period.  Consequently I started teaching not knowing the agony of having my class interrupted with announcements about homecoming, meetings, or sports cancellations, and then having student attention diverted to those topics rather than what they are supposed to learn.  I always hear about cell phones being a distraction to students, but random announcements that could have waited until another time (or be made in another way) during a class can be just as much of a distraction from the real reason students are in the building. 3. Letting students talk among themselves for the last 5 minutes of class.  I am known as the strict teacher because I believe in bell-to-bell instruction.  I only have 50 minutes a day to cause understanding in my students, and I want to use all of that time.  Some students and some teachers find this unreasonable of me.4. Pulling students out of class for things that are non-learning related.  This school year alone I had students pulled out of class to talk about sports participation opportunities and to do something for an extra-curricular activity that was supposed to be done after school.  I even had a student pulled out of my class during a test because another teacher simply demanded it.  Now, I'm not against sports or extra-curricular activities; I feel they are a valuable part of a student's school experience.  It's when they start to take priority over learning that I have a problem.