If Teacherfish's School Were a Village

Kliptown Youth Program.  A program in the Soweto Township of Johannesburg, For the people in the " global village" who have no access to computers in their homes, let alone flush toilets.  Anyone interested in learning more should contact: http://www.kliptownyouthprogram.org.za/contact

Winnie was not happy. She had her head on the desk and what my mother would have called, a ferkrimpt punim  (literally a pinched face- but sour puss is the best idiomatic translation). It didn't help the matter that the temperature in the room was approaching 90 degrees.

 I have a lesson plan and a Smart Notebook file, for the lesson if anyone wants it just leave a comment and a way I can get it to you.

"This is not math.  We are supposed to be doing math."  I have taught Winnie before, she is hard working, self-advocating, not unintelligent, and her IEP lists her as being on the Asperger's Spectrum.  My co-teacher last year hated that, he thought her too weird.   I wasn't so fond of my co-teacher, I thought him too mean. Winnie has a structure in her brain about a math class, and the fact that we were not solving for x, was very uncomfortable. Understanding, experienced, special educator that I am, I told her to pick her head up, and get over herself.  Hey- it was 90 degrees in that room.  What I didn't tell her was they were making us do a multi -cultural lesson. 

I thought it was math- just not exactly the kind we are used to teaching. Our struggling large city high school took another punch to the gut (sorry- I've been watching a Houdini miniseries this weekend).  Our graduation rate fell almost to the 50% mark.

Because I read the local education news website, I found out the following.  I will quote from an article, since I might never get it right otherwise.  The point is we are now part of this unnamed plan:

The plan places the low-performing schools in an intensive-support group, dubbed the “School Achievement Initiative.” Chalkbeat, September 3, 2014.

Yippee!

Now the Chancellor  is coming to visit us on Monday.  The first thing we were told to do, was in all content area, to prepare multi-cultural lessons that illustrate our mission: that we celebrate and honor the fact that many of students come from different parts of the world. I can't speak for the other departments but the math teachers' reaction was similar to Winnie's.

I took a play out of one of the Teacher Guppy’s playbook.  We collected information on a few statistics and watched the video, If the World Was a Village.  This weekend I will tabulate the data and have the students make posters to illustrate the statistics from our school community.  I will post the results on a bulletin board for the school's chancellor to be impressed with,- or not.  I know I should spend more time teaching the students how to tabulate, analyze and chart the statistics.  (Yes Winnie that would really be math and High School Common Core Statistics standards) but who has time for that -we have Regents to pass, and graduation rates to raise.  

Tom suggested that our school motto can be represented numerically as:

                                1 + d > 1

One +  diversity is greater than one. 

Wow- great- I made a big fuss about him being able to quantify a concept.

"Yes, Marlene said, only if diversity is less than zero"

Wait- can that be true?  Is this really math?

Tomorrow we go back to looking for x.