Current mood:
relaxed Picture this (especially if you work at a school): the district administration says to you, "Report to work early on Tuesday. Oh, and bring your sleeping bag. We're flying you 200 miles away where it's 20 degrees colder and snowing. Weather permitting, we'll bring you back on Friday." Would that make you a happy camper? No, probably not. Can you imagine a school district actually doing that? Welcome to the annual Bering Strait School District Fall Education Conference. That's where I spent last week. Four fun-filled days of workshops, rubbery cafeteria food, communal showers, and sleeping on the floor of a school.
Our travel wasn't bad this year. Last year, we were weathered in here and almost didn't make it to Unalakleet. This year, we were flying with the district pilot (yes, the district has its own plane and pilot) who has a record of safely flying when no one else will and the weather was perfect flying weather. We were the first staff scheduled for travel, which meant we left at 8:30 Tuesday morning. Our first encounter with the white stuff came when we landed. No snow in Elim, but Unalakleet has had snow for the better part of a month. It actually snowed on and off for the next two days. Not much else went on that day (because of people traveling in) except the welcome and keynote address. The keynote was about math, and I don't remember much about it. He posed a math problem about halfway through his presentation and it stumped me for most of the rest of the week. If there are 20 students in a class and each student shakes the hand of every other student once, how many handshakes are possible? Well, the answer is (20x19)/2. I got the first part, but I still don't understand why you would have to divide by 2 at the end. I couldn't find anybody (at a conference of teachers) who could explain it to me. Go figure. (If any of you math-minded people want to explain it to me, please do.) Wednesday and Thursday were pretty mundane. Time to work as a school staff and then breaking out into our longer sessions for the rest of the day. Those sessions were two days long and we had chosen them in advance. Mine was about teaching a math curriculum that I'm totally sold on and hopefully will be able to teach starting next year. Right at the end of the Thursday, the person leading our session presented us with a math problem that had us all stumped. Pretend you have some cups and they are stacked in a pyramid shape. Given any number of levels/rows in the pyramid (n), how many cups will be needed? Now, granted, it was a bunch of kindergarten and first-grade teachers, but nobody could figure it out. I figured out the pattern, and knew that there had to be some sort of equation there, but couldn't make it work.
Friday morning, I was eating breakfast, feeling a little sleepy, and the person who had been leading the aforementioned session sat down across from me and asked if I had figured it out yet. She had gotten that problem from a workshop she had attended over the summer and didn't know the answer either. We started chatting about it, and the high school math teacher from our school happened to be sitting next to me and overheard our conversation. She explained the solution to us, and it wasn't an easy answer. It had something to do with cumulative sums and adding everything before up and just generally not a pretty answer. There wasn't a simple equation as I had previously assumed. The pattern I had seen was right, but it was more complex math than I have ever learned. She attempted to explain the handshaking problem, but I don't know if I'll ever understand that. I think I'll just go back to drawing pictures as my strategy for problem-solving and be perfectly happy. That conclusion actually has implications for my own teaching of math. Students come to the solutions to math problems in different ways. If I had started out just drawing a picture of the handshaking, I would have been fine, but because the presenter didn't give us very much time to solve and discuss with our neighbors, I had to make the jump straight to an algebraic equation. Students may not solve the way we want them to, and they may take a lot more time than we anticipate, but they will form their own working understanding of math concepts. I need to allow that freedom in math to allow these students to explore and solve in a way that makes sense to them. After they have a basic working understanding, then as a teacher, I can help them refine that understanding and fit it into the larger math picture.
The rest of Friday was pretty boring, because it was just wrapping up the conference, and schools started flying out after lunch. As luck would have it, we were the first school in on Tuesday and the last school to leave on Friday. Ridiculous. I know that arranging travel for 15 school sites must be a logistical nightmare, and I'm sure they did the best they could, but that made for very long waits for us. Travel in Alaska is a "hurry up and wait" game anyway, but having to wait for 8 hours gets really boring. We were flying with the district pilot again, and he is known for being early, so there was some hope that we would get home before the scheduled 8:00. True to form, the call came at 6:30 and we loaded up and headed for the airport. Smooth ride home, with the sunset surrounding us, and snow waiting on the ground in Elim (scarcely more than a dusting, but snow nevertheless).
As much as we griped about it, the week wasn't too bad. The food left something to be desired, classroom floors are not very comfortable, and I've found that the best time to shower is about 4 in the morning (nobody else is there, hot water, etc.), but it was a change of pace. It had been a rough first quarter for our staff, and we needed something different. A chance to get out of our village and do something other than teach. This October in-service is always a nice break from the standard teaching fare. Everyone in the district seems to come alive and we get the opportunity to feed off the creativity, enthusiasm and ideas of teachers from other sites. It's a very well-organized opportunity for collaboration and learning (and refreshment).
Winter has finally arrived. No matter how cold it is, I can't convince myself that it is winter until we have snow on the ground. It wasn't winter when we left Elim on Tuesday, but was definitely winter when we landed in Unalakleet 10 minutes later. Time to turn up the heat, turn on lots of lights, pull out the heavy parka and start fighting the urge to hibernate :-)
Our travel wasn't bad this year. Last year, we were weathered in here and almost didn't make it to Unalakleet. This year, we were flying with the district pilot (yes, the district has its own plane and pilot) who has a record of safely flying when no one else will and the weather was perfect flying weather. We were the first staff scheduled for travel, which meant we left at 8:30 Tuesday morning. Our first encounter with the white stuff came when we landed. No snow in Elim, but Unalakleet has had snow for the better part of a month. It actually snowed on and off for the next two days. Not much else went on that day (because of people traveling in) except the welcome and keynote address. The keynote was about math, and I don't remember much about it. He posed a math problem about halfway through his presentation and it stumped me for most of the rest of the week. If there are 20 students in a class and each student shakes the hand of every other student once, how many handshakes are possible? Well, the answer is (20x19)/2. I got the first part, but I still don't understand why you would have to divide by 2 at the end. I couldn't find anybody (at a conference of teachers) who could explain it to me. Go figure. (If any of you math-minded people want to explain it to me, please do.) Wednesday and Thursday were pretty mundane. Time to work as a school staff and then breaking out into our longer sessions for the rest of the day. Those sessions were two days long and we had chosen them in advance. Mine was about teaching a math curriculum that I'm totally sold on and hopefully will be able to teach starting next year. Right at the end of the Thursday, the person leading our session presented us with a math problem that had us all stumped. Pretend you have some cups and they are stacked in a pyramid shape. Given any number of levels/rows in the pyramid (n), how many cups will be needed? Now, granted, it was a bunch of kindergarten and first-grade teachers, but nobody could figure it out. I figured out the pattern, and knew that there had to be some sort of equation there, but couldn't make it work.
Friday morning, I was eating breakfast, feeling a little sleepy, and the person who had been leading the aforementioned session sat down across from me and asked if I had figured it out yet. She had gotten that problem from a workshop she had attended over the summer and didn't know the answer either. We started chatting about it, and the high school math teacher from our school happened to be sitting next to me and overheard our conversation. She explained the solution to us, and it wasn't an easy answer. It had something to do with cumulative sums and adding everything before up and just generally not a pretty answer. There wasn't a simple equation as I had previously assumed. The pattern I had seen was right, but it was more complex math than I have ever learned. She attempted to explain the handshaking problem, but I don't know if I'll ever understand that. I think I'll just go back to drawing pictures as my strategy for problem-solving and be perfectly happy. That conclusion actually has implications for my own teaching of math. Students come to the solutions to math problems in different ways. If I had started out just drawing a picture of the handshaking, I would have been fine, but because the presenter didn't give us very much time to solve and discuss with our neighbors, I had to make the jump straight to an algebraic equation. Students may not solve the way we want them to, and they may take a lot more time than we anticipate, but they will form their own working understanding of math concepts. I need to allow that freedom in math to allow these students to explore and solve in a way that makes sense to them. After they have a basic working understanding, then as a teacher, I can help them refine that understanding and fit it into the larger math picture.
The rest of Friday was pretty boring, because it was just wrapping up the conference, and schools started flying out after lunch. As luck would have it, we were the first school in on Tuesday and the last school to leave on Friday. Ridiculous. I know that arranging travel for 15 school sites must be a logistical nightmare, and I'm sure they did the best they could, but that made for very long waits for us. Travel in Alaska is a "hurry up and wait" game anyway, but having to wait for 8 hours gets really boring. We were flying with the district pilot again, and he is known for being early, so there was some hope that we would get home before the scheduled 8:00. True to form, the call came at 6:30 and we loaded up and headed for the airport. Smooth ride home, with the sunset surrounding us, and snow waiting on the ground in Elim (scarcely more than a dusting, but snow nevertheless).
As much as we griped about it, the week wasn't too bad. The food left something to be desired, classroom floors are not very comfortable, and I've found that the best time to shower is about 4 in the morning (nobody else is there, hot water, etc.), but it was a change of pace. It had been a rough first quarter for our staff, and we needed something different. A chance to get out of our village and do something other than teach. This October in-service is always a nice break from the standard teaching fare. Everyone in the district seems to come alive and we get the opportunity to feed off the creativity, enthusiasm and ideas of teachers from other sites. It's a very well-organized opportunity for collaboration and learning (and refreshment).
Winter has finally arrived. No matter how cold it is, I can't convince myself that it is winter until we have snow on the ground. It wasn't winter when we left Elim on Tuesday, but was definitely winter when we landed in Unalakleet 10 minutes later. Time to turn up the heat, turn on lots of lights, pull out the heavy parka and start fighting the urge to hibernate :-)
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