Chapter 3: Stories Categorical Data Tell, Continued (Day 13)

 Let's get to today's Blaugust topic.

Since today's the 27th, here's the 27th topic from Shelli's old 2019 list:

• How do you support struggling students?  What intervention strategies have you used?

This is a tricky one. So far, most of my assessments are of the formative variety, via my daily Warm-Ups and Exit Passes, so these are my only ways of identifying struggling students. Sometimes I can see that my students need help on these, and so I try to give them small hints if they're stuck on a part. If they are completed stumped as to what to do, I call on a student who does know the answer to explain how he or she obtains it to the rest of the class.

But one student in my fifth period Stats class will definitely need more help than this. He's a special ed student with a one-on-one aide (and as well, I disclose nothing further about him on the blog). Today he is confused with a percent proportion problem I give for the Warm-Up/Exit Pass. I do try to break down the steps for him slowly, and his one-on-one can help him out as well. But I'm sure he'll need something else at some point.

There's also a guy in my fourth period Ethnostats who speaks mainly Spanish, very little English. One other guy has volunteered to help translate, and he can use Google Translate as well. This week he's having trouble submitting assignments to Google Classroom, so I'll have to pay a bit closer attention to him and how he's faring in my class.

Today is a minimum day due to Back to School Night on Wednesday -- all classes meet today for much shorter periods. In Stats class, I cover only three pages on non-block days. These pages focus on bar charts, pie charts, and contingency tables.

Meanwhile, in Calculus, I move on to Section 1.5, "Exponential Functions." At first, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with the minimum day. The next section is on inverses and logarithmic functions, and so I definitely prefer giving the logs lesson on a block day, not a minimum day. The exponential functions lesson isn't quite as long as the logs lesson, but still, exponentials are important. I haven't decided yet whether I'll continue the exponentials on all-classes Monday, thereby saving logs for the block day on Tuesday.

Here's the tough thing about Calc class. I want to hurry up and get through Chapter 1 so that we can get to the very meaty Chapter 2 on limits, and Chapter 3 on derivatives. After all, that's where the real Calculus is, not Chapter 1, which is just Precalculus.

But we must keep in mind that this district didn't have hybrid at all last year -- it stayed in distance learning the entire year. So these students hadn't seen the inside of a classroom since March of their Integrated Math III year -- the rest of Math III and all of Precalc were spent in distance learning which, as we've already noted, isn't as effective as in-person learning. So I can't be sure that these students have a strong Precalc skills as previous entering Calc students (regardless of what letter grade these students earned in their online Precalc classes). For these students, extra time spent in Chapter 1 is essential.

What this all means is that I must carefully watch these students to see whether they are lacking any major Precalc skills. Only then will they be ready for Chapter 2 when we get there.

And I might get another formative tool in my classroom soon. During conference period, I speak to the other math teacher at the school -- she'd been out most of the week due to family issues. She tells me that despite the pandemic, she still has her students use markers in her classes. There are no real whiteboards in her classes -- instead, the desks themselves serve as whiteboards. In other to keep the students safe, my partner teacher simply cleans the markers between classes.

At the very least, I'd like to have a whiteboard review before the test. But it might be helpful to have markers used during the lessons as well -- after all, I don't want to wait until just before the test to find out that my Calc students are struggle in Chapter 1, or my Stats students have trouble in Chapters 2-3. I need more formative assessments in my class.

There are some other students who might not be doing as well in math as they ought to be -- and these are the seniors who have dropped out of my math classes. As we've seen earlier, since only three years of math are required, many seniors decide not to take any math at all. While this is fine for students who don't plan on attending college, many people question the wisdom of college-bound students taking a year off from math. Even community college students need to take a math placement test upon arriving there, and those who haven't seen math since junior year tend not to do well on that test.

And that's in a normal, non-pandemic year. If we assume (as many do) that students aren't effectively learning math during the distance year, then the last time these seniors would have attended a math class in-person was March of their Integrated Math II year --  meaning that they would have only 1 3/4 years of "real, live math," and nearly 2 1/2 calendar years between their last "real, live math" class and their college placement exam.

Of course, for students who dropped my classes, there's not much I can do to help them -- and I'm not responsible for students who are no longer in my classes. But it's possible that some of these students are in still in my Advisory class. The officially declared reason for the Advisory class is to prepare students for college and career. Well, an argument can be made that giving these students some math refreshers during the year really is preparing them for college.

There are a dozen students in my Advisory. Of these, only one is also in any of my math classes. (He in second period Ethnostats.) One of these others was in my Stats class but he dropped it. I don't know anything about the other ten -- it could be that all ten of them are taking Precalc with my partner teacher, but it also be that none of them are taking math at all.

Then again, my Advisory students would complain if I started arbitrarily teaching them math. The students who dropped math don't want to be taught math this year, and many of those students aren't even attending college, and so they don't even need any math. Then, of course, there's the Mass Media course from the community college -- thus I'll only see many of the students on Fridays.

I'll decide what to do about math in Advisory later on this year. Students might be more amenable to extra math lessons late in the year, after college plans have been solidified and the math placement tests are only a few weeks away rather than almost a full year. Until then, my focus needs to be on helping these students get into college, not helping them pass math tests that they might or might not take.