You Call This Support?

Our school has had a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) group for a number of years now, and we have been trying to put more resources into place to support students who may be struggling with their sexual identity. Last school year we had a full faculty meeting (K-12) that definitely highlighted some issues around homosexuality among the faculty. Near the end of the year our Diversity Director arranged for another optional/voluntary meeting for teachers that wanted to discuss the situation further. This post is about an issue that came up in that meeting.

One of the issues that arose in the meeting had to do with supporting our students – particularly those who were wrestling with the identity. While being gay or lesbian is not openly mocked or teased at our school, there is still an undercurrent at times that probably makes it hard for those students to be open about who they are. As teachers many of us felt – well, all of us stated that we felt – that we need to be supportive of students who may be gay or lesbian and provide a safe space for them.

However, there was one teacher (let’s just call him Tim) at the meeting who came to defend his beliefs that homosexuality is wrong because of what his religion tells them. He pulled out the “Love the sinner, hate the sin” argument. When another teacher – who is gay – said they did not understand how Tim can be supportive of someone about whom they have a belief that what they are is fundamentally wrong, Tim argued that that he could be supportive of those students without necessarily agreeing with their choices.

I have heard these kinds of statements before, and I never knew how to respond to them. I can understand Tim’s perspective – he is teaching at a school where discrimination is clearly not acceptable, so he needs to reconcile something that he believes with the reality of his job situation. At the same time I agree with the teacher who confronted Tim about it.

After thinking about it, here is my take. To be supportive, truly supportive, of someone, you must be willing to accept them as they are and help them take responsibility for the choices and decisions they make, but not set out as your goal to change them – unless their choices and decisions are destructive to others.

To be supportive of a homosexual student means recognizing that this is not really a choice for them – it is part of who they are. Does this mean that I don’t believe that some people who label themselves ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ aren’t doing it to rebel or for some other reason? Of course not, but I think you have to start from the position that if a student believes they may be/are homosexual than it is part of who they are and not a choice. As long as I accept that about them, I can be supportive of what they need to deal with this. If they later decide that they really weren’t then, in my opinion, that will have been made more possible by people accepting them for who they are (or claim they are) then telling them they are wrong.

In Tim’s case, his support – in my opinion – is more like the support you would have for a confessed/convicted murderer (yes, I know it is an extreme example, but I still think it valid). You can support this person, but ultimately they need to take responsible for their actions, and certainly this means changing their behavior so they do not murder again. I can agree with Tim that murder is a ’sin’ (even if I don’t agree with his concept of sin), but to equate this with homosexuality by also labeling it as a sin falls far short of the type of acceptance that student needs.

If a student were to come out to Tim, how would he react? Even if he does not come right out and say that he will be supportive, but he cannot condone homosexuality, that belief will forever color Tim’s reactions to that student. And while teenagers can be notoriously clueless about a great many things, they are highly sensitive to how people feel about them, and this student would probably still feel some sense of disapproval from Tim.

I appreciate the fact that Tim at least recognizes that he needs to be supportive, but in my opinion his beliefs hold him back from being fully supportive of all students. Unfortunately, because being homosexual is an invisible distinction I become concerned about the things that Tim may say or do that reflect his beliefs unconsciously. He may not be aware that he is talking to a gay student, but say or do something that implies disapproval which could then cause that student to be even more conflicted about who they are – and less likely to trust other adults in their life.

Of course, the elephant in the room here is religion. So much is based on a this book that was mostly written nearly 2000 years ago or more. What’s worse is the editing done when translating the original languages into more recent ones. I might as well pick up Euclid’s Elements and insist that this is the one and only Geometry book that should ever be used and any teacher who uses another is an abomination. While I can appreciate what came before, I also recognize that over time our understanding changes and (hopefully) improves. To continue to base our behavior on a ‘literal’ translation of a 2000 year-old document is the height of insanity. I strongly believe that there is more to this life than just the reality before us, but ultimately it is the reality before us that defines us. Religion should not be about defining that reality, but helping us recognize it for what it is.

I don’t know how Tim really feels, and how good he would really be as a support for a gay student, but I do not agree with him that he can be fully supportive. And that is his choice.

The POTUS & R-E-S-P-E-C-T [The Library Lady Rants]

This post sums up my feelings about Joe Wilson’s absolutely inexcusable outburst. You may dislike or disrespect the man, Barack Obama, but what Wilson did was disrespect the President of the United States. That does not just make Wilson look bad, it makes the entire United States look bad in my opinion. Nice post, Library Lady!

Fourth Day, Fall 2009

What a day. A lot of things went on, so I’ll try to highlight them – and perhaps save some details for a later post.

My classes went very well today, particularly the Geometry Honors where today was their first day presenting problems from the problem text. One thing I have decided to do is present one of the problems every day for the first 2-3 weeks and model for them what I am looking for. Additionally we will take some time during our block period next week and talk about strategies for attacking problems they haven’t seen before.

In the problem text, the first three problems are really setting the students up with a visual argument for the Pythagorean Theorem. The first problem really scaffolds the situation:

A 5 x 5 square and a 3 x 3 square can be cut into pieces that will fit together to form a third square.

This diagram is given to the students.

(a) Find the length of a side of the third square.

(b) In the diagram above, mark P on segment DC so that PD = 3, then draw segments PA and PF. Calculate the lengths of these segments.

(c) Segments PA and PF divide the squares into pieces. Arrange the pieces to form the third square.

Perhaps it a is a bit too scaffolded, as one person has suggested to me, but I want the students to gain some success early on. Also, the point of this problem is less the solution here and more the generalization they are asked to form in the third problem, which asks them if this method works every time for any two squares.

My first class this morning latched onto the problem pretty quickly and demonstrated they understood by solidly discussing the second problem (which was another specific example with different numbers). In addition, the third problem asks,

Will the proceeding method always produce pieces that form a new square? If your answer is yes, prepare a written explanation. If your answer is no, provide a counterexample – two specific squares that can not be converted to a single square.

The answer a student posted in my first class said yes, but gave a fairly weak (predictably, I think) reason for why it would work, but I let the discussion continue for a little while and by the end they were all good with it. In the second class I had to ‘volunteer’ someone to post an answer as it was the only problem left blank. She got up and wrote no, but that she couldn’t provide a counterexample – she only thought that was the case. However – and I give a ton of credit to this girl – she stuck it out, led the discussion and finally agreed, based on the work presented from the previous two problems, that the answer was yes. I’ll confess I was expecting a lot more ‘teeth-pulling’ the first day, but both classes jumped right in.

In my calculus class I am impressed with their willingness as well. I did throw them a little bit on a problem involving parametric equations. They actually figured out the answer, albeit in a very intuitive manner, but when I introduced some new information that yielded a different number, they got confused and couldn’t see why the value obtained from my information (which was correct, just not correctly interpreted) was wrong. I told them to let the problem simmer a little over the weekend, and we would revisit it on Monday.

Another problem, the last for the day, that we worked on was interesting in that instead of merely stopping once the information asked for had been obtained, the student said that he had been curious if the problem could be generalized further. He spent the next five minutes taking us through what he found out. It was awesome! Earth shattering mathematics? Not really, but that “what if” attitude was great to see.

Blogging what occurred everyday this week has been an interesting experience. I have found that it became more of a diary than anything else, and I decided against sharing some things for the sake of some semblance of brevity. Next week I will return to more topic centered posts, although I will continue to share vignettes of my classes and how they are progressing with the problem-based curriculum.

One other thing is that Wednesday’s post was my 100th post since starting this blog!

Third Day, Fall 2009

Today was a bit more interesting in that I was teaching my two Geometry Honors classes, and I started introducing the problem-based philosophy. Today is a ‘block’ day – which means we met half our class periods for 80 minutes each. Here is how Geometry Honors went down:

I begin with a problem I call the “Poet and Peasant Problem,” from the description in the Challenging Problems in Algebra book. This problem is actually in the introduction. I like it because even though the authors emphasize that the issue is between having an ‘elegant’ solution versus one that just gets the job done, I see it as a problem that emphasizes knowing your destination and working backwards. The problem is:

If the sum of two numbers is 2, and the product of these same two numbers is 3, find the sum of the reciprocals of these two numbers.

There is a brute force method for solving this problem, which is solving for the two numbers before finding their reciprocals and then adding them. Unfortunately, for a Geometry class this is problematic because the two numbers are actually Complex! My kids were introduced to Complex numbers in Algebra 1, but not in a way that they can do anything meaningful with them yet, so they end up with a negative under the square root in the quadratic formula and get stuck.

The ‘elegant’ method involves looking first at what the questions asks for. It never says that finding the two numbers is necessary. It only asks for the sum of their reciprocals. If we let the two numbers be a and b, then we want:

Which, after a little algebraic manipulation becomes:

.

The rest is simple substitution.

It really drives home the idea that knowing what you are working toward can be helpful.

I followed this with an activity to help the students see what they already know about Geometry. I confess that the first few years I taught Geometry (and to a lesser degree since then) I made an assumption that the students were blank slates where Geometry was concerned. So I would treat the notions of points, lines, rays, and polygons and everything else almost as if it was the first time they had seen it.

I have found, however, that at multiple grade levels, starting in elementary school and as recently as Prealgebra, they have seen many concepts from Geometry. From polygons to parallel lines, to 180° in a triangle to perpendicular bisectors, students have studied a fair amount of geometry.

I had the students break up into groups, and I gave them markers and poster paper and had them answer the question, “What is Geometry?” and then list all the things that know they think are related to Geometry. It was pretty illuminating. It was interesting to see the groups that were trying to please and the groups where one or two people were showing off a little because they had taken a geometry course over the summer. Overall they have amassed a lot of facts. As I told them, it’s not all about facts and this year their will be a lot of justification, explanation, and proof expected.

Then, I briefly introduced them to GeoGebra and told them where to download it, and I handed out a reference card I had made with all the buttons labeled.

Finally, I handed out the first installment of the problem textbook – only 40 problems typed up so far. This weekend I will power through some more. I assigned the first 8 problems, many of which had to do with the Pythagorean Theorem. I plan on presenting the first problem tomorrow as a model, and I will probably present at least one each day for the first couple weeks to demonstrate good techniques for writing work on the board and explaining it.

I got excited later on in the day when, during our activity periods, two of my girls came to ask some questions and had already worked through most of the problems!

The rest of my day was meetings… nothing interesting there. One more day and the first week is over!

Second Day, Fall 2009

I feel almost silly about blogging today. I taught one 80 minute class, led an advisor group meeting about our Honor Code, and ran a department meeting. Of course I was working throughout the rest of the day, but all in all I probably had 5 hours of time to get work done and only about 3 hours actually ‘on.’

Today was my Calculus BC class, and the first day of presenting problems. It also ends up being a bit of a catch-all in terms of calculator questions (I issue TI-Nspire CAS calculators to them and they have no idea how to use them) as well as a review of polar coordinates and parametric equations – which I hit them up with early to see where they are.

It turns out that for a couple years our Precalculus teacher would skip polar coordinates and parametric equations so that he could start Calculus earlier in the second semester. That worked fine for students who were only taking Calculus AB at our school, but for those that made it to me, I had to start from scratch. Fortunately this is the last year of that…

No fascinating problems today. Introduced Newton’s Law of Cooling, reviewed limits, and some polar and parametric problems. What was fascinating to watch was how quickly the class dove in! I walked into class a couple minutes before the bell rang, and there was already students standing at the board doing every problem! That was a first! They asked some good questions of the presenters (some okay ones also, but that should improve) and most did a good job of presenting what they did.

In trying to reflect on what was going right I figure there are several possibilities:

1. The students are better prepared – a possibility because I have talked frequently with the Calc AB teacher about what I’m doing and what is expected.
2. The students are just better. Another possibility since the quality of the class varies from year to year.
3. My ‘rep’ proceeds me. They have heard what to expect from older siblings and students and so there is less of the “this is new” reticence (I expect that to be pretty prevalent in my Geometry Honors classes this year).
4. I’m just awesome, and I have – in one day – imparted my expectations so clearly they could not be anything else but amazing.

Okay – I’m reaching on the last one, but the bottom line is I’m not sure what caused such a good class today. I’ll take it, and keep trying to figure it out so that I can replicate it.

The rest of the day? I did some more typing into the Geometry set of problems – including rewriting a Geometer’s Sketchpad investigation to work with GeoGebra instead. Our advisor group met to discuss the school’s Honor Code, and then talked through a mock honor council case involving plagiarism. It was an interesting conversation and reminds me what I learned last week on the Wellness Retreat – I have a great group of advisees! Finally I co-ran our Math Dept. meeting. Mostly high level conversations with all the usual suspects. We needed to start some of these discussions, even if I could have predicted the responses of a few people. It’s a good start.

For those of you about to gag at my good cheer, let me just say that I will not deny that most of our students are amazing people in addition to being pretty good students. However, the ones I’m responsible for this year have just knocked me out – it will be another 17 years of teaching before I have a group like this again!

Day 2 down.