Yo Mista!

Parent teacher conferences are an interesting point in time for transfer high schools. Last year, my school only had a 20% turn out rate for parents (based on less than 120 students). Last night, we had about a 25% turn out rate, but now we're at nearly 200 students. Still a pretty shitty turn out, I must say. Supposedly though, this is "okay" for transfer schools because our students' parents might: ...not be as involved in the student's life. ...not be present everyday in the student's life. ...not have time because they are working. ...have better things to do (this relates to #1). ...be dead. For the parents that do actually come, their son/daughter is usually performing well or they have the capacity to perform well, but aren't pushing themselves. Either way, these students aren't the ones in danger of failing. The fact they even have a parent coming to discuss their performance is telling. I briefly talked about this yesterday with a few o

Like many other bloggers, I use Google analytics to gauge this blog's readership. That is, when I actually have the time. Google analytics allows me to see how hits received, where readers are in the world, and how they ended up on the blog to begin with (referrals). One of the features I recently set up provides me a summary e-mail of all the key words people have typed into search engines to arrive at this blog. Generally, people who use a search engine to come here usually type one of the following phrases: Yo mista! Yo mista.com Yo mista blog Yesterday, I received an e-mail from Google summarizing last week's search results. Everything seemed normal except for the very last result: "I need quality education for my kids in karachi" There it is, honest and bold. A father's desperate attempt to learn how to give his children access to education? Maybe, maybe not. Whoever this person was, they obviously didn't find what they were looking for on this bl

This week, I felt off. I was completely exhausted and my colleagues actually noticed, which was strange because I'm generally good at keeping up appearances. Superman would've been disappointed in me. I fell asleep during my favorite TV shows at home. That rarely happens. I haven't gone running all week. I've been snoozing through my alarms instead of waking up. I've made several mistakes in my PowerPoints. I just haven't been...sharp.  Luckily, there were a few diamonds in the rough this week that helped make the work days better. Emily , a student of mine who barely came last year has been working her ass off this year in both my classes (personal wealth management and algebra). Here's a text message exchange from Wednesday night: "19%... move the decimal twice to the right?" asks Emily. "That would make it 1900..." I reply. "Oh yeah... left! I knew that. Thanks!" Emily was doing her algebra homework (exponential decay)

Remember sitting at your desk, waiting for the teacher to come by and hand over your exam? An awkward divide between students celebrating and others putting their heads down on their desks. Even more awkward if the test was handed back to you face down. That's when you know you fucked up. I can't remember there being any worse feeling in high school than getting a shitty grade. Thanks Mom . I handed back graded projects and exams last Friday and today. The project involved grading an exam "I" had taken. The point was to get my students to think about the correct or incorrect work shown and then figure out on their own whether or not the selected answer was marked correctly. Students also had to explain their rationale for their answers. As expected, my students did fairly better on the project than on the exam, even though the exam was basically very similar to the exam they had to grade in the project. My conclusion is that students generally took their time

This week, my Algebra class had two major assignments:  A project where they had to grade someone else's exam and thoroughly explain their rationale for each question A Mock-Regents examination (covering all material from September to last week) My school allows students to intern for teachers as part of a "Learn to Work" program. This allows me to delegate simple grading tasks and use the additional time to plan. After my intern finishes grading, I simply go through the work, make corrections (if necessary) and drop the numbers into my ridiculous excel grade tracker. If my intern finishes early, I force him/her to study for the SAT or work on college apps.  Yeah, I know, I'm pretty amazing. Thanks for the thought. So, today my intern and I grading the Algebra exams after school. The results were a mixed bag: some students did incredibly well, others did so-so and a few scored ridiculously low. When my intern finished grading a "ridiculously low" exam,

A few days ago, I was sitting on my thinking chair remembering my first teaching interview. This experience was not only hilarious, but it also provided me with some insight into how much fun I was going to have in this profession. A few of you may already know this story. In April of 2009, I was in between jobs. I wasn't working on Wall Street anymore and I still had a few months to go before Teach for America's summer training program started. Teach for America (TFA) gave me an advantage in the job hunt in that they started sending my resume out to schools before I had even started training. Of course, TFA doesn't just send you off to interviews to act like an idiot: I had a few interview prep sessions with a placement associate, Jennifer. Jennifer was helpful, honest and quite frankly, supremely nice. I can't thank her enough for the school placement I have today. My first interview was with a high school in the Brownsville [insert brown person joke here] regio