The Day I Lost Control of my Class and Quit Teaching

Today I lost control of my class and quit teaching. Well, I lost control of two of my classes. I teach 4 classes on 70 minute blocks. That part is boring and who cares? Today I had three students in my geometry class teach a lesson on the effects of altering dimension on the area of an object. So they talked about the effect of altering the height of a trapezoid, or altering the base and the height of a parallelogram. They did not go into solids. They did have a set of google slides ready that they showed, the class took notes on, and that they provided additional notes and examples on the whiteboard on the side. All three of them were teaching like crazy and they were prepared. In that same class last week, a group of students taught a lesson on finding the area of regular polygons showing simple examples as well as cases where students needed to find the apothem. They dissected the polygons into congruent triangles formed by the central angle, showed how to find the central angle, then showed how to use right triangle trigonometry to find the apothem and hence the area of a triangle and thus the whole figure. It was amazing. Each of these groups taught the entire class. They gave a warm-up, worked various examples, and gave an assignment. I sat in the back and took notes.

Laugh or Cry

How do you write about this? I haven’t been writing anything here since before the election. Since before Betsy DeVos, before the great climate change denial, before we throw the sick out into the streets, before the refugee kids in our classrooms were denied any last hope of refuge, before it was ok to assault women as long as you are famous, before the majority of Evangelical believers sanctioned such behavior, before our proud and massive community of bombs finally lost their mother. Ok the last statement was a joke, one that didn’t come from me, but a good one. There have been a lot of good ones. They help, to a point. But what have I done? I’ve tried to do the same thing I have always done with my students, be open and listen, be professional and teach math. I look for ways to give them stuff to be curious about and challenged by and excited for.