Elizabeth Green - Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (And How to Teach It to Everyone)

BUILDING A

BETTER
TEACHER

How Teaching Works

(and How to Teach It to Everyone)

Elizabeth Green

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

New York London

For my family: parents, brothers, and Dave.

Contents

BUILDING A

BETTER
TEACHER

O pen the door and walk in. Remain standing. Or maybe you should sit down?

This crowded rectangular room is yours. Right now it has twenty-six chairs with attached desks, a chalkboard, and early-afternoon sunlight pouring through windows onto the tabletops. In a moment, the room will also have twenty-six fifth-graders : Richard, Catherine, Anthony, Eddie, Varouna, Giyoo, Awad, Donna Ruth, Tyrone, Ellie, Enoyat, Leticia, Charlotte, Karim, Shanota, Messima, Saundra, Dorota, Ivan, Connie, Illeana, Yasu, Reba, Jumanah, Candice, and Shahroukh.

Your job, according to the state where you happen to live and the school district that pays your salary, is to make sure that, sixty minutes from now, the students have grasped the concept of rate. Specifically, if a car is going 55 miles per hour, how far will it have traveled after 15 minutes? How about after 2 hours? By the end of the year, your students should also have mastered fractions, negative numbers, linear functions, long division, ratio and proportion, and exponents. Youre also supposed to teach them to become good citizens, subtly knitting into your lesson (yes, this math lesson) the principles of democracy. In whatever time is left, remember to help the children vault over any hurdles life has thrown themracial, economic, parental, intellectual. You must bend reality closer to the dream of the American meritocracy.

Ready?

The door bursts open. With the residual energy of recess, they surge through the coat room, rearranging their clothes and jostling for sips from the water fountain. Here comes Varouna. She is from Kenya, lithe and dark skinned. Giyoo is from Japan. He is 4 feet tall and barely speaks. Catherine is studious and has her hair in braids. Eddie, freckle faced and hyperactive, takes his seat in the back. Tyrone just moved from South Carolina and prefers not to pay attention. He sits closer to you, in the front.

Dont just stand there. Teach something!

Richard sits near the front, next to Tyrone. Theyre both new to the school this year. On the first day, Richard introduced himself and volunteered that math was his worse subject.

Half an hour later, the students are all askew, murmuring and chatting with each other. Theyve been working on a math problem you wrote on the chalkboard while they were out at recess.

Condition: A car is going 55 mph. Make a diagram to show where it will be

A.after an hour

B.after 2 hours

C.after half an hour

D.after 15 minutes

Consider how to get everyone to quiet down. Next to you, on a table, is a small bell. Do you ring it? Perhaps you should raise one hand and put the other hand over your mouth. Or what about that old line? When my hand goes up, your mouths go shut. You go for the bell. Thankfully, it works, and you launch a discussion.

Soon, fifteen minutes have passed, and class is almost over. So far, the students have worked on the problem in small groups of four to six. You have circulated around, peering over shoulders at their varying degrees of success, deciding when to talk and when to nod and when to hold in a laugh, letting it shake inside your chest when a student does something hilarious and adorable. And all of you, together, have reasoned your way through A, B, and C.

On the chalkboard, youve drawn a straight horizontal line, with distance represented on top and time underneath. On the far right is a crosshatch for 110 miles and 2 hours (B); halfway in the middle there is another for 55 miles and 1 hour (A); then theres one more, smaller, crosshatch halfway between 0 and 55: 27.5 miles and hour (C).

It looks like this:

Point to the board. Ask: Can anyone show where the solution to part D should go on the diagram?

Hands shoot up. Then, right in front of you, Richard adds his. You know enough about the others to have an idea of how they understand rate, or at least an idea of what they will be able to do with the problem. Richard, though, is something of a mystery. After the worse subject speech, you collected his math notebook at the end of each week along with the other students. But he wrote very little in it and only rarely raised his hand. Now hes volunteering to answer the most difficult part of the questionand you have no idea what hell say.

What do you do?

Look at the clock; only 10 minutes left. Do you have time to risk a wrong answer? What about Richard? What if he isnt even close? If hes wrong, will he, an African American boy in a racially diverse classroom, shut down and hesitate to participate again? On the other hand, what message does it send to the others not to call on him?

Richard, you say. He stands up, turning his notebook so he can see it from the board, and walks slowly to the front. Everyone waits, silent.

D: Show where the car going 55 mph will be after 15 minutes.

Reaching for the miles section, on top, he rests the chalk halfway between 0 and 27.5. 15 minutes, he writes. Below, between 0 minutes and hour, he writes, 18. The board looks like this:

Ummm, he says. Eighteen.

Huh? Not only has he put time (15 minutes) where distance should go, but he has also proposed another number, 18, that makes no sense. A car going 55 miles an hour could not travel 18 miles in 15 minutes. And what reasonable computation would get you to 18? Not dividing 27.5 by 2, or 110 by 4, certainly, and not anything else related to the numbers on the board either.

What do you do?

You could quickly correct his time-distance reversal, not drawing too much attention to the mistake, on the assumption that it was a careless error. But what if it wasnt? You decide to assume nothing. Eighteen miles, you venture, or eighteen minutes?

Clarify: You wrote 18 next to minutes. Did you mean 18 miles and 15 minutes? Richard nods, erases, and rewrites. Now the numbers are flipped: 18 miles, 15 minutes. But theres still that mystifying 18.

What do you do? Should you say, simply and directly, Thats wrong ? What does Richard mean, anyway?

Look at the class. Ask: Can anybody explain what Richard was thinking?

Another jolt of hands. Try to memorize who is asking to speak, and who is making a fan out of his pencils. Remember, you arent just teaching Richard; the other twenty-five need to be educated too. What are they thinking? Are they learning?

Check the time. Just a few minutes left, but this could take much longer. Maybe better to give up; theres always tomorrow. But look at Richard, who still believes 18 makes sense, who doesnt know what he doesnt know.

Call on studious Catherine. Ummmmm, she says. I disagree with that. She pauses. Then, Ummm...

Think. She wants to give the correct answer, yet you said, can anybody explain what Richard was thinking, not can anybody talk about her own idea. Catherine seems to know shes out of order. That ummm...shes eyeing you, looking for permission to disobey.

Do you grant it? Maybe you should. Nod, and the right answer will comeclear and concise, knowing Catherine, and just in time for the end of class. But look at Richard. If quick Catherine, a white girl, jumps in with the save, what effect will that have on him? On the other hand, if you dont let Catherine continue, how will that affect the rest of the class? In either case, what will the class learn about race, gender, andoh yeah, math?