rawsonmath

We are beginning this year with a week of what we’re calling Baxter Foundations. We realized at some point last year that we should have done more to bring our students together at the beginning of the year. They are coming from 30+ different towns and educational backgrounds. While I completely support and value the time spent building community last week, we could also use some time building that academic foundation and getting out into the community. These are also foundations of our philosophy. Full disclosure: Our Phase 3 renovation of the building isn’t going to be ready to begin classes on Monday, so we find ourselves with this opportunity.

Beginning tomorrow, our students will participate in such varied experiences as going on college visits, listening to an entrepreneur’s journey, seeing a planetarium show, walking the Portland Freedom Trail, watching a film at nearby SPACE Gallery, touring the waste-water treatment plant across the bridge, visiting the Wells Reserve to learn about the environment, and learning about agriculture by working on Wolfe’s Neck Farm. Those who stay in the building will participate in workshops as varied as learning about Flex Friday, understanding rubrics, plagiarism, research strategies, reading strategies, and teen dating violence. Other workshops include introductions to spreadsheets, probeware, and modeling. Some students will participate in some fitness and conditioning while others are working with local experts on creative writing or art. We have a workshop in food chemistry (Is that really food?) and other in project management. 

I’m excited about the opportunity to begin the year this way. It won’t be perfect, but we will take those pieces that worked, fine-tune them, and improve Baxter Foundations for next year. After all, that’s what the design process is all about. And that’s what we do at Baxter Academy.

This Day 2 was different from last year’s Day 2 – of course. There was no furniture to build, at least not yet. We have more students now. Only 9th & 10th graders were in the building today, but there are still more of them, which is great. Today was about orientation, and reorientation. As with any project, any design challenge, reflecting and improving are important steps. We’ve done that. There are changes to what we plan to do with kids this year. Some rearranging of the schedule, a bit more time with our advisory groups, nothing huge. Our philosophy is still the same: we want our kids to be able to stand up and say what they know and believe. We want them to be fearless, and to learn from mistakes.

Today’s schedule was organized around our advisory groups. We teamed together a 9th grade group with a 10th grade group. Those groups then rotated through a series of presentations about our school: Open Campus, Flex Friday, Baxpectations & Standards Based Grading, Baxtitution, Student Government, and Student Judiciary Board, Mentoring & Advisory, and a slide show of the teachers. All of these presentations were designed by teams of 10th graders, student senators, who had minimal guidance from a faculty member. Was I nervous about what they would say? Sure, I was. Did they do an amazing job? Of course they did. That’s what impressed me the most. Not only did twelve 10th graders agree to put in extra time to create a presentation about a specific topic special about our school, they delivered that information six times and answered countless questions. And the 10th graders in the audience asked great questions, too. It was really a good morning, led by kids. Could it have been better? Sure. That’s the reflection and iteration part. Next year it will be slightly different, slightly tuned, and more effective. But I doubt we will change the overall purpose or how it is student-led. Those six topics were selected by students who spent the last day of school last June brainstorming and designing today’s orientation model.

After lunch, we got outside (another gorgeous Maine day), walked to the Old Port with our 9th grade partners (my advisory group really wanted to get to know them better), learned about next week’s “Baxter Foundations” schedule (more about that next week), and had our own design challenge for “Baxter Swag.” When you work in a school that revolves around problem solving, it’s good to get in as many design challenges as you can.

When I asked my students to sum up their first two days (10th graders do not have school tomorrow), many of them said how great it was to be back in school. Even with the changes (new students, new faculty, new building spaces, moved classrooms). One student said, “All summer, people asked me about Baxter. They know it’s a charter school and they want to know about it. The best way I could sum it up is to tell them that I am excited to come to school every day. I’m so glad to be here.” Ditto that.

This time last year, I began a brand new adventure, a leap of faith, as my principal said recently. I left Poland Regional High School to help start a brand new school in Portland, Maine. A Brand New School. Would it open? Would kids even come? Would we survive year one? Would there be a year two? There were certainly lots of questions, and not many answers. Except, we did open, kids did come (and keep coming), we survived, and there’s a year two. We’ve expanded our faculty to meet the needs of another 100 students. We’ve revamped our schedule and our curriculum. We’ve created a school-wide writing rubric, together, with input from the entire faculty (soon to be approved), that we agree to test out during the fall term. We are moving forward.

Last year, we weren’t sure if the school would open on time. There were issues with building and occupancy permits. We spent our first day team and community building at Fort Williams Park. And by Day Two, we were in the building, putting together our cursed Ikea furniture. But it was an adventure that drew us together as a team and a community. How could we possibly recapture that spirit this time around, when we have a year behind us? After all, we’re not “new” anymore.

Fort Williams worked so well last year, that we’re doing it again, but only with 9th and 10th graders. Two hundred thirty students are too many for Rippleffect to work with all at once, so we’re splitting up. They will have our 9th & 10th graders at Fort Williams Park this Wednesday. They will host the 11th graders on Thursday, using the facilities on Cow Island in Casco Bay. Meanwhile, the 9th & 10th graders will be back at school orienting each other about Baxter Academy, and the ways that our school is different from other public schools. On Friday, those juniors, and some sophomores, will work with the 9th graders as mentors. And there will be furniture building, of course.

I’m excited about how we’ve rearranged our curriculum. We are organizing by trimesters, and we are focusing on being really standards-based. So, we’ve created these 12 week courses, that focus in on specific standards. In math, that means focusing on Algebra or Functions or Statistics or Geometry. Those are the big, reporting standards. There are course standards that are a smaller grain size, like Building Functions or Reasoning with Equations. But this is the exciting part, for me, of continuing to build this school. Figuring out what standards-based, really standards-based, graduation looks like. Not some hybrid of standards, courses, and credits, but standards. It’s a work in progress, like everything, but I’m excited to be teaching courses like Functions for Modeling, Problem Solving with Algebra, Intro to Statistics, Designing Experiments & Studies, and Programming for Beginners. That last one came from our students.

The wrinkle to our beginning school this year is the fact that our basement renovation will not be complete in time for the week that we had planned for classes to begin. But when it’s done, it will give us some really awesome spaces: a fabrications lab, complete with drill presses and table saws and a CNC router and whatever else we can get our hands on, and real science lab with benches and space to conduct experiments, a CAD focused computer lab, and a couple more classrooms.

Rather than see this as a complete setback, it provides us with an opportunity. The opportunity to pull our students together, students who come from 35 different communities, and teach them a few skills. Skills that range from how to get around Portland (so you don’t get lost at lunchtime) to what to know about your laptop and how to organize your Google drive. We have workshops on how to conduct research (it’s more than just Google?) to understanding where food comes from (have you seen Jamie Oliver’s TED Talk?) to learning how to use science probes for collecting data to just a little bit about project management.

Sure, we didn’t plan on two weeks of Baxter Foundations, but we are Innovative and Ethical and see this delay as an opportunity rather than a setback. That’s part of the payoff of taking that leap of faith a year ago. I am constantly reminded that it was the right leap to take.

Wow. What a week. We had our first week of classes and our first Flex Friday.

Our schedule is an interesting mix of current tradition and pushing the envelope. The students have eight classes and there are no study halls. There are four classes every day, so the days alternate. Classes meet either Monday & Wednesday or Tuesday & Thursday. So, during this past week, I met all of my students twice. I am teaching seven classes this year. Yes, seven of eight blocks. It’s a lot. But it’s what’s necessary during this first year. So we are all doing what’s necessary. I am teaching all of the 9th graders and 2/3 of the 10th graders. That gives me about 105 students, which averages to about 15 per class. Not bad, really. I just wish I had a little more time to chat with colleagues. I’m hopeful that will come.

So what did we do this week?

9th grade

We had a bit of fun with Dan Meyer’s Pyramid of Pennies problem. After watching the video a couple of times, I had them write down the first question that came to mind (and then a couple more). They shared their questions with each other and with me. Many questions were common from class to class, but some were quite different. Here’s a listing:

• How tall is it?
• How much does it weigh?
• How much money is it?
• How did they keep the pennies from falling?
• How many pennies is that?
• How long did it take?
• Where did they get the pennies?
• How many pies can you buy with all those pennies?
• How many pennies are in each row?
• Why a pyramid?
• How many people did it take to build?
• How old were the creators?
• What’s the oldest penny?
• Why time lapse instead of sped up video?
• Were there any patterns to the penny placement?
• Are they real pennies?
• Who has that much time?
• Is the change between each layer a constant?
• What did they do with the pennies afterwards?

As they set out to figure out how many pennies were in the completed pyramid, I heard lots of great discussion about how the layers were formed. If the bottom layer was 40 stacks by 40 stacks, then was then next layer up 38 by 38 or 39 by 39? If there were 1600 stack in the bottom layer, then did the next layer up have 1596 because it lost four stacks from the corners? Each team made some assumptions and then proceeded with their computations from there. Several teams were able to see their plans through, making some adjustments if the numbers didn’t seem to be making sense. Other teams ran out of time. But that was okay. They had done enough to share strategies. I especially liked that when one group said, “We multiplied 40 x 40 x 13 to get the number of pennies in the bottom layer, then we did 39 x 39 x 13 to get the next layer, then 38 x 38 x 13, and so on. Then we added up all the layers to get the total,” another group said, “We did the same thing. We just multiplied by 13 at the end.” Huh? How can it be the same if you multiplied by 13 at a different time, I asked. The response: “They found the number of pennies in each layer. We found the number of stacks in the pyramid and then multiplied by 13 to get the number of pennies.” Isn’t that beautiful?

On the second day of class (Wednesday/Thursday) we played around a bit more with the patterns of pennies. Since just about every group had focused on squaring numbers to figure out how many pennies were in each layer, I asked them to take a look at these numbers: 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, … and describe any patterns they discovered. Looking for and describing patterns is key to thinking critically about mathematics (as well as lots of other things). Most groups found the difference pattern. At least one group in each class found a pattern by looking at the final digit of each square number. Interestingly, no groups attempted to represent these numbers visually. I guess we’ll have to go back to that. They were also able to tell me that the number of stack on layer n would be  n^2. (Maybe someone can teach me how to show this properly using latex. I tried and tried and couldn’t get it to work.)

Then I gave them this pattern: 1, 5, 14, 30, 55, 91, 140, … and asked them to find the next few numbers in the sequence. Again, this involves looking for patterns. I also challenged them to come up with a formula, suspecting that they would not be able to. They’re 9th graders, after all. I’m happy to say that nobody gave up. They really tried to come up with a formula. They were thinking recursively, of course, but don’t yet have any language for that. Again, that’s okay. I found out a lot about these students during those two classes.

10th grade

Again, I turned to Dan Meyer. But this time we tried out the Penny Circle. It was really the first time I’d ever asked my students to do math through an online guided activity. I’d been through it myself, first, and it seemed pretty straight-forward and reasonable. And while the conversations during class were all good, the data that I received on the back end (teacher dashboard) was not so helpful. It’s not any fault of what Dan & Desmos put together. I love what they put together. I just forgot that I would be using it with 10th grade boys. (Yes, most of our 10th graders are boys – there are only a handful of girls in the 10th grade.) So, I got some very silly, anonymous results. Thankfully, nothing was school inappropriate!

However, it’s now difficult for me to use their data to figure out who needs some help understanding the relationship between diameter and area of a circle. Although the easy answer is: most of them. I’m not sure that this new presentation of the original problem prompted creative problem-solving and curiosity in the way that the penny pyramid problem did for the 9th graders. Maybe that wasn’t the point. But part of me wishes that I had given them some real pennies and real circles and had them collect the data that way. These kids didn’t have the opportunity to think about their own questions after watching the video. I’m just not sure their curiosity was sparked.

I’ll keep working at it. I know that I can spark some curiosity around math for this group. But they will be a bit tougher than the 9th graders. I have my work cut out for me.

Flex Friday

One of the founding principles of Baxter Academy is that students work on projects. Big projects. Long term projects. Meaningful projects. To give kids time to work on these big, long term, meaningful projects we have Flex Friday. We have no regular classes on Friday. Instead, the time is devoted to project work (mostly). Since it was our first Friday and students do not yet have projects to work on, we teachers gave some presentations of possible projects. The ideas ranged from building a noise & dust containment system for our CNC router, to figuring out the best possible lunch program for our school, to building a greenhouse, to designing a video game, to researching the ethnomusicology of Maine. Some students have their own ideas that they are hoping to pursue this year, but the rest now have lots of good ideas to choose from.

Since we have this gift of Flex Friday time, we also thought that it would be good to get out and about into Portland. We are only a couple of blocks from the Old Port, after all. So, on Friday afternoon groups of kids with their advisors went to different locations around town. I was with the group the went to the Portland Public Library. They’ve had a recent renovation and the new building is awesome. Bright and inviting, this is a place where I would not mind spending an afternoon. We signed all the kids up for library cards – I got one, too. The little city of Portland has a great library full of wonderful resources. I can’t wait to begin exploring them all. Now, to find the time …

It was an absolutely beautiful day.

We (the faculty at Baxter Academy) decided that we actually have three 1st days of school this year. Nathaniel called them 1D1, 2D1, and 3D1. The names stuck.

1D1

On 1D1, we all gathered at Fort Williams Park in Cape Elizabeth. This beautiful seaside setting was the backdrop of our work for the day. The school contracted with Rippleffect whose fabulous staff designed a series of five challenges for the kids and faculty.

Clumping and acting seemed to be the key.

One challenge was called, “Where’s my water bottle?” Similar to the old red light, green light game, this time the kids had to figure out how to grab said water bottle, return to the starting line, and let everyone have a chance to hold it, all while making sure that Toby, the Rippleffect guide, did not see them moving or guess who was holding the water bottle. It was interesting to see them devise a plan that completely fooled Toby. It turns out that Toby was a student in the first year of the Francis W Parker Charter Essential School, the charter school in Massachusetts founded by Ted and Nancy Sizer. It was an interesting side note for me – during my first year of teaching, I met Ted Sizer during a Coalition of Essential Schools function and read his book, Horace’s Compromise. He made a tremendous impact on the direction my teaching ultimately took.

It quickly became a salvage operation.

In a different challenge, the group was divided into four engineering/design teams. Their task was to design, build, and market a raft from three pieces of float foam, three 6 foot long 2×4 pieces of wood, and three lengths of rope. The ultimate test, of course, was to take them on the water to see how far they could go (and how quickly they would fall apart). There were some solid designs in my group. Unfortunately, the construction process didn’t go as well as planned. All four rafts fell apart in the water. Kudos to the kids who volunteered to test the rafts. Sure, it’s September and the weather was beautiful. But this is still Maine – that water isn’t very warm.

It was a fabulous first day. Lots of laughs, smiles, and new friends.

2D1

Our second first day was at the school. As students entered the front doors to wild applause and noise making, a reporter from Maine Public Broadcasting caught the racket from outside. He was later allowed to enter the building and speak with a couple of teachers. Here’s the report. Quite nice, actually, considering some of the turmoil that has surrounded the opening of this school. Once the opening ceremonies were over, we got down to business: building furniture and arranging our rooms. We had about 7000 pounds of tables, chairs, cabinets, and bookshelves to assemble. Computers needed to be set up in the lab. Off we went in our advisory groups and got to work. My classroom started out looking like this:

A few hours later it looked like this:

And the view out my window?

Sure, there’s a hotel under construction and a lumber yard next door (they own the building, after all). But there’s also water. I’ve missed the water. It’s good to be home again.

Stay tuned for 3D1 – that happens on Monday – and I get to teach some classes!