Our Friday Lunch Sales . . .
A few weeks ago, we had a rather embarrassing lunch sale. Here’s how it works — we process orders on Thursday and deliver food on Friday. Students are paired and have responsibility for each of the 8 classrooms as well as the specialists and other staff. Two are mainly responsible for managing our supplies as students pick up sandwiches, juice, chips, and more for the classroom that is waiting for food.
Thursday is the critical day. That’s when we collect the orders and record them. They report the numbers to me and then open the envelopes and check the money. Errors of amounts up to 25 cents are usually allowed to pass, on the assumption that some other parents will give us a five dollar bill for a $4.75 lunch. But Mark and I don’t check the students’ count. If the totals they report say we need 12 cheese hoagies, that’s what we order. Although we usually over-buy on things we can save for the next sale (chips, juice, pudding, etc.,), we usually cut the sandwich order pretty close.
Although this week went really well, the previous hoagie sale was not great. I made a mistake while adding up some classroom totals, students recorded orders in the wrong column on the form for their group, one class lost some orders in the classroom and never handed them in . . . and we felt pretty bad about it. But that was okay. Why? Because it’s real work. We have real customers, and we are selling (and, we hope, delivering) a real product. If we get it wrong, it’s a lot more serious than a spelling mistake. And getting it wrong makes us want to work harder and better next time. (Mark now checks my addition, and our kids are taking their double-check routine much more seriously.)
Our children need real responsibilities at school and at home. The children become important, accountable, and committed. When a couple of errors surfaced in this Friday’s lunch delivery, students were intent on finding out what had happened. As it turned out, one mistake occurred when a sandwich was recorded by a team in the wrong category. One was a result of a second grader’s paying for an applesauce but not writing it on the his/her order form. We took care of both mistakes. We agreed that one mistake that we owned was not bad — an acceptable level of customer service, especially since we did have the correct sandwich to replace the wrong one.
We see the same growth in pride and commitment as the “Life Skills” project moves along. Children who are learning to cook meals, do laundry, do the grocery shopping, take over care for a pet, and the like are doing “real” things. We appreciate the time parents are spending in supporting this growth. We know it takes longer to teach a child to do something than to do it yourself, but that time will be more than balanced when the child becomes independent at the task.
Video Literacy . . .
Another thing we did this week was take a second look at the final scene in Bridge On the River Kwai. We had a good discussion about nuances of dialogue, camera angles, the role of various characters, and the same kinds of plot “signposts” that we have been using for reading. See our blog post from January 13 for detailed information. We saw quite a few “aha!” moments and agreed that they often occur at the end of films and books. If you enjoy movies, we encourage you to think about how ongoing conversations while watching as a family can help make your child more aware of how a good story is put together and interpreted, whether in print or on the screen.
This is the second film we have watched in which the two central characters represented strong and opposing views. The first was I Shall Fight No More Forever — the story of Chief Joseph’s doomed struggle to avoid the placing of his Nez Perce tribe on a reservation. The army officer who pursued and ultimately defeated him was General Howard, a Civil War veteran of the Union army and, later, founder of Howard University. His “tough questions” were about his duty to the army and its orders, which were in direct conflict with his own values and wishes. Chief Joseph’s “tough questions” were about how much loss he was prepared to see his people suffer in order to try to get to Canada and freedom.
Math . . .
As many of you know, we have been doing a lot with ratios in math recently (and some students have extended that understanding into problems involving rate as well). This is some of the most challenging work we have done this year, and we have seen tremendous progress in our students’ understanding. At the beginning of the year, we did a lot of work with proportional reasoning in the context of fractions and also percentage concepts and problem-solving. This connects strongly to that. As we noted last week, most students are quite solid on the necessary computational processes — it’s analyzing the problem situation that is difficult. And, for many parents, the homework looks like problems that can be solved only with high school algebra because — like Mark and me — they were not taught any other method for working with such tasks. But the bar modeling technique that is a core part of the Math in Focus program takes a different approach that is visual, logical, and entails no complex equation-based strategy. If you’d like to see another set of solved examples such as we posted last week, go here:
If you are trying to help your child with math homework and seem to hit a wall together, please keep a couple of things in mind. First, the purpose of homework is not only to provide practice in things that have been learned in order to build fluency and mastery. It is also to point up what may still be wobbly and in need of ongoing instruction and practice in the classroom. It’s quite all right for work to come back unfinished and for the student to say “I need some help with this.” That’s a healthy request that gets us all ready to move forward. Lately, we have been having students who were given the same assignment sit down in pairs or threes at the start of math class to go over the work together. Sometimes we have indicated on their worksheets which things were correct, but sometimes we have not. (There is often more participation if students aren’t sure who, if anyone, got something right.) As they talk with each other, they share strategies, realize that they aren’t the only ones who are getting some things wrong, and often figure things out together that didn’t go so well the night before. When a pair or threesome become totally stuck, they call a teacher over, and we help them sort it out. We’re very pleased with the amount of independence, reasoning, and careful explanation that we can observe in those student-led discussions. You learn a lot by teaching someone else. You also find that two or three heads are often better than one, so collaboration is valuable. The second thing to keep in mind, please, is that email is not a good way for students or parents to try to get homework help at night. A phone call is always better. We can have a two way conversation, remind the student of classroom instruction, and — if necessary — agree that we need to sort it out in the classroom the next day. Third, if a student is totally stuck on one problem, s/he should move on to a different one instead of feeling frustrated for most of 30 minutes. That’s one of the reasons we send more problems home than we expect students to complete in half an hour.
The SAT is changing — will the SSAT follow?
Many of our students took the SSAT exam as part of their school application process. We all agreed that the test was extremely difficult, at least partly because it penalized students for guessing by taking off points for a wrong answer but none for a problem that is skipped. We have a lot of doubt about whether most 6th graders are ready to make a determination about their level of confidence in their answers. In addition, skipping problems is a good way to get out of place on the answer sheet, as it’s easy to skip #12 and then put the answer to #13 in the row for the skipped question. We continue to believe that “standardized” testing tells little about a student now or in the future other than how s/he does on this kind of test. At the same time, we know that failing to give students the opportunity and experience of taking such tests (including the Terra Nova test that we do in October) could make things difficult for them and their families as they move on to secondary schools, both public and private.
A recent NY Times article, however, says that the SAT (for college admissions) is about to stop the points-off for a wrong answer and also make many other changes to tie the question content and test format much more closely to typical high school curriculum. The essay will become optional. (How many essays did our 6th graders have to write for schools as well as for the SSAT?) The article can be found here.
We can only hope that this change will trickle down to the SSAT as well. Even those changes would be an improvement.