One of the many, many reasons I re-retired from teaching was the new policy that my administration was trying to put forward. They didn’t like zeroes. During my interview, they asked me if I would cooperate with their new policy to not give zeroes for incomplete assignments, but to assign half the points even if they turned in nothing. I said sure, because I really didn’t care how grading was done. I was more interested in student learning.
But when it came time for me to get my students prepared to have a quarterly grade check in nine weeks, I told them that they really didn’t have all that much to worry about for the assignment portion of the grade, and here’s why:
Let’s say that I counted each completed assignment as four points, which I actually did. Four or four hundred, there’s no difference because it all scales. And let’s say that I gave five assignments for a grand total of 20 points. Once again, we’re just keeping things simple here. If they completed just one of the four assignments and got the full four points, they would pass. They looked at me like my head was on backward. I said, no, really, let’s take a look. If you get half credit for doing absolutely nothing, and just did the last of the five assignments, let’s see how that looks:
2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 4 = 12
Congratulations, 12 out of 20 points is a 60% score, and that, according to the standardized school grading scale was a D-; a passing grade! You can look like you’re doing the work, even when you’re not.
Now, many people are going to try to argue with me here, and let me warn you. You will lose. It doesn’t matter what the assignments were worth. Make it 100 points per assignment.
50 + 50+ 50 + 50 + 100 = 300. And since the assignments are worth 100 points each, that’s 300 out of 500, or…60%. it’s the same. You do one assignment out of every five as well as you can and your homework grade will look like you tried. Now, mind you, if you actually want to pass, you’ll need to score higher than 60% on the assessments, but don’t worry about that, because we were encouraged to give multiple chances to take those.
We were being asked to lower our standards to such a point that almost nothing mattered, and that’s just a bitter pill to swallow when you’ve just come back from a year and a half of retirement.
When I was a child, from age seven to twelve, I suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of the man who would become my stepfather. I’ve talked and written about it elsewhere ad nauseam, but I think it’s appropriate to mention it here in this new venue. Unfortunately, the trauma I experienced is the central experience in my life. Every day, I deal with the effects.
It’s only fair to issue a trigger warning:
Trigger warning: Descriptions of abuse follow.
The abuse I experienced was both physical and emotional. I was beaten nearly every day on my bare behind with a wooden ruler with a metal backing. It was called “the stick.” At least, that’s what happened at first. I was eventually punched, kicked, and had my head held underwater so long that I had to literally fight for breath. The physical abuse escalated to the point where my mother thought he was going to kill me. The worst of the physical abuse came when I was eight, and he tore my infected fingernail off with a pair of pliers. This was ostensibly to avoid a doctor visit, which would have cost money. I ended up in the emergency room.
If you can quantify such things, the emotional abuse was worse. I was called worthless, stupid, lazy, and weak on a daily basis. But perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to me was when he burned all of my comic books in front of me. You’ve probably already read here what they meant to me. He claimed that they would give me nightmares, but the only thing that gave me nightmares was the burning of the comics.
The abuse finally ended on my 12th birthday, when my mother let me choose who to live with, my dad or her. That decision took 0.005 nanoseconds to make, and just after Christmas, I moved in with my dad, where I was safe. No one ever laid a hand on me again.
I bring all this up because, as the title of this post would imply, my abuse is the elephant in the room. Which room? Every room I’m in. As I said above, I struggle with the effects every day. Yes, I’ve had counseling. But as anyone who has ever experienced this to a certain degree will tell you, it doesn’t go away. It will never go away. The best you can do is learn how to carry it. And I think I have.
I don’t intend to write about this a lot, but almost everything I do write about will likely have at least one reference to it, so I didn’t want my readers to be in the dark.
One of my favorite parts of the holiday season is thinking about time spent with my Grandma and Grandpa McClain. And one of the things they always had on hand that made it fun was a bowl of candy. So, we stopped today at Wakarusa Dime Store, which is simply loaded with nostalgic candy, and I filled a bag with three of the candies that were always on-hand at their house: Starlight mints, butterscotch disks, and red anise squares. Now, if you’ve never had a red anise square, it’s a candy that tastes like black licorice. Anise seeds are sweeter than fennel, one of the other sources of that licorice flavor. I know, no one else in my family will touch them, but if you’re a fan, you might want to check them out!
I didn’t have a candy dish to store them in, so we stopped at an antique mall and I found a cool basket that is much safer in my office, with the dog and cats always about.
One of my earliest memories is of watching the “Operation: Annihilate!” episode of Star Trek–what people now call Star Trek the Original Series.
“Operation Annihilate”
Since it was broadcast on April 13, 1967, I was only two and a half years old. The show was very appealing to a young child such as myself because there were lots of garish colors, both in the uniforms and the sets. I remember my mother babysitting for a pair of twins named Matt and Mark, and they had shirts with traffic lights on their left breasts. I used to call them their Star Trek shirts. I had one with a bear on the left breast, but the shirt was black so it didn’t qualify.
In the 1970s, Star Trek made a big comeback in syndication. Daily reruns allowed those of us in Mrs. Burkholder’s third grade class to discover Star Trek’s imaginative adventure and to recreate it in pretend play. We used to take the cardboard backs of our notebooks and draw phasers and communicators on them. Then we would cut them out with scissors and use them as props on the playground at recess. We were even more excited when the cartoon began that fall, as if it had given us license to create our own Star Trek adventures. We loved the fights, the ray guns, and the action of Star Trek. We didn’t get that the point of science fiction was to create allegory and parables from which to learn, but the show gave us plenty of excitement nonetheless. Using typical third grade logic, when it came time to select roles for the characters, I got to play Captain Kirk, by virtue of being named Jim.
The main cast of Star Trek (animated)
My brother and I, on one of our trips to our grandparents’ house, received matching Mego action figures of Kirk and Spock, and together we had many adventures on distant planets. I don’t know how many times we re-enacted “Amok Time,” but it counted in the hundreds.
Mego Capt. Kirk
We also got one of the first trade paperbacks when we found the Enterprise Logs in a bookstore. The trade reprinted the old Gold Key Star Trek series. We read that thing dog-eared.
Star Trek The Enterprise Logs Volume 2
or Christmas in 1976, Jeff and I got matching phaser pistols from our father. They were the coolest toys for the time. When you pressed the trigger, it made a chirping sound, which was more like a communicator than a phaser, but we didn’t care. The phasers were also projectors that, using a cutout that you slid over the lens, projected a picture of a ship on the wall. I remember they took a nine-volt battery in the handles for the sound, and two double A’s in the back for the light. My dad probably regretted getting us noise-making toys for Christmas, but the phaser remains one of my favorite toys of childhood. When I moved in with him a month later, Star Trek was still in reruns and I was lucky enough to find a book from the library, called The Making of Star Trek, by Stephen Whitfield. My dog ate the cover of the paperback so we had to buy the book, but I sure didn’t regret it. I was able to check off all the episodes of Star Trek that I had yet to see. We only had a black and white TV, but it didn’t matter. I knew what color everybody wore! In my spare time, I created my own starship based on some of the production drawings in the book. I crewed the ship with superheroes, so that made for some interesting daydreams, to be sure. It wasn’t until later that I started to get the deeper meaning behind the show, but that time would come. And that understanding only reinforced my love for this show.
The Remco chirping phaser
Even though from ninth grade through the end of high school, I became an insufferable jock, I still found ways to incorporate my nerdity into my everyday life. When I had to give a demonstrative speech with visual support, I chose to use my The Making of Star Trek book to demonstrate for the class, where everything was on the starship Enterprise. But perhaps more informatively for the masses, I was able to define what people in the credits of movies and TV show actually do, from the director, down to the best boy (senior electrician, second to the gaffer). The book had provided insights that I had never known, and neither had my classmates. Scored an A for that.
The Making of Star Trek
When 1979’s Star Trek The Motion Picture was released just after my 15th birthday, everyone in my whole family went to the movies, a rare event. Even my grandmother went to see it. What a thrill it was! People have often called it “the motionless picture” but I found it, if you’ll forgive the term, fascinating. I absolutely loved the slow, lumbering exterior shots of the Enterprise model. I saw it three times in the theater, and yes. I bought the Happy Meals.
Star Trek Happy Meals
In 1982, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan silenced all the critics of the first movie. This one was special to me, as I was 17, and had saved enough money to treat my dad and my brother to a showing on Father’s Day and felt like a grown up driving them there.
During my freshman year of college, in the early spring of 1984, we showed Star Trek II as part of the Student Entertainment Committee’s series of films. I wasn’t actually part of the committee; I was doing my college work-study as a projectionist, so I got to see it multiple times that weekend and enter the trivia contest, which I won. The question was, who said, “Take it easy lad; everyone’s entitled to their own opinion.” But the kicker was, “In which episode?” I got both questions right, and won a model of the refit Enterprise.
By the time Star Trek III rolled out, it was the summer after my freshman year in college. I took my college girlfriend to see it one weekend when I was in Kalamazoo visiting her.
Star Trek IV came out at the beginning of my senior year in college, in November 1986. Are you starting to see the pattern here? I literally grew up with Star Trek. The model used for the Enterprise was still being built on the day I was born, and by the time I graduated from college, it was still going strong, with the original characters perhaps reaching the height of their popularity. It was at this time that I discovered the FASA Star Trek Roleplaying Game. I started my gaming life during freshman year, and didn’t really have time to devote to a long campaign, but during some long summer nights in my junior year, we managed to find the time to make some trouble in the Original Series era.
I was a math teacher for 32 years. I taught every math subject under the sun, first in high school for 10 years, then eighth grade for 11 years, and then finally spending the final 11 years of my career teaching an elective course called 7th Grade Math Problem Solving. Now, what Math Problem Solving consisted of was a question for the ages. No one seemed to know. The teacher who was teaching it while I was teaching eighth grade hated the idea of a nebulous, free-form course that had no formal textbook or ordered set of standards. She was as uncreative a teacher as I’ve ever met. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she left teaching to become an administrator shortly afterward. I, on the other hand, despised being tied to specific texts and schedules.
A little background is required, here. At the beginning of my career, teachers had the power to select their own textbooks, by school system. Every seven years, just as Vulcans return to their home planet to mate, textbook companies would come courting, to try to bribe us teachers to vote to adopt their textbook. I guess you could call it Textbook Pon Farr. In a large school system with thousands of students, this adoption would be extremely lucrative for the book company. And when they courted us, they meant business, literally. Teachers would be treated to meals at the best restaurants in the area, and companies would try to sway us with promotional items, sample textbooks, and other gifts. One time, we teachers and a guest were treated to a private showing of Star Wars The Force Awakens, complete with free popcorn and snacks! Clearly, this system is ridiculous and corrupt, and just before I took on the problem solving course, the power to vote for a preferred textbook was taken from teachers completely. An administrator and his hand-picked committee made the decision for us, and in this particular instance, a very poor and unpopular decision was made. A problem-based curriculum was chosen, which would have been great, except for one thing; it was scripted.
When I say the textbook was scripted, that is precisely what I mean. It was in the format, say this, do that example, ask this question, assign these problems. And we were required to attend inservices where the teachers who piloted the program insisted that every page must be followed to the letter, or it would have no validity. We had some really creative, experienced teachers at that time, and I would stack their homemade lessons against the scripted curriculum any day of the week. They were told they could not vary from the book, even when their activities were similar. There was a mass exodus soon after, as they fled the system. If I’d had the experience and the years in, I would have followed them. As it was, I had the opportunity to jump ship and teach the soon-to-be-abandoned problem solving course. And jump I did.
One of the first things we established about the problem solving course was that it was to supplement the regular curriculum, remediating kids who had done poorly and enriching the kids who’d done well. It was a semester course, and at my suggestion, we put struggling students in the first semester so that I would have them for a full semester preceding the big test, ISTEP+, which was given in the spring. Higher-performing students would be scheduled in the second semester, so they could also benefit from the course, but their need wasn’t as critical as the struggling students. This process seemed to work well, as we saw a rise in scores soon after. It may have been a coincidence, and there is absolutely no way to make a case for the effect of this course. I just like to think it was.
I was free to use whatever materials I chose, and I was careful to support my choices with the state standards we were required to teach. I still laugh about those state standards, because they are so poorly written. In 2014, Indiana moved away from Common Core State Standards because of a misinterpretation of their origin. Tea Party Republicans viewed them as a federal takeover. And in 2014, then-Governor Mike Pence signed legislation making Indiana the first state to walk away from the national rollout of CCSS. We reverted back to the 2000 academic standards that we had been using before the advent of CCSS. When we finally adopted new standards written by Hoosiers for Hoosiers, they were about 80% Common Core, but paraphrased. So, by the time I was writing lessons to match the standards, we were using the Cliff’s Notes version of Common Core. But I wasn’t complaining, because one standard stood out over all others. I present to you, Indiana Math Standard 7.C.6:
Use proportional relationships to solve ratio and percent problems with multiple operations (e.g. simple interest, tax, markups, markdowns, gratuities, conversions within and across measurement systems, and percent increase and decrease).
At that time, we were required to write the standard we were teaching on our whiteboards, and I printed a copy off, posted it, and never took it down. It kind of covers a lot, doesn’t it? Other standards say stuff like “Add integers.” This one, though, could keep you busy for five months!
And busy we were. At the time of this writing, it’s the week of Thanksgiving, and I always had a lesson prepared that covered 7.C.6. Regular textbooks often had sections on unit pricing. You know what excited kids about those units? Absolutely nothing. Here’s how I handled it. I stopped at the local grocery chain, Martin’s Supermarkets, on Monday morning when the new flyers came out, and asked a manager if I could take 150 of them to use in the classroom. Now, what manager is going to say no to that? Free advertising directly into the hands of 150 students’ families, right? Win-win. I broke the students up into groups of four with an odd group of three if necessary and gave them a budget to buy communal food for a week. NO ALCOHOL! What, did you think I was a n00b? It was always the first thing they asked.
Martin’s sales always have a variety of unit pricing: 5/$5, 2/$4, etc. We’d start off easy on those. But then something like this would come up and the kids would choke.
This is an actual price from this week’s ad.
Suddenly, kids were in a panic. They couldn’t make it come out even. Ah, to heck with it, I’ll just buy three! And I’d point out, what if you just needed two? Are you going to waste that money? They usually thought better of it and played along. The unit price rounded to $1.67. The second one you bought would also cost $1.67, and the third one you bought would be $1.66, and the kids accepted that, as they should. I warned them, however, that it didn’t always work like that.
I’m a storyteller, you see. And there are very few things for which I don’t have a story readily available, and unit pricing is right in my wheelhouse. I worked at Meijer as a cashier when I was in college, back in the distant past of 1985. That’s right, the year Back to the Future came out. And we had just gotten those newfangled scanners. Before that, we had to ring everything up manually. Now, the problem with the computers was that they didn’t care about your rounding rules. I still remember a customer complaint when cans of Starkist tuna were 3/$1. Those were the days, right? And one day, a particular customer bought one can of tuna. It scanned $0.34. The customer complained. I agreed, one can of tuna at 3/$1 should have come out at $0.33. So, just for the sake of curiosity, I scanned it again. The second time, it scanned at $0.33, as it did on the third time. After I canceled the second two scans, I called the customer service manager, who actually got mad at me for questioning it. I said that the customer questioned it first, but that was unpersuasive. He yelled at me some more. Honestly, I don’t think he wasn’t cut out for customer service. He explained that the computers were programmed to do it that way because the company was losing that valuable penny on single can purchases, and if you sell 50,000 cans of tuna chainwide, that starts to add up to real money. How much money? By now, you see, the kids were hooked. They started whipping their calculators out and figuring it out for themselves. And this is what we call teaching.
I miss teaching this lesson, and I would have been doing it this week had I not retired.
