Tomorrow marks the beginning of year five as a high school math teacher at Bronx Letters. I know in my head that this year is going to be awesome because so many important techniques have become muscle memory and that I should feel confident about this, but I've been a nervous wreck for about a week. There's something about the prospect of potentially messing with the lives of a hundred young people that still gets me uneasy. I never feel like I'm prepared enough or working well enough to be the kind of teacher I want to be. The crappy part of this is that it's true. The part I can take relief in is that nearly every teacher feels this way--it just comes with the territory. Five years in and the importance, the sanctity, of what I do hasn't diminished for me one bit. And I think that's ridiculously awesome.
This has the makings to be a great year. After a lot of upheaval, the school seems to be finding its way. There's a ton of new teachers and a palpable energy and enthusiasm. I feel like it's possible for me to strike that balance of being extraordinarily demanding while having a lot of fun at the same time. I think I've lost my sense of fun in the classroom over the past couple years as I've tried to be more "serious" as a teacher, and it's like throwing away my best weapon. I'm gonna let it all hang out this year AND provide the kind of structure and organization that let's the kids know that they're learning. That they're moving forward towards something important.
I think I must have a natural poker face because most people seem to think I have it together all the time. It's weird because often times (like over the past week) I feel like I'm falling apart at the seams and it's totally obvious. A big part of me worries that I'm just not good enough to do this job well. Even worse, I worry that I haven't done enough to get to that place. When I first moved out here and started teaching it was easy for me to forgive my shortcomings. I knew that I wasn't where I needed to be. It was part of why I chose to teach in the first place--I figured it would help me become the kind of person I wanted to be, and it has. But every year that passes it becomes more difficult for me to forgive my faults. I should be past these battles by now, no? I should be able to overcome the things that hold me back. I realize that the expectations are entirely my own, but I don't think they're unreasonable. So every misstep starts to feel like a failure of character. It becomes a heavy burden to bear (again, one that is entirely imposed by my own expectations).
That means I have to simultaneously forgive/not be so hard on myself/have FUN! while also being super hard on myself so I can push forward to becoming the kind of teacher/person that I'd like to be. I think it's a balancing act that we do all the time without thinking about it, but when it skews toward one side it becomes more apparent. I think writing about it is my attempt to get it out of my system so I can move on and not think about it so much.
So I'm super excited about (deathly afraid of screwing up!) this school year. I know I'm going to do great things in the classroom and learn a lot about myself and a group of incredible kids in the process (unless I don't...). And it's going to be a ton of fun along the way (until I start grading my first batch of papers). Hmmmmm. I thought this was supposed to get easier...
Monday, September 3, 2012
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Mapping
Sometimes I think I should start off my blog pieces with a line from Almost Famous. I have tons of strange, innocuous (and usually incoherent) thoughts racing around my head all the time, and this post will contain one of them. Here's the scene from the movie:
So here's a theory for you to disregard completely:
A few days ago I went running along the East River, and I started thinking about my face. Hey, the mind wanders. More specifically I was thinking about my resemblance to other people in my family. It's fairly obvious that I've inherited my most striking features from my maternal grandfather, Marvin. We have the same facial shape, similar bone structure, and, ah, that nose. Plus I'm starting to master his incredulous/exasperated look, though my eyebrows ain't got nothing on his:
Hardly a revelation. However, from the right angle, I think I also bear a pretty strong resemblance to my paternal grandmother, Betty. I've noticed it more and more, especially in facebook photos posted on my timeline this summer.
Which got me thinking...
One of the most useful concepts to understand in mathematics is that of a "function." There are a bajillion different ways to think about a function, but in a basic sense it takes an input and transforms it into an output. For example, a gumball machine performs the "function" of transforming a quarter into a gumball. Or with numbers, let's say your input is 2 and output is 4; input is 3 and output is 9; input is 4 and output is 16; ... The function is to take the input and square it.
You can also use functions to explain a lot of visual things that involve math. Take a projector, for example. Place your hands in front of the light of a projector, and suddenly there's a bird on the wall!
Your hands are the input, and the image on the wall is the output. Depending on how you angle your hands, different images appear on the wall. In math, stuff like this is called mapping. You're mapping an image of your hands onto the wall. The cool thing (and, yes, I'm using the word "cool" very loosely) is that the same pair of hands can make a bajillion different images, depending on how the light hits them.
...Which brings me back to my face. I was thinking that genetics are kind of like mapping. I was also probably thinking of the term "genome mapping" which doesn't exactly apply here, but, you know, word association. Certain traits from our ancestors are "mapped" onto us, only we can't see them all at once because the image depends on the angle. It's like we're a mosaic of our family tree, each feature a different projection from one of the branches.
So here's a theory for you to disregard completely:
A few days ago I went running along the East River, and I started thinking about my face. Hey, the mind wanders. More specifically I was thinking about my resemblance to other people in my family. It's fairly obvious that I've inherited my most striking features from my maternal grandfather, Marvin. We have the same facial shape, similar bone structure, and, ah, that nose. Plus I'm starting to master his incredulous/exasperated look, though my eyebrows ain't got nothing on his:
Which got me thinking...
One of the most useful concepts to understand in mathematics is that of a "function." There are a bajillion different ways to think about a function, but in a basic sense it takes an input and transforms it into an output. For example, a gumball machine performs the "function" of transforming a quarter into a gumball. Or with numbers, let's say your input is 2 and output is 4; input is 3 and output is 9; input is 4 and output is 16; ... The function is to take the input and square it.
You can also use functions to explain a lot of visual things that involve math. Take a projector, for example. Place your hands in front of the light of a projector, and suddenly there's a bird on the wall!
Your hands are the input, and the image on the wall is the output. Depending on how you angle your hands, different images appear on the wall. In math, stuff like this is called mapping. You're mapping an image of your hands onto the wall. The cool thing (and, yes, I'm using the word "cool" very loosely) is that the same pair of hands can make a bajillion different images, depending on how the light hits them.
...Which brings me back to my face. I was thinking that genetics are kind of like mapping. I was also probably thinking of the term "genome mapping" which doesn't exactly apply here, but, you know, word association. Certain traits from our ancestors are "mapped" onto us, only we can't see them all at once because the image depends on the angle. It's like we're a mosaic of our family tree, each feature a different projection from one of the branches.
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