After summer school Tuesday Vincent headed off to visit with a friend who is married and heading off to Texas to be with her husband during bootcamp. Periodically over the past half a dozen years Vincent has dyed his hair. Apparently his friend and he decided to dye his hair purple, but it turned out pink (even the eye brows, which Vincent doesn't usually dye). My immediate reaction was practical: how are you going to get a job now? Apparently, the kids at school the next morning didn't flinch (except Andrea who said "I no want touch pink"), as turtle math took to comparing height. They measured and compared the heights of Greenville (6 inches) and Speckles (6 1/2 inches) and Vincent and then all the students - and then a guest, me! - who stopped by for an early lunch break. Stephanie took the camera in time to take a few pictures of the measure-in.
Most of the kids were able to figure out that Mr. Vincent is taller than I am, we are both taller than Mrs. Gregory, and everyone is taller than Greenville and Speckles. Notice the nice color coordination between Vincent's hair color, T-shirt, and elements in the classroom. Vincent ended up wearing some shirts this week that he hasn't worn for a while - because of my subtle T-shirt rotation and him being so far behind with laundry - and then the next week Stephanie was able to pick Vincent's clothes out, since they're in the basement and on the second floor and he can't reach them. Up through some of 10th grade I used to pick some of Vincent's school clothes out. After measuring people's heights, we measured the lengths of the two sofas in Stephanie's room to see if Vincent could lie down on them.
Vincent sat in what is usually the teacher reading to the students chair.
He helped the kids with some lists/calculations on the board (below).
Stephanie had played a game with the kids in which she gave them on the board (while timing them) each five addition problems (varying according to their skill levels) and they had to figure them out and answer them correctly and then gave them a time. Vincent and my time turned out to be close, but Shuto had come in under us. Besides learning about seconds (and in some cases minutes) and addition, the students had to compare numbers (Who ran faster, Greenvile or Speckles? Who added faster, Mr. Chang or Mr. Vincent?), which taught or reinforced greater than or less than concepts.
This also gave Vincent practice in math, a topic that he is ostensibly studying in a dual-enrollment high school-college class right now. I know from looking at analysis of his standardized test scores that although his math scores are OK, he still occasionally even has trouble with some basic arithmetic.
While Vincent retired to the teacher's chair to read silently and I got ready to go, Stephanie got the students started on a money exercise where they had $1 to spend and they had to figure out what they would spend money on first and how much tomorrow. Some of this budgeting involved some new thinking on the part of the students (and generated some unrealistic prices). But the point was to get the kids practice at writing and reading numbers and some basic arithmetic, plus some practical math skills and even just basic reinforcement that math skills are not purely academic skills, that they're important practical skills also.
The kids got a late start on this and so they were to work on the first purchase - including drawing a picture of what they were purchasing and once they reported the price, figuring out how much money they had left (some of this was tough for one of the outgoing kindergarteners who had not learned addition and subtraction yet in school), and then taking home their work and showing it to their parents and then bringing it back Thursday to work on the next purchase.
Some of these materials (including the math bingo and I believe this activity) were not things that Stephanie found in her regular ESL curricular materials or things she found on the Internet, but materials summer school had actually directly supplied summer school teachers for Math Camp week. Greenville and Speckles went in to summer school for their fifth and final day Thusday, but stayed home Friday, when the kids had a party with the other teacher teaching ESL students (usually a regular classroom teacher - the one other teacher going to Vegas for that conference, with her husband). Each week Stephanie prepared some partly narrative mini-evaluations/report cards from the week for the students and their parents, staying up late to work on these Thursday night (along with grading whatever tiny bit of homework the kids had done but she hadn't yet graded) and finishing these up in class on Friday while Vincent held down the fort. Monday while Vincent slept in class the outgoing superintendent of schools dropped by briefly. While I was there Wednesday one of the three-day acting summer school elementary school principals dropped by Stephanie's classroom. But also in the office was the regular school principal, who was essentially "volunteering" by popping in. We saw her Saturday also . . . .
-- Perry
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