Cycle 1 Blog Post

For this blog post, we were prompted to reflect on our own childhoods. Given the nature of Kyle’s blog post and the topic of the Rosin article, I specifically reflected on instances from my child that spoke to the ways in which I (and/or my siblings) was or wasn’t closely monitored as a child and the ways that I did or didn’t engage with danger. For instance, I remember that my family spent several years living in town, literally across the street from the local elementary school, which went up to third grade. During our first year living in that house, my sister was in third grade, and I was in ninth grade. I remember that my mom insisted that either I or my brother (a sixth-grader, at the time) pick my sister up and walk her home from school each day. I thought it was ridiculous, considering that my sister was eight years old and should know how to safely cross the street. Looking back on it as an adult, though, I get my mother’s worry about the increased volume of traffic, between the school buses and the parents picking their children up from school. Not to mention that, before moving into this house, we’d lived on a dirt road about 10 minutes outside of town, where there was never any traffic more than the infrequent passing car, so it makes sense that she would worry about my sister not knowing how to navigate it safely, with no crossing guard or other adult supervision.

                When I say “in town” or “out of town,” I want to be clear that “town” was less than 2 square miles of paved roads with a two-way stop (no light, just a sign) at the main intersection. My graduating class was fewer than 200 people, many of whom I had known since pre-school. A number of my classmates and close friends grew up on working farms and had responsibilities related to caring for animals and operating machinery. In this context, I experienced a mix of both more and less freedom than it seemed to me that kids in the US in general did, based on what I saw in movies, TV, and books. For instance, I never got to spend a Halloween walking around with my friends, without parents to guide us or remind us to say “thank you” in addition to “trick or treat.” The houses where I lived were simply too far apart – after we moved from the house in town, we ended up on a back road again, where the two closest crossroads were a mile apart, and we were the only house on our side of the road for that entire stretch (across the road was a pasture where the neighboring farmer let his cows graze). Instead, my mom drove us around on Halloween night, and she would stay in the car in various driveways as my siblings and I walked up to the door to collect our candy. I also never went to the mall to hang out with my friends, since the nearest one was in Flint, about 45 minutes’ drive away. As for walking downtown after school on my own, I snatched that opportunity without asking my mom for permission when I was in, I think, seventh grade. I figured it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission (or, you know, I just didn’t have to tell her, as long as I was at the school waiting to be picked up after Quizbowl practice got out). This wasn’t any kind of standard coming-of-age ritual, though – walking downtown by yourself wasn’t really a big deal, because there wasn’t much to do there.

                At the same time, though, there were plenty of ways in which I was less supervised than “typical” US kids of the 1990s. At the back of my grandparents’ property was the beginning of some woods, and there was a treehouse back there that had belonged to my uncle when he was younger. I spent many hours playing back there with my siblings, cousins, and friends, and we were barely within hollering distance of the adults in the house. I remember once that four of us decided to explore deeper in the woods than ever before, and we got completely lost. We ended up coming out into the backyard of a house on the next road down (about a mile away), and we thought about knocking and asking for help, but we were too nervous about encountering someone mean, so instead we kept wandering until we caught sight of my grandparents’ house again and finally made our way back. I think we were gone for at least an hour, and no one seemed to have even noticed. My grandparents also had an old junker car in their backyard that we frequently played on/in/around. Again, this was with very little explicit concern for our safety – the car wasn’t kid-proofed by any means (except that it didn’t run, so there was no fear of us starting it up and driving it into a tree).

                Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa talked about the missing rural story in China, and about the fact that some studies indicate that there is greater difference between urban and rural schools than there is between schools in different regions of the country. To some degree, this rings true to me, given the ways I’ve described here that my own childhood differed from the “normal,” suburban, middle class childhoods that I observed in the media. Stories about kids in big cities (like “The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” a favorite) felt so foreign to me, in some ways (Claudia knew how to take the subway!). Still, my own childhood and schooling experience was also distinctly American. In Tobin and colleagues’ descriptions of the pre-schools in Hawaii and Arizona, I recognize elements of my own experience – like the use of storybooks to introduce a science topic, and the use of hands-on experimentation.

Another resource that reflects this idea of schooling as a cultural activity is “The Teaching Gap” by Stigler and Heibert. These authors were involved with the TIMSS (Third International Mathematics and ScienceStudy), and they wrote comparing eighth-grade math teaching in Germany, Japan, and the US. These authors explicitly define teaching as an activity that follows cultural scripts, and they write about the ways that the cultural scripts in Germany and Japan can suggest potential improvements for US teaching. 

The degree to which children are or aren’t monitored by adults is also cultural in nature. This article discusses the degree of freedom that kids in Japan have, compared to the US, and attributes it to cultural values such as “group reliance” and shared responsibility for public spaces. This is, in some ways, the opposite of my own experience – my own freedom to get lost in the woods had less to do with that space being cared for by everyone, and more to do with the lack of such curated spaces nearby – the woods was all we had.

Introduction

Hi everyone!

My name is Amanda Opperman, and I'm a PhD student in Math Education. I also received my undergraduate degree in Mathematics and my secondary teacher certification from MSU -- East Lansing just can't get rid of me! As a research assistant, I've worked on several projects over the years. I spent two years teaching MTH 201 and 202, which are MSU's basic content courses for undergraduate elementary education majors. I worked for one year on TEACH Math, a research project centered on preparing pre-service teachers to build on students' mathematical thinking and community knowledge. For the past year, I've held two assistantships, one as an editorial assistant on the Mathematics Teacher Educator, a journal of both the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, and the other as a research assistant on SEMI (Study of Elementary Math Instruction), a project focused on early career teachers' planning and networking practices. This fall, I'll be leaving the journal to begin working as a field instructor for secondary mathematics interns in the Grand Rapids area. Additionally, I am wrapping up my practicum research, which focused on pre-service mathematics teachers' conceptualizations of classroom culture, and preparing to complete my comprehensive exams this fall. For my depth paper, I am completing a literature review of research that has evaluated the success of alternative teacher preparation programs via metrics other than students' standardized test scores, such as rates of teacher retention. My main areas of research interest are the preparation of pre-service teachers and issues of social justice in education.

When I'm not working, I enjoy running, knitting, baking, singing along loudly to musical soundtracks, reading (I'm currently in the middle of Glen Weldon's The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture), and watching TV (current favorite: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend on the CW network). I also love spending time with my family, including my husband of 6 years, Michael. Together, we enjoy traveling, hiking, and finding new brewpubs to try out -- we recently moved to Grand Rapids, so there are a lot of those!

Since I do enjoy watching so much television, I've seen a lot of portrayals of teachers and teaching. Some of these portrayals are more realistic than others. Some are more realistic than they perhaps mean to be. I remember once watching an episode of The Simpsons where Lisa's teacher is passing the morning's tests back to students in the afternoon, and one paper has earned an "F," but looks at first as if it has a "B," because the teacher has spilled kahlua on the paper. The implication is supposed to be that this teacher is burned out and doesn't care -- "look, she's drinking over lunch!" I turned to my husband and pointed out that even this burned out, uncaring teacher just worked over her lunch break. He was taken aback to realize that this implication had slipped right by him, taken for granted as just part of what being a teacher is.

I would have to say that the portrayal of teachers and teaching that sits closest to my heart, though, was on Boy Meets World, which ran on ABC through much of my childhood in the 1990s. This show featured a history teacher named Mr. Feeny, who went on to become the school’s principal (thus allowing him to stay on the show after the main cast moved from middle school to high school). This was a show that was intended for younger viewers, and as such had a rather idealistic take on teaching. Mr. Feeny always knew how to get a lesson across to his young students, and he was always wise, kind, and generous to a fault with his time. Real-world teachers may often feel that they fall short on these fronts – I know I did when I had my own classroom.

Yet, I believe there are still ways that the real work of teaching can be connected to this portrayal. Mr. Feeny took an interest in his students as people and individuals. He knew that their experiences outside of class had an impact on their learning, and he spent time getting to know who his students were and what they had gone through. He also expressed his genuine affection for them. Mr. Feeny also held high expectations for his students. Many of the students in the main cast were shown to be struggling students who disliked studying, but Mr. Feeny frequently encouraged them to truly engage with a lesson’s content and gave them opportunities to do so by designing lessons that would connect to their interests (for example, students’ interest in baseball) or be otherwise meaningful to them. He also pushed his students to be self-reliant and to go outside their comfort zone – for instance, by applying to colleges that weren’t just “sure things.” Throughout the series, Mr. Feeny was a caring, reliable presence who made sure to help his students see the relevance of learning to their own lives and who pushed them to believe in their own knowledge and ability to learn and to contribute to the world.

All of these things reflect my own values as a teacher. I believe that effective teachers must engage their students holistically, recognizing that they are complete human beings with capabilities, interests, and experiences that they can bring to bear on the classroom. Additionally, teachers can’t learn for their students; instead, the teacher’s role is essentially to set up the context that will allow students to develop their own knowledge, then let it happen while providing support along the way. Teachers must also hold students to high standards and expect them to do their part in engaging with these learning scenarios. Each of these ideals can be seen in Mr. Feeny’s behavior, and his example was valuable to me as I frequently watched this show as a young girl. In fact, it still is.

But I can still get a laugh of recognition from watching Miss Hoover and Mrs. Krabappel from time to time.