Years ago, I ran across a calculus document by a teacher and AP grader named Dave Slocum. He called his document How to Succeed in Calculus and gave it as a handout at the beginning of the year. I modified it and used it as an intro document when I was teaching AP Calculus AB for years. Last summer I modified it for use with my Geometry kiddos. As many of you know I wrote a text for Geometry that we use at our school. If you are interested in it, you can find it here. In the last two years using this text I realized (remembered?) that these younger students don’t always have the same good habits that my AP students have. So, I created a document called How to Succeed in Geometry (you can grab it from the link) and shared this with all of my students and their parents. I revisited this document two or three times in the first month of the year. I am realizing now that this is not enough. If I am serious about supporting my students and helping them develop positive habits, I need to revisit this over and over again in the early part of the year. I stopped doing so for a number of reasons and none of them are valid enough. I don’t like to read to my students, I know that they can read. However, I should also know that many of them will not read a document like this one. I stopped revisiting it because I was getting frustrated by saying the same things repeatedly about classroom behavior. This is not a good reason. I need to be more patient and realize that all of the teachers that they have during the day have different expectations. I need to remind them of my expectations, just like I need to remind my children at home to do their chores or to put dishes in the sink. I think that the difference is that I am more willing with my own children to be a nag. I am more confident that I have built up a decent reservoir of good will with them. Early in the school year, I do not have that sort of reservoir with my students. The reason I am writing this now is that I sort of snapped with my Geometry students last week after a particularly disappointing set of quizzes. The mistakes made on this quiz made it abundantly clear to me that many of my students were not taking my advice about how to succeed in this class. One student said out loud, somewhat dejectedly, that he wants to succeed. Without changing behaviors, it is hard to take a statement like that one as being particularly meaningful. If I genuinely want to be healthier and more fit, I need to change behaviors to make this happen. If my students genuinely want to succeed, they need to be willing to change some behaviors so that this is more likely to occur. I know that I want them to succeed and that is one of the reasons why I prepared the document that I did. I just need to be far more committed to using that as a breathing document next year and not wait until the last week of April to mention this for the first time since September.
I’d love to hear any words of advice about reinforcing these habits of work and habits of mind. You can drop comments here or over on twitter where I remain @mrdardy