What to expect with our Senate runoffs

 

Let's first of all take a moment to celebrate just how far Georgia has come in just the last few years. Going blue by 2020? It's happened! It's hard to believe that as recently as 2016, statewide races seemed just out of our reach, just short of victory. So did most of our traditionally Republican seats.

But then this young, spry man by the name of Jon Ossoff entered the 2017 GA-06 special election with the intention to flip a seat that had been a safe red seat for years. He lost a close race, but his work blazed a trail for Lucy McBath to flip the seat the very next year. (She has won reelection!)

Has Stacey Abrams done the same with the whole state and the upcoming runoffs? We will see. It is much too early to predict how these Senate races will shake out. However, having lived in GA-06 during that truly special election, I want to give some insights on what I experienced. This is not meant to be a guide on how to flip the Senate seats but what you, as a Georgian, can expect to experience over the next two months.

1. Understand that the whole nation is going to be emotionally, verbally, and financially investing in these two races. There is going to be no escaping a very harsh spotlight for the next two months. You are going to hear analyses about counties that you've never even heard of dating back to 2018, 2016, and potentially before. Your social media feed is going to be flooded with these two races, and the flood will approach tidal-wave intensity by January 5.

2. Prepare to feel a massive emotional burden to help our country. Unlike the GA-06 special election, which just served as a moral victory/defeat, this will be a chance to retake the Senate. You are going to feel a pressure to be the difference between there being Congressional gridlock and actual progressive legislation in Washington.

3. Unlike in past elections, you are going to feel like we are the ones on the field of play while others wait on the sidelines. Because we are! This may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Don't be afraid to relish this, especially if we pull off the victories.

4. Oh wait, there's more. During the GA-06 special election, we did not have to deal with the winter holidays, the pandemic, and a defeated president who might not leave office. As if we did not have enough to stress about right now, we're also going to have these two high-stakes, nationally-watched elections. So start your emotional preparation for how you will handle this latest source of stress NOW. Do not wait until you are overwhelmed! If you do not have a support network, seek one NOW.

5. Make your plan to vote as soon as possible. But if you decide to vote early in person, keep an eye on the weather, which varies greatly in the winter. Especially if lines are long, you need to prepare to be waiting in line outdoors in any kind of weather. It is worth having a backup date in mind. However, the lines might be shorter on poor weather days. We'll just have to see.

6. Be willing to volunteer. You won't be able to canvass because of the pandemic, but you can work with organizations to text and call potential voters. Do not worry if you lack experience or are nervous about what to say! I had nearly zero canvassing experience in 2017-2018 but did it anyway.

7. Know that just like 2020, these runoffs will not last forever! This, too, will pass.

Hello again!

It's been quite awhile since I've been here. I've had some things on my mind, and I've wanted to share them on Facebook, but I just don't feel that that's a good visual format for extended thoughts. So I'm going to revive this blog.

Blogger, here we come!

Well guys, it's been fun.

Life calls us all in various directions, and such it is with me. Due to personal reasons, I won't be continuing the TEEMS program. Thank you everyone--Jermaine, Fetimah, Rachael, Charles, Millard, Brandi, Janet', Dr. Matthews, Dr. Daily, Desha, Ms. Turner, Winston, and all the people I forgot to mention. It was a challenging but profitable summer for me. Best of luck to all of you who are teaching for the first time ever--hang in there!

The end. No, wait, not yet.

Thus draws this summer session to a close, and it is approaching time to return to our schools and teach, some of us for the first time. Personally, I'm ready to take what I've learned here and apply it to the classroom. I've witnessed those moments of euphoria where students, after having spent a great deal of time and effort attempting to solve the problem, they finally arrive at the solution. It's extremely empowering for them to have done it on their own with little to no help. It will take us a great deal of work and planning to arrive at that point, but I think that once we get in there, it's actually pretty fun to let go and see what they're capable of. Heck, I think we all witnessed that at Sandtown last week!

Expectations re This Week's Teaching

To be very honest, I'm keeping my expectation list short. I do, however, expect myself to engage the students from the moment I walk into the classroom. The students and teacher will assess one another as soon as they first see one another. It is vital to capitalize on this short window of opportunity to capture their interest and imagination. I intend to do this by having a catchy, relevant introduction to the activity, and by maintaining good pedagogy and professionalism throughout the lesson. While I am in charge of the classroom, I will expect every student to engage in the activity, from the "high-achievers" to those who consider themselves to be struggling learners. All students can learn, and it will be my responsibility to transform that "can learn" into "will learn."

No pressure. :)

Teaching through problems

"Letting go" and letting the students take charge. I don't know of too many teachers that actually like the sound of this. Why? Because it's the way we've been taught that the classroom is supposed to work; it is our understated idea of its mechanism. And heaven forbid we let a kid go slip through the cracks--please, no child should be left behind. Yet that's one major obstacle that's keeping our students from truly learning.

So, then, what happens when they are wildly off track? At this point, they usually beg--I don't just mean ask, but beg--the teacher to supply the answer. Hints are good here. Give them only enough information to shift their line of thinking, just enough so that they have a better chance of taking the problem from here. One way I like to do this is with questions. "Remember when we had a problem that looked like ___? How did we solve that one?" Eventually that gets them going. And it's very empowering when they realize that they solved the problem on their own, and all the teacher did was just ask them questions. That's really the whole purpose of this: student empowerment. Remember, we have to prepare them for the day when they won't have us around to help them, and that day is coming soon.

One of the features that I introduced to one of my math courses last year was the concept of a "Closing" session--essentially the same thing as the After. The key principle was that the students had to explain the solutions to each other, and if they got it wrong, they had to rely on each other to correct it, not me. For much of the course, this drove the students nuts. Why do we have to go over a problem that we already know the answer to? Why can't we just say whether the answer is right or not? But I didn't cave into this, because I knew that they would learn a lot more effectively if they had to not just explain their mistakes but why they were mistakes. That has a lot more power than just hearing the teacher give the correct answer.

Something I'm planning on doing new next year is this idea of teaching the idea from problems. Have them understand why you need to learn FOIL--or do they need to learn it at all? Have them figure out what makes the Distributive Property so powerful. Reinforce their findings with multiple examples, but by all means, avoid skill-and-drill as the primary locus of teaching.

Mathematics in the real world

It's early in the morning--one minute before 6 a.m., to be exact. That the time is 5:59, is math. Your bedside clock receives a 120-volt current. That's math. So is the way your clock displays "5:59" on the front. Exactly 60 seconds after this, the clock sends a signal to change the digits to "6:00," and because that is the matching time to the previously-set alarm, the alarm goes off. There's all sorts of math going on there! Barely awake, your brain sends a signal to the muscles in your arm, which swings over and hits the snooze button. All of that is math. That clock registers 60 times however many minutes your clock's snooze is set for, and after that number of seconds, it goes off again. You guessed it.

You finally get up, whether a multiple of how long each snooze lasts, or if by chance a roommate or family member wakes you up for good. Those decisions involve math. You walk down the stairs, which support you all the way down. Guess what that is. And then you take a look at the cereal carton, and pour yourself what turns out to be 1.5 servings of cereal. That means you get 150% of all the vitamins and ingredients, good or bad. And that's not including the milk.

Folks, that's only the first half hour of the day, and look how much math there is. That doesn't include starting your car, having your car's engine run, the acceleration and aerodynamics on the car, and stopping at the traffic light. Heck, the traffic light cycle is a whole set of math in and of itself.

And you haven't even gotten to work or school yet! Look at all this math!

Now how come our students don't know this? Well, maybe we've forgotten to tell them. Perhaps we've let many of them become so satisfied in their phobia of math that we don't risk bursting their bubble, and make them realize that, Hey, this IS real-world stuff, and I AM going to have to bite the bullet and learn it for the sole reason that I can not only better understand the world, but perhaps change it as well.

You get students that start thinking like this...LOOK. OUT. WORLD. :)