Troubled Youth, Troubled Learning (Dave Reid)
Dave Reid is a high school mathematics teacher in his third year of teaching. He received his MA in Education and credential in secondary mathematics and physics from Stanford University in 2011. Dave spent a quarter of a century in high-tech primarily in the wireless and Global Positioning System (GPS) industries. He earned a BS degree in electrical engineering from George Mason University, and an MBA in finance and marketing from Santa Clara University. He also attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He blogs as Mr. Math Teacher and tweets as @mathequality.
While the title for this post does not always ring true, in my few years teaching at Title I schools, it often reflects reality. In fact, rarely does a day go by where no student disrupts the classroom learning environment for one reason or another. As a fifty-something, I knew this going into teaching; what I did not know was how deleterious these disruptions are to continuity, sanity, and in the limit: opportunity, for my students, not me. As someone in the classroom every day, hoping above all hope that my students can break out of their behavioral binds, it challenges my every fiber of existence to keep the class focused on our learning objective(s) for the day.
Troubled youth make for troubled learning, not only for themselves, but also