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No Such Thing as a “Math Person”

Kenny Rochester, when he began teaching math about a decade ago, thought like many people do that some people were just “math people” and others weren’t. He considered himself a math person. Growing up in New York and Connecticut, he sat in math class after math class, and it all seemed to come relatively easily. When he was accepted to Atlanta’s Morehouse College and was asked to choose a major, he chose a subject that came easily to him. The choice was obvious. After all, he was a math person.

After eight years teaching middle school math at The Friends School of Atlanta, and after being trained on a teaching approach called “growth mindset,” Kenny has changed his view—and his students have benefited.

“There’s really no such thing as a ‘math person,’’’ Kenny says. “It’s really all about your experiences. In fact, those experiences can have a real impact in how successful you are. It’s about one’s willingness to make and learn from mistakes. Honestly, the growth mindset approach has really opened my eyes. I now know that all kids can learn math at a high level.”

Many like math because of its lack of ambiguity. Sure, undergrad and grad students discover the many subtleties of higher math, but when it comes to the foundational material—arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus—primary and middle school students have rules to follow. A math problem like x + y = 10 can have many right and wrong answers; but whether they’re right or wrong isn’t up for debate. An answer is eitherright or wrong, period; x equals 9, but only when y equals 1.

The students who grasp the concept quickly like its straightforward nature; they feel good when they find the right answer. Students who don’t get the right answer, though, can grow insecure in a hurry. They then think they’re just not a math person and, whether they’re conscious of it or not, they stop applying themselves in a positive manner.

Kenny has seen this happen many times, and to turn things around, he takes a multipronged approach. First, he knows that a teacher’s impatience is the enemy. He never praises students who get a problem right and, then immediately after, turn around and express disappointment with those who don’t. That just reinforces the “math person versus non-math person” stereotype.

He instead praises mistakes. When students make errors, it’s not a failure; they’re instead one step closer to getting it right. Kenny also doesn’t shower excessive praise on students who grasp math quickly. He asks them to explain what they did, find other ways to solve the problem and sometimes asks them to help their classmates.

Kenny also gives the class what he calls “low floor, high ceiling” problems—like, say, x + y = 10. The low floor allows all students to gain a solid footing; the high ceiling pushes those who are ready for the next level.

For instance, most middle schoolers grasp the basic concept and insert various answers to x and y that add up to 10; that’s the low floor. But Kenny doesn’t stop at integers. Introducing the high ceiling, he talks about the concept of infinity, that it’s not just about the fact that numbers go on forever, but that there are infinite numbers between two points on a number line. The x variable could be 5, but it also could be 5.879832, which would make y 4.120168. How do you express this? Kenny draws crosshairs on the board, a y vertical axis and an x horizontal axis, with zero in the middle, and graphs the answer.

The ceiling rises from there, and all of Kenny’s students continue to climb, reach higher, and embrace the mathematical concepts that have built our modern world.

A Community That Never Leaves You

Want to know what The Friends School of Atlanta is like? Ask Karen McMichael, known to her friends at FSA as Kaymac. She will be retiring as the school’s administrative assistant at the end of the 2017-2018 school year, but Kaymac’s Friends School journey started years before, when she and her husband decided to send their son, Ian, to FSA in 1998.

“Our son was at Georgia State University’s Child Development Center,” Kaymac recalled. “They recommended the Friends School for him, specifically because he wasn’t any trouble and he was [and still is] very bright. They felt he was going to fall through the cracks in the public schools. We visited FSA first, and to tell you the truth, we didn’t visit any other school.”

After Ian started attending, Kaymac volunteered her time and soon found that the culture fit her like a glove. She felt at home, so much so that when she was brought on staff full-time in 2001, the transition was virtually seamless.

She’s done a bit of everything over the years. She does website updates, performs some registrar work and helps with admissions in ways that coworkers identify as completely responsive, patient and effective in bringing calm to often stressful situations. She has taught word processing, Photoshop, jewelry making, among other subjects; and, as a teacher’s aid in reading, has experienced the joy of witnessing a child’s “aha” moment, the initial spark of understanding, of conquering a small hill, looking back with pride, and looking forward with confidence. “The squiggles on the page, the letters, now mean something to them,” she said. “It’s different with every child, but once you witness it, it’s something you never forget.”

“Kaymac’s smile and gentle nature was refreshing as well as encouraging to the children that she assisted with reading,” recalls long-time first grade teacher Celest Samas. “Her love of books has inspired generations of FSA first graders.”

The entire FSA experience is shaped by a kind of empathy that anyone associated with the school—staff, teachers, students, parents, alumni—knows very well. “Early on, working here and sending my son to school here, I learned about not judging people by my life. Consider what the other person’s life is like.” That is, she doesn’t judge someone based on her own life experiences, but instead tries to truly understand the complete context, and how the whole of a life shapes a person. It’s living the expression “knowing where the person is coming from,” but on a much deeper level.

This philosophy even lends itself to her teaching. Speaking about Kaymac’s jewelry-making middle school exploratory, 6th graders Katy and Paideia said, “Kaymac gives lots of freedom to express yourself, always makes space for laughter and responds right away when you need help.”

Living it comes through listening instead of waiting to talk. It also comes through feeling at home in silence, be it during class, silent meeting or during administrative staff meetings, where silence plays a key role. After someone expresses an opinion, everyone sits for a brief period of silence, allowing time to reflect on what was just said. That builds understanding, reinforces empathy, and buttresses FSA’s unique, enduring community.

“I’ve loved this place since the first day my son started school here, and I’ve never stopped learning. It’s such an amazing community.”

Those who have worked side by side with Kaymac in the administration, whether for decades or just a few years, are not sure how to move forward without her capable, reassuring presence. “It would be impossible to enumerate all of the ways that our beloved Kaymac has served the school community,” according to Waman French, Head of School. “Speaking personally, Kaymac has provided the ultimate support during some very difficult times as well as joyous ones.”

Likewise, Nancy Bent, Director of Advancement, shared, “Kaymac is so utterly reliable, so meticulous with detail, so unflagging in her willingness to serve however she is needed. I will dearly miss partnering with her on the work of the school.”

Kaymac may be retiring this year, but she—like all the students, staff, teachers, and alums who have passed through The Friends School’s doors—will never stop being part of the FSA community.

 

By Tim Heston

Tim Heston has written for business magazines since 1996. He’s won some awards here and there, but his greatest achievement is being the proud parent of an FSA fifth grader.

Teaching the Alt-Right

As teachers across the country prepared to begin the academic year in August, 2017, the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia threw many into disarray as they attempted to contextualize the United States’ legacy of white supremacy and racism for the young and inquisitive. For some, the easiest option was to avoid any pushback from schools, parents or students by leaving it outside of the classroom.

But for The Friends School of Atlanta (FSA), shying away from big issues is not an option. In fact, difficult issues often inform the primary courses for a school that prides itself on offering programs that cater to social consciousness. Alex Zinnes, who teaches middle school social studies at FSA, was one of those teachers who chose to tackle it head on.

Because she ends the spring semester on African Studies with a case study on Rwanda, Alex usually begins the semester in January with a mini unit on genocide in order to help students develop a vocabulary to have fruitful discussions. Charlottesville had her thinking differently. “I addressed it and we had a discussion,” she said, “but afterwards I was thinking that there’s so much more to unpack.”

That’s when she encountered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, “The Other America,” where King says, “In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide.” She thought about this well into October when attending a professional development session on service learning with FSA middle school science teacher Dennis Bauer. There, she discovered Teaching Tolerance, a publication from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which included a toolkit on teaching about the alt-right. That’s when it all came together.

Still, Alex didn’t want to just teach about the alt-right using the resources found in the magazine. She examined her own subjective position as a white Jewish woman, seeking sources to enlighten her own personal thinking. She also informed parents beforehand, which is a vital part of education at FSA—emphasizing that parents are stakeholders in the classroom. Alex reminded them: “It’s hard to contend with the knowledge of the Alt-Right and yet, I cannot think of a more important thing to do right now, but teach your kids what this menace is, how to identify it, and how to stand up and confront it.”

Alex and her class learned that the alt-right is just the latest formulation of white supremacy rebranded to appeal to a wider spectrum of society through the use of mainstream social media platforms and memes. The class discussed how the movement focuses on recruiting white males ages 12 to 22 who feel lost or unattached to a greater cause. Identifying with the alt-right gives them a false sense of power. For the second component of the lesson plan, Alex implemented a design thinking assignment that required students to generate prevention strategies to target this demographic before exposure to the alt-right. Students produced projects that included a picture book warning young children against the dangers of the alt-right, a summer camp that teaches acceptance and inclusivity, an afterschool program and a social media app.

Combining Quaker pedagogy with design thinking helped to greater integrate collaborative problem solving into the lesson. “Quakers believe the purpose of education is to develop critical thinking skills in order to discern the light within,” she says.

Encouragement from her students fuels Alex’s commitment to having difficult, but necessary conversations. One eighth grader commented, “I appreciate you (Alex) for stepping up and teaching us about this harsh subject so that we would know the truth and are not mislead by the internet or others that may be influenced by white supremacists or Alt-Righters.”

Alex feels honored that the FSA community allows her to be so daring in her teaching and learning. As she reminds parents, “We’re in this together.”

By Malcolm Tariq

The Then and the Now: A Parent Reflection

I sat in the pews with the other parents and watched as my teenager stepped forward at the 8th Grade Mentor Ceremony during a recent Silent Meeting. As she lit a candle in honor of her final weeks of her Friends School education, a wave of realization crashed over me. It was as if I had had my back turned to the surf, even when I knew I had been staring at it intently all along.

How could she have jettisoned through nine years in the blink of an eye? It was just a split-second ago when she first experienced The Friends School of Atlanta during a visit day. At the ripe old age of 4, she was wearing the tiny clothes I picked out for her that morning, with her hair—still too short and thin to form a single ponytail—pulled back in six different piglet tails sprouting out at all angles of her head like a little strawberry blonde blowfish. When I picked her up after the visit, she couldn’t WAIT to go back. WHEN COULD SHE GO BACK?!?! DID SHE REALLY HAVE TO WAIT ALLLLL SUMMMMMMERRRRR???

The earliest years—with her teeny-tiny classmates holding hands with their big eighth-grade buddies and sitting in laps during Silent Meeting, the line of booster seats waiting like little soldiers near the front door on field trip days, losing teeth in lunch foods, rest periods and head lice and playdates—careened into the now—with lanky, sullen, grown-up-not-grown-up classmates now holding hands with their little Pre-K buddies and offering them laps during Silent Meeting, the line of trail hikers proceeding at individuated paces up the 5-mile trail on the ultimate overnight class field trip, losing patience with adults and all gangly limbs akimbo, school exploratories and acne and group texts.

I have watched intently as my baby blowfish has swum through a sea of SPICES and exploded into becoming a protest-marching, creative-writing, book-toting, animal-rescuing, underserved-representing, K-pop-extolling, still-loves-her-mother-acting young woman, and I am so very grateful to FSA for shepherding us both at all points between the then and the now, for always holding us in a warm Friends’ embrace, and for being the village that it takes to raise a child.

 

By Sarah Rosenberg

About Harmony, Acceptance, and Playing Your Part

Every classroom has its rhythm to it, the people its chord structure, and at The Friends School of Atlanta, the classes have some rich chords. Fifth grade language arts teacher Johnny Pride felt the vibe of those chords the first time he stepped into FSA, when he saw the art on the wall and heard about the philosophy, about the Light Within.

“It was me. I was in.”

Johnny felt the vibe since he interviewed and began teaching for the school six years ago—a bridge, if one were to map out his life in song form. He had been a classroom teacher and then a literacy specialist at The Howard School. Eventually, he wanted to be in front of the classroom again.

From one perspective, FSA seems like an unlikely destination for Johnny, a music industry veteran who once played with the drummer for REM, whose band once opened for The Police and other big acts, who ended up being featured in The Doors movie, and who even roomed with Val Kilmer for a few months during the filming of it.

But from another perspective, Johnny’s landing at FSA makes all the sense in the world. He majored in journalism at the University of Georgia (hence the connection with REM). He wrote for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution for a time and worked for PBS before jumping in the car and heading for California. He headed west to perform and write, songs instead of prose, before family commitments called him back to Georgia. He taught and coached his nephew, who attended Howard, which is how he ended up at that school and, ultimately, FSA.

It’s safe to say that Johnny wouldn’t feel at home at Friends if he taught in a traditional environment where students are tracked and separated by ability. Grouping students together in advanced and remedial classes doesn’t reflect real life, where different people with different strengths and weaknesses need to work together.

True, FSA pushes students as far as they can go. For instance, a few middle schoolers who’ve mastered certain concepts join math or language arts classes in higher grades. But students aren’t segmented into tracks. Teachers, Johnny included, practice what’s known as learning differentiation. They teach differently to different children, depending on their strengths and weaknesses. They also encourage students to teach each other.

“I probably do about four different lesson plans per class,” Johnny said. “All kids are different. They all work together, and what I love about it is the acceptance they have for each other.”

That acceptance builds the harmony and drives the rhythm of learning. “Here I can make learning joyful and fun,” Johnny said. “Students work very hard, but they don’t feel that they’re working hard because they have so much fun. This place allows me to do that.”

Visit Johnny’s class, and you’ll see students constantly in action. They write all the time and read each other’s stories allowed. They learn vocabulary through theater; they dream up and write scripts that use new words or imply them, and the students watching guess what those words are. Students teach students. Like those in the best bands playing the best music, everyone listens, everyone helps, and everyone plays their part.

By Tim Heston

Tim Heston has written for business magazines since 1996. He’s won some awards here and there, but his greatest achievement is being the proud parent of an FSA fifth grader.