I’m 5 months pregnant, and every time I go to the bathroom, I check for blood.

I’m due in November. Last November, I was also pregnant. You might be doing the math and realizing that previous pregnancy was different. We had been trying and I had been tracking my cycles so I was pretty sure when I got the positive test result I was about 5 weeks along. At the time, I was trying to avoid missing school if possible so the earliest I could get in for an ultrasound was when I would be 9 weeks. This didn’t concern me at the time because I had the positive test, everything felt right, and bloodwork showed good hormone levels. I went to the 9 week appointment by myself because my spouse was at work and I was expecting good news. The ultrasound tech was very quiet at first, then:

Tech: “Are you sure you’re 9 weeks?”
Me: “Pretty sure, yes.”
Tech: “Is it possible your cycle was off, because it looks like closer to 4 weeks?”

My heart sank. It wasn’t possible. I had a positive at-home test 4 weeks ago. They can’t pick up the hormone until at least 3-4 weeks. There was a sac, but no embryo. The pregnancy wasn’t viable but my body continued to produce more pregnancy hormone as if everything was fine. I hadn’t miscarried on my own and it wasn’t likely I would. So, I was presented with three options: wait a while and see, take a pill to induce contractions and miscarry (likely painfully) at home, or undergo a D&C--surgical removal of the tissue. The D&C had the highest likelihood of success and the quickest recovery to when we’d be able to try again so I opted for that. I’d also be unconscious for the procedure so I thought it may be less emotionally scarring. I told my coworkers and students I would be out for a day for a “minor surgery,” “but don’t worry, nothing big, I’m fine!”

My spouse took the day off with me and took me to the hospital. The nurses were kind and the procedure went well. I wasn’t in much pain. I was told I may have residual bleeding for a few weeks. I did. I went back to work the next day.

After a few weeks, the bleeding seemed to stop for a couple of days and then started again. I assumed this was my period and thought nothing of it, but it continued for another couple of weeks. I called my doctor and by the time I was able to go in, I had been bleeding on and off for nearly two months.

Another ultrasound. More bloodwork.

There was some tissue left behind. Again, I was presented with three options: wait a while and see if the tissue passed on its own (unlikely since it hadn’t by now), take a pill to induce contractions and hope the tissue dislodges (unlikely again), or undergo another D&C--this time with a camera. I opted first for the pill this time. I had maxed out my deductible and out-of-pocket copay with the first D&C in November ($6000) and it was now January so I would be looking at another similar bill should I have to have surgery. The pill caused a lot of cramping and some bleeding, but alas, some tissue still held on. At this point, leaving the tissue would prevent me from being able to get pregnant and could eventually pose an infection risk. So, another surgery.

I told my coworkers and students that I was going in for a followup surgery to the first, but again, “don’t worry, nothing big, I’m fine!” This time the procedure didn’t go as well. I had to stay in the hospital for several hours afterward due to an irregular heart rhythm. I was in a lot more pain this time due to how aggressively they had to scrape my uterus. I had now indebted myself to the hospital for nearly $12k and gone through physical and emotional turmoil with nothing to show for it. I returned to work the next day.

Miraculously, we were able to get pregnant again shortly after the second procedure, but unlike the first time, my first reaction wasn’t excitement. More than anything, I was scared. I was scared to become attached. I was scared to potentially go through all of that again. When we go to doctor’s appointments and ultrasounds now, and hear the heartbeat, or see her move, the biggest feeling I have is relief. Every time I feel a pain in my stomach, a part of me panics. Nobody tells you that the baby moving can actually be painful.

In going through this, I’ve learned how common pregnancy losses truly are. I’ve recently become more open about my experience and have shared with my coworkers and even some students (who had put two and two together with the "surgeries" and my new pregnancy and had asked if they were related). Many people have come to me to share similar stories. At the end of the school year, I told my students and coworkers I was pregnant and while I was happy to share that, I was also deeply concerned that I could come back in the fall and not be pregnant anymore.

I am trying to stay positive and enjoy this pregnancy rather than to be paralyzed by fear, and I think sharing what I’m going through has helped. Reading other women's stories helped me tremendously and I hope my story can help others too.

Moving on: reflections on leaving my first school

Teachers move schools (or sometimes even leave the profession) for a multitude of reasons. Maybe they were unable to teach the classes they desired. Perhaps their teaching philosophy did not align with that of their administrators, or maybe they didn't feel like they were getting the professional support they needed. Sometimes teachers are forced out of their positions by lay-offs or restructuring. Sometimes they move across the country. One could argue that in each of these cases, leaving a school is an easy or unavoidable choice. But how do you tell your students and coworkers you're leaving when it's none of those things? This spring, I found myself in that exact situation. For the past 5 years--my first 5 years of teaching--I have been at Licking Valley High School, a small but progressive school in a rural community of Ohio. There, I was able to gain experience teaching several math and chemistry courses, teach using methods and curricula of my choosing, learn from the mentorship of several teachers and administrators I have grown to greatly respect, and build strong personal relationships with some incredible students.

In those 5 years, I also advised two clubs and helped start a Professional Learning Community exploring ways we could continue to improve school climate and support understanding of differences. As I began to get more involved in the community--something I think is vital to being an effective teacher--I started to realize that being the teacher I wanted to be was not going to be sustainable for me long term. You see, I live 55 miles from Licking Valley. My commute was long, tiresome, and often met with hefty traffic on the way home if I didn't leave right at the 9th period bell. That meant I was stuck in traffic almost every day because if I didn't have club meetings after school, I liked to make myself available to help students or stay to set up the next day. Going to evening events at the school meant rushing home and immediately back or spending the entire day and evening at work. Balancing everything was getting very tough. I began to wonder how I would ever make it work once we have kids. What sacrifices would I have to make at work or at home? Would I be willing and able to make those sacrifices? Thinking about it caused me a lot of stress. So, when I saw a job posting at a highly reputable school very near our home, I thought I owed it to my future self and family to at least apply.

Letter from a graduating student

Well, the application lead to an interview, a second interview, and eventually an offer. Now that it was real, I had a new struggle ahead of me. How do I tell my principal? The other teachers? My students? What especially will I say to the students in the GSA and NHS? It was extremely difficult for me. I knew some of those conversations had to happen in person, and some I left to email and Facebook (mostly because I was afraid that I would be too emotional to get to say everything I wanted to in person). I have always had a hard time being that vulnerable in front of others. To an extent, I envied coworkers who had found job offers after school was out. I was scared to face some of my students and I was afraid they would feel like I was abandoning them. While I'm sure those feelings were there for some, what I ended up getting more than anything was an outpouring of support from the community. In the last few days of school, I received dozens of cards and letters from students that I will cherish forever. I got words of encouragement from my coworkers, many of whom had also moved schools at some point.

I am excited for the new chapter in my life and to take on the challenge of a new school, but I will be forever grateful to Licking Valley for helping to shape me into the educator and person that I am today.

 

 

"Now you can't leave."

Time for an AP Chemistry Story Slam

In 2015, I (somewhat last minute) found out I would be teaching AP Chemistry.  I was pretty excited for the challenge but not feeling super prepared. I signed up for the only AP Summer Institute I could find that still had openings. It turned out to just be a four day problem-solving session and was not super useful. The main message I left the institute with was, "don't expect any of your kids to pass the test the first year."

And I thought, "Yeah okay but that doesn't apply to me because 1) I work really hard and 2) I am going to be following the curriculum and pacing of a veteran AP Chemistry teacher who would be teaching the other section that year!” Admittedly, this is a pretty unique experience.

As the 2015-2016 year went on we moved through the material really quickly and had over a month before the test to do review and take practice tests. At this point, I wasn't sure about my students' understanding and throughout the year I had encountered a lot of classroom management issues that I didn't expect out of AP students. Still, when the test results came out that July, I was surprised that not a single one of my students had passed. I was disappointed--but not in them.

Last year, I had a lot more confidence in the material, I incorporated design projects, inquiry, more practice, more feedback, and we slowed down! At the end of the year I knew students would pass. Even if the test is really hard, when students understand the material they should do well, right? Maybe some would even get 4s. They deserved it. I deserved it.

Then July came. Once again, there was not a single passing score in my class. Admittedly, the other class only had one student pass. Despite all the confidence I had in May, I found myself questioning: which is a better indicator of what my students know? That impossible test? Or my own observations and assessments? I even began to wonder: do I have enough experience to be trusted to properly prepare and assess my students?

I know that when it comes to a high-stakes, 3+ hour test, there is more at play that just whether or not students understand the material. Looking ahead to the 2017-2018 year, I know that I could teach more to the test, do less inquiry, and teach more test-taking strategies. I know I could do these things, but I would have to sacrifice some of the things I know to be best practices when it comes to helping students understand chemistry. Last year, I regularly gave students upwards of 30 minutes to work on free-response questions in groups. They asked each other questions, argued about their answers, and eventually reached conclusions I knew they understood. This is science. I know that when it comes to these questions on the test, they are expected to answer (alone) in about 10 minutes. If I change these practices, maybe more students will pass and maybe not, but am I really helping them beyond the test?

A Day Without a Woman

Today is International Women's Day. You may or may not be aware of the Day Without a Woman movement, where many women are striking, marching, protesting, conversing, boycotting, and/or wearing red today to stand up for equal rights for women.

A colleague of mine in KSTF, Laura Wang created an amazing STEM lesson plan to use on this day, with tons of ideas to spark conversations in STEM classes. I decided to try out some of it in my Chemistry and AP Chemistry classes today. While a lot of the conversation was productive, I also faced some challenges I wasn't expecting.

My hope going into the lesson was to illuminate a few key facts (using data):

• Girls take as many science and math classes in high school as boys. This suggests that girls are at least as interested in math and science as boys.
• Girls have higher GPAs in math and science than boys in high school. I also wanted to suggest that one reason why this might be is because teachers may be more likely to offer help to female students and males may also be less likely ask for or accept help from teachers.
• Boys outperform girls on AP science and math tests. I was hoping to tie this into the stereotype threat talked about in the article.
• Girls are less likely to obtain degrees in STEM fields, especially in engineering.

I tried to make it clear to students that any gender disparities (in any subject, favoring boys or girls) were worth talking about, but that we were focusing on girls because of the day and on STEM because of the subject of our class. While I was able to have these conversations without problems in a few classes (other than the occasional "This is stupid, I don't want to do this"), one class had a particularly negative response.

I started the lesson by explaining the Unity Principles from the Women's March and how that related to the Day Without a Woman movement, and I think this is where a few students stopped listening and started forming their own conclusions about the rest of the lesson. Because I had mentioned a march/protest, I must be a hyper-feminist who wants women to take over the STEM workforce and push all men out. I have to assume this is what one student inferred, because at the point when I had only given them the data and asked what the graphs showed, he refused to answer the questions and said, "This goes against everything I believe in." 

What?

You can't "believe in" data. We hadn't even begun to interpret the data. I asked the student to expand on what he meant, but he wouldn't (or couldn't).

As we started to brainstorm possible reasons for the gaps, other students unleashed frustrating remarks as well. "Women have less degrees because they want to be stay-at-home moms." This statement itself is not inherently a problem. Being a stay-at-home mom is an extremely admirable job and certainly this is why some women don't get degrees in STEM. When I explained that factor alone didn't account for the entire gap, students still insisted they couldn't suggest possible solutions without having that graph "fixed" to exclude stay-at-home moms. I wasn't sure where to go from there. Students started having their own side conversations. One student remarked that the graphs didn't account for other genders...a great point, but I'm certain it was only brought up to try to derail the conversation. Another student said we shouldn't even be talking about this in school because it is too political. 

Again, what?

I still asked that class to take the article home and discuss is with an adult woman in their life for homework. I am hopeful that discussion will help illuminate for those students why this issue is important. I am worried, though, that some of the comments I heard today represent a larger problem society is facing regarding the tendency of those with privilege to lash out when others try to push for equity.

I'd be interested to hear others' responses in the comments.

Writing to vent outrage

I guess I knew at some point I would start blogging about education. I didn't think I had time to do it this year, let alone right now. When someone is outraged enough, venting can become writing...so here I am.

Anyone who is involved in education is Ohio is aware of the "Graduation Crisis" looming on the horizon due to new standardized tests tied to graduation (~40% of juniors are not on track to graduate). While I was fully aware that many on the State Board of Education were either unaware of the problem or unwilling to admit it existed, I did not believe they truly thought that we cared more about our students getting a diploma than learning. That is, until I read this blog post, which included that exact sentiment from State School Board President, Tom Gunlock.

So, I quit eating dinner and wrote to him as well.

An open letter to Tom Gunlock, President of the State Board of Education in Ohio:

Mr. Gunlock,

I was recently directed by my principal to read your response to Matthew Jablonski’s email of concern about the “Graduation Crisis.” I was dismayed at, and quite frankly offended by, your comment that asking for the graduation requirements to be changed means we are not interested in educating our students. More than anything, I would love to educate my students, but I frequently find my passion for education and my ability to teach to be hindered by testing.

I can see how from an outside perspective, these tests may seem reasonable to you. After all, you have been told that these tests are designed to determine whether or not a student has achieved a 10^th grade education before they graduate. The problem, as Mr. Jablonski tried to explain in his email, is that the skills employers want are not the skills being tested. As a teacher, I am therefore forced to choose every day whether I should prepare my students to answer questions like those that will be on the test (even though we have been given very little information on that) or to prepare them to handle novel situations in the real world.

As an Algebra 1 teacher, I will use the practice test items available for that subject to illustrate my point (see the Algebra practice test scoring guide). The most obvious problem with these items is that they are scored only 0 or 1 point, regardless of the answer. None of the students’ process is rewarded, and in fact, none of the problems require students to share their thinking in any way. If the goal is to prove that students are ready for college or career, these questions do a poor job of it. Less than half of the questions (2, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16) even attempt to link the math practices tested to real-world scenarios and instead ask students to interpret an obscure equation or graph.

I was particularly distressed by the scoring on Question number 7 (page 72 of the document). The question clearly has 3 parts (graph the first line correctly, graph the second line correctly, place the star in the correct area), yet a student who gets 2 of the 3 parts correct gets the same score as a student who doesn’t even attempt the problem—ZERO. Assuming that at least last year’s tests were scored in a similar way, many students’ scores are not even close to being reflective of their knowledge of performing algebraic calculations

This brings me to my next point. Conrad Wolfram, the director of the world-renowned mathematical company Wolfram Alpha, is an outspoken critic of the traditional way of teaching math—as a set of rules and calculations. He proposes that there are four stages of mathematics in action:

1.      Posing a question

2.      Going from the real world to a mathematical model

3.      Performing a calculation

4.      Going from the model back to the real world, to see if the original question was answered.

In the 1970s, computational skills were very important to employers, ranking 2^nd on the Fortune 500 “most valued” skills. Since then, computers and calculators do almost all of that work and that skill is now at the bottom of the list. Yet, this is the only skill from the list above that is assessed by the Algebra EOC. If you want to know whether students are leaving high school able to do the other three stages of mathematics, a standardized test is not the answer. Real, high-level thinking cannot be measured in a standardized way. There is also an incredible amount of research suggesting that students’ brains grow the most when they make mistakes, yet these tests punish students who are anything but perfect (0 or 1). If you don’t believe me, or would like to read more, then I encourage you to look at any of the work done by Jo Boaler, a world-renowned mathematics professor at Stanford University.

I understand that the proposed purpose of these tests was to raise the level of rigor for students to solve a problem you outlined in your email—that students are not prepared for the workforce. As Mr. Jablonski and many other educators and administrators have tried to point out, these tests are a false solution, as they test some of the least important skills to employers.

Quite frankly, these tests are only deemed necessary because there is an unfounded lack of trust in teachers to provide quality educations. As Mr, Jablonski explained, there is no federal requirement to have a test tied to graduation. If in fact you are concerned that teachers are not providing a quality education, then I have many suggestions for how you could explore that further. One of the most powerful things you or anyone on the State Board of Education could do is come into our classrooms. I invite you to visit mine any day. If it is a matter of deciding where to invest money, I suggest you spend it improving and adding to teacher preparation programs and teacher professional development that is grounded in research-based practices. Instead, we are asked to spend our professional development time learning how to properly prepare students for and administer a test.

I hope you will understand that I am writing this email in concern for my students and for education in general. I am not the type of person you suggested in your email. I have never tried to cut corners when it comes to education. I graduated in the top of my class in high school and in college. I was chosen to speak at my graduation from Michigan State University. I am a teaching fellow in the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation. I think about how I can improve my teaching all the time. In fact, I spent my entire day off today reading about teaching and revamping my lesson plans for this week (for the tenth time at least). I read Mr. Jablonski’s post while I was eating dinner and literally stopped mid-meal to write to you. I am a passionate teacher who cares about my students and their future. I hope that voices like mine are important to you as the President of the State Board of Education.

Sincerely,

Beverly Stuckwisch

Licking Valley High School Chemistry and Math Teacher

Knowles Science Teaching Fellow