Jackie's class is my first close encounter with a high school classroom in the United States. It is a non-typical situation as discussed in my earlier posts about Memorial High School. But for me, I have no baseline for what is a typical classroom. The interactions that I observe in Jackie's classroom are not very typical I guessed but wanted another experience.
I decided to visit an AP Statistics class in a large comprehensive high school in San Francisco. The school draws it's student population from all over the city. The teacher appears popular (enrollment in AP Statistics has almost doubled since he joined 4-5 years ago). The school itself has undergone a self-feeding upward trend with its scores int he same time period. The student population has undergone a demographic change.
The first difference I observed in this class as compared to the Memorial HS class is the more uniform dressing style. The are about 20% of the accessories that I saw in MHS - on both boys and girls. The other is that out of 25 students, there were 2 Hispanics, 1 Caucasian, the rest are all of East Asian origin. The community appears to have much to do with dressing styles. As someone who came from wearing uniforms to school and liking it, I struggle to come to terms with how much time and effort appears to go into dressing for school. I cannot help feeling as if they would regain a good hour or two each day if only they didn't spend so much time on dressing. This will be the last mention of this issue because this ethnography is not about what they wear but what they do; else I will be guilty of the same time waste.
This class apparently has 60-70% ELL students. But I can't help wondering if that just means that their first language at home isn't English - not necessarily meaning that they struggle with English. In addition, the similarity(with MHS) that here again more than a third will be first generation college aspirants seems amply offset by the difference parental expectations. As Jackie has expressed before one of the big challenges facing her students is an almost complete lack of parenting. Jackie also pointed out that even if they don't speak English at home, the language that they do speak, they speak at a much higher level of sophistication sot hey know what it it to communicate at a "college-level" so to speak. The other significant differnec ein this ELL characterization is the language you hear at break (that is their language of choice for social interaction) is English at this school whereas at MHS you hear Spanish in the break mainly.
So on the whole the students appeared on task, prepared to learn (in the sense that all of them had books and calculators and writing materials), non-disruptive but also jaded. There were situations in which one of them was napping. one was eating and another texting - but the teacher appears to have very strict classroom behaviour expectations and in general thery were met.
That said, the class was in a listening mode and not really in any type of active learning situation.
It was a lecture - they did about 5 problems but all of them were done by him on the board and they took notes and answered when he called on them. I definitely need to go again when they may be doing an activity. They did enter data about penny ages into a Fathom survey during break. They were passign around a bag of pennies during class and had been instructed to take 2 samples - one of size 5 and another of size 10; compute the mean; enter it into the survey. He used this data at the end of class to lead up to the Central Limit Theorem. It was the standard demonstration of how the distribution of sample means approaches the normal as we increase the number of samples - irrespective of the shape of the population. He then moved onto using the CLT document that comes with Fifty Fathoms. He also modified the uniform population in that demo to a bi-modal distribution to better illustrate the "normalization" that takes place as the shape changes int he sampel mean distribution is very dramatic moving from a bi-modal to tri-modal to normal by the time you get to about 25 samples. Even this felt more like a demonstration as it was not preceeded by any active work by the students in the area of building the distribution - they computed the means but that was all.
I took detailed notes of what actually happenned in the class in terms of the activities and use of Fathom but what appears here is a distillation of those notes using a framework of comparison rather than of reporting. I did learn how to answer questions like the ones that appear on the AP exam :-).
