It’s a new year and the buzzword is resolutions. Let’s call it what it is; How can I get my shit together? Just like most everyone else, the Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s season saw me getting fatter and lazier. Yeah, I did my share of football, eggnog and chocolate gorging. Time to get on the right track. But how?

Here’s what I’m trying; I see my life as being categorized into 4 areas; mind, body, soul and heart. Some areas are pretty good but others,well, not so much. Mind? I’m pretty good there. My profession is high school math teaching so my mind is pretty sharp. Added to the math is my propensity to rationalize things. (Rationalizing is more important than sex; how many days go by without rationalizing.)

Body area is not bad but needs some work. Before Thanksgiving, my Keto eating was refined and effective. My supplement routine is working as well. My 60 incline pushups every morning helped, as does my sporadic wood cutting. But I need more so I’m adding daily stretching, planks, knee bends and sit ups as well. With some discipline (and a testosterone prescription), my body should fare pretty well.

Next on my list is my soul. This one is a little tricky. From a religious perspective, I should be “trusting in Jesus.” But that ain’t where I am in this part of my life. From my two degrees in psychology, I should be trusting my Inner Self. This is my preferred approach because, by definition, psychology is the science of the soul.

So how do I cultivate my Inner Self? Mostly by introspection. My two guides for this is my beginner’s knowledge of Taoism and Jungian Therapy with my dreams.

What’s that, Inner Self? Yeah, I fired my Jungian Therapist months ago. How can I use Jungian Therapy without a therapist? Well, until I can find a real one, I’m going to use Artificial Intelligence as my therapist. And , yes, it is working quite well.

I realized through this plan that awareness of these areas is not enough. I need to find a way to express these areas of my life. For my mind, mathematics is a good expression. For my body, I express it through exercise and sculpting my body. For my heart, it is writing poetry to my wife and other expressions of love to the ones I love in my life.

For my soul, that is what I’m going to use this blog for; daily (I hope) expressions of where my spirituality and faith lie. As I doubt religion, I am working in a Catholic high school. At the same time, Taoism is helping me pull off veil of what reality really is. Stay tuned; it should be a fun ride.

I am not sure where the whole idea of extra tutoring began but it was not a common practice when I was a high school student many, many years ago. I graduated from high school in 1977 and I never considered getting a tutor in any subject. Its not that I couldn’t use the help. I was a kid that did “just enough” and ended up graduating high school with 2.6 GPA. (Thank goodness for the As and Bs I got in math classes and band.) The first time I paid for a tutor was in 1998, when I was trying to pass a course in Abstract Algebra at the University of Georgia as an undergraduate.

Once I started teaching high school math in 1999, tutoring had become rather commonplace to use. When I got my first teaching job in December 1999, I supplemented my income by being a traveling tutor in Northern California. When I moved to Norfolk, Virginia, in August 2000, I continued the practice of getting extra money by tutoring for a private tutoring company. (I even tutored a couple of my students in the evening until my principal informed me that it was against school policy to do that. I understood why but I just didn’t know that there was such a policy.) At the school I worked at, math teachers took turns tutoring students before school. Every school I have worked at since then has had some sort of expectation for extra tutoring.

The question in my mind is “What happened from 1997 to 1998?” A lot of this cultural shift seems to be the emphasis on every student going to college somewhere. When I was a high school student, I don’t remember a strong emphasis on the average student going to college. In my family, we lived by the Charlie Daniels Band lyric, “A rich man goes to college and a poor man goes to work.” My parents just said it was too expensive and nobody told me anything about financial aid and scholarships. (I knew athletes got scholarships but I knew very little about academic scholarships. I was told about going to University of Virginia for free through Army ROTC but I felt I was too good for the military and not good enough for UVA. Growing up in a military area had that effect on me.) I thought, therefore, my best route was to get a government job. I never received a government job.

In 1995, I decided to return to college. By that time, many more middle-income students were entering and finishing college. As a result, tutoring had become much more important. It is my guess that this was probably the result of many upper-middle-income students getting tutoring help to improve their SAT scores. (I think that this behavior trickled down to all levels of students who could afford it.) The competition for “the right college” had begun. Then many schools, public and private, figured this was the magic bullet to the achievement gap of academics. I remember one school in Northeast, I think, that, after 8 hours of teaching, required another 4 hours of tutoring.

In my opinion, this amount of tutoring is a red flag about the current education requirements. That is, if that many people need extra help, then we are asking too much of the student.

Despite protestations, the need and offering of tutoring still continues. Therefore, as a “core” teacher of mathematics, it is my duty to provide tutoring as much as I can. In my classes, I offer an “open door” approach to tutoring. That is, if you ask for it, I will do all I can to provide it. I have a couple of students who take me up on this offer on a regular basis. When I realize this, I recognize that a more efficient approach is needed.

Then, one day, an idea came out of the blue. I was talking to a parent one afternoon and she said, “I would teach him myself but it’s been a long time since I did that stuff.” As a result, a grand idea popped in my head; “Why don’t I offer to tutor parents so they can better guide their kids?!” I suddenly loved the idea. If you think about it, it makes total sense. Parents are paying the money so no time will be wasted. Not only that but I will total focus of the parent. Also, I won’t just be guiding someone through problem but I will be presenting the over-arching concept. On top of that, it will be more cost efficient because parents will be able to help the student at the moment that they get lost on the topic. It will mostly be another source of bonding with parent and child. It seems to be a win-win for everyone.

I believe in this some much that I have launched a tutoring service for parents. I have a nationwide Google ad, offering tutoring for parents at a negotiable $35/hour. I am willing to use Skype, FaceTime, etc., to tutor parents in need. I even envision tutoring groups of parents for a cheaper perversion rate. If you want to check out my qualifications and experience, go to drboguynn.com. If you want to set up a session, or have a 15-minute free consultation, you can call or text me at 757-346-9173. (If I don’t answer, please leave me a voicemail or text me at the same number.)

Let’s say a school let you teach a class the way you felt it should be. I know this is a fantastic notion, given the state of American education but stay with me here. You gave your own style of opening, you taught the concepts that you felt necessary and gave them a chance to practice the new concepts. What then? How do you know that they learned what you tried to teach them? Some mainstreamers would probably say, “I’ll check their homework the next day?” What if they don’t do the homework? What if they ignored you and just watched some YouTube videos and/or some Khan Academy videos? Yeah, it’s great that they learned, no matter how they learned. But what about your teaching? How do you know your methods were effective? And, oh yeah, what if they had their girlfriend/boyfriend/friend/sibling do the homework for them? How does this inform your teaching?

Standard application of the 4-part lesson plan (opening-instruction-practice-closing) gives that needed feedback. However, the standard closing of unsolved problems has its issues. First, it tests where the teacher feels the student should be, not where the student actually is in its knowledge base. Second, the same problem for everyone leads to an opportunity for kids to copy each others’ answers and thereby gives a false impression of knowledge. Third, the uninitiated will become bored with it and claim that they cannot do anything because they don’t understand it.

In my estimation, the solution to this issue lies in having choices. In response to that, I developed a “closing protocol” outlining 10 choices of ways to give feedback to the teacher about the students’ depth of knowledge. Of these ten, several are straightforward and logical and the rest are pretty creative. Among the creative are drawing a cartoon, creating poetry or a rhyme, telling an applicable joke, etc. The idea of these closings is to tap into what the student enjoys while giving feedback of knowledge.

These are quite useful but an idea I used for my dissertation goes a bit deeper. At the time I was choosing a topic, I was interested in bringing psychology ideas to education. One idea I was greatly impressed with was something Active Imagination (AI). AI is taking an abstract idea and having a conversation with it. The study took the step by step approach analyzing dreams (Robert Johnson’s Inner Work) and taught it to classes. One of the steps of this work is doing an AI with a character of one’s own dreams. Once the student understood AI, the student was given the option of doing an AI with a mathematical concept. The study shone a very positive light on these type of closings.

Given these positive results, the reader may be asking whether I use this idea or not. The answer is yes and no. Yes, I use the closing protocol on a daily basis. However, AI is offered in the protocol but I no longer encourage its use through dream analysis. Why not? Because it requires taking up to week of teaching dream analysis and I am afraid of being accused of “not teaching math.” (One school suspended me for several days on that charge. The school district’s decision was actually political but it hid behind that charge, in my opinion. The same school eventually allowed me to run a monthly “Dream Club,” where I taught the dream analysis steps and students analyzed each others’ dreams.)

If you would like access to any of these documents of this dissertation, please ask in the comments section.

In the early months of my very first teaching job, I learned my first valuable lesson for the profession of teaching. The lesson was that every success in education is about making connection. This lesson wasn’t from a depth of understanding but out of fear. (When I say “very early,” I mean before I entered the classroom.) When I talked to my first contact of my first school district, I told an HR person that I was a little scared about the physical size of high school students, even though I weighed over 200 pounds. She told me that, when I make a connection with a class, the larger kids usually became protectors rather than assailants. I took this information as an understanding that “it was all about connection.”

I have tested this hypothesis many times over in my 20 years in classrooms. In my experience, it has always been true in every classroom. It has also been true in social situations and work situations. In general, it is an excellent lesson in my Life. Fast-forward to Fall 2013. I am teaching high school math in a 99% African American high school. (It was also a low-achieving school as far as academics.) I am also PhD candidate in Psychology, with an emphasis on its applications to high school education. And I need an idea for pilot study for my degree.

I decided to look how I started classes. For that matter, how any math teacher starts a class. (This probably can extend to other subject areas but I have never looked at that.) As you may or may not know, math classes in high school usually start with a few math problems to solve. I have heard called a warm-up or a sponge. For motivated students, it reminds them of the stuff they learned the previous day and primes them for the new information. It works great for, as I said, motivated students.

However, it doesn’t take much observation of the high school math classes I have taught that 80% of my mathematics students are not very motivated to learn mathematics. So, the question is, how does this kind of opening affect the uninitiated? From my observations, I realized that these kind of openings remind the uninitiated that they are in a place that they don’t really want to be. As a result, I thought, “How can I flip that script and make this a place where they want to be and, at the same time, be a warm up to thinking?

What I came up with was a pretty simple idea. On the board, I would write a quote or some poetry. I would then ask students to respond to the quote or poetry. They could respond verbally or written on a piece of paper. The greatest part of this assignment was that there were no incorrect answers; just inadequate attempts. How did I decide on inadequate? First of all, “what he/she said.” Also, written responses were a minimum of 50 words. As for verbal responses, I asked for more if I wasn’t clear about any “surface” responses. My pilot study used several of my colleagues to use this exercise for their classes.

The results were very good. Participating teachers extended the idea to use videos. They reported better grades. They reported higher grades. They reported more consistent participation in class. One teacher even witnessed students looking new terminologies from the opening exercises.

There were complaints that breaking down a quote was not “mathematics.” I would argue that this breaking down was based in logic and logic is taught in our geometry classes. Besides, the process got more students thinking that the standard warm up.

Why did stop using it? Because it helped me get suspended once and was partially responsible for irate parents, which probably led to my forced resignation. (I would like to point out that the suspension and the resignation were also about me getting sloppy in my methods. I cannot blame these actions solely on this practice.) Despite its effectiveness, I made a vow to go mainstream and not take too many chances. If I could get assurance of my professional safety, I might try it.

Note: This is an unpublished study. If you want more information, contact me and ask.

In yesterday’s blog, I updated the reader on the “job sampling” I have been doing since December 2020. As part of that journey, I have returned to teaching math in a small public school. I am doing the job I have been doing, for the most part, since 1999. But my approach is different now.

Since being released from my last teaching job, my wife became fed up with the fragility of my working life. I have been suspended from teaching once and then I was told not to return on the other occasion. She also believes that I didn’t taking responsibility for those actions and I “always blamed it on someone else.” Maybe she’s right but I’m not sure.

Before May of 2022, I saw myself as a rebel against the current system of education in America. This stance was applauded by my PhD professors but got me in trouble with educators and parents. I thought of myself as an advocate for my students. I thought, “Sure, I make administrators uncomfortable but I was never denied employment.” Until May 2020.

So when I returned to teaching in August, I decided to take another approach. This time, I decided that I would take the mainstream approach. I would follow the rules as they were placed in front of me. I would be very liberal with writing behavior referrals. I would contact parents early and often. I would teach with a very standard approach; opening problems, teach by example, assign work, closing assignment. Very boring but the letter. Treat my assignment as a job, not a calling. Keep my nose clean and stay out of trouble.

How has it been? Well, it is almost January and I have yet to experience an deep problems from administration. On the other hand, student compliance is very low. Test scores are very low. Off-task behavior is very high. But, in my opinion, that’s what you get when you play the mainstream rules.

Could it be better? Absolutely! Some of the ideas I have tried could minimize (and have minimized) most of these issues. Are they worth trying? Absolutely not! It just doesn’t feel safe to attempt anymore. (I sometimes fantasize about winning the lottery and using these methods on my way out the door.)

Please wish me luck for the rest of the year. As these patterns continue towards the Spring, I will very tempted to try my old methods to boost better results. Please give me strength to stay the non-productive course.

In upcoming posts, I will discuss some of these ideas I am too scared to try. I will share how effective I have seen them to be and risks they have caused.

I recently celebrated my 6th year with WordPress. However, I haven’t written a blog in two years. I guess I have some explaining to do.

Well, let’s pick up from the time of my last post. It was a post about comments that my principal made after observing my teaching the first time. As you can see from the post, I was not in agreement with his comments. This was not a good start. And it got worse. Every time he observed me, I thought that the class went well. When I received his comments, there were nothing positive said and more negative things said. This continued until April 2022, when he was removed as principal of our school. Good news, right? Well, yes, but not for long. Not for long because, in May 2022, the new regime let me know that they were not renewing my contract. Ironically, I was informed of this during Teacher Appreciation Week. The message to me was loud and clear.

When I took this news in, I took it as an opportunity to try something different as a profession. (My wife didn’t take this as lightly as I did.) In a way, I had anticipated this scenario; I worked many evenings preparing to take the Virginia Real Estate Exam. After two attempts, I passed the exam. (The average pass rate of the test is around 50%.) A week before Teacher Appreciation Week, I received my new license. My first thought was that I would just smoothly move into real estate.

Since real estate income is pure on commission, I need to find a way to earn benefits. I figured I would need to supplement the real estate job with a benefits-offered job. So I started applying to jobs. But where should I apply? I quickly decided that I should focus on jobs I had done before. Within a few weeks, I was hired as a bartender at a chain restaurant. It seemed perfect; I could bartend a few nights a week and focus on real estate during the day. I quickly learned that reality and theory live in different houses. After four days of training, I decided that this was definitely not going to turn out the way I had envisioned. I quit the job and the management seemed as relieved as I felt.

Not long after leaving that job, another profession from my past came a-calling. I was called in for an interview with an engineering services company. Before I knew it, I was hired a Construction Materials Technician. It paid less than teaching but overtime could take care of the difference. On top of that, like the bartending job, they offered full benefits. I was nervous at first but I soon settled into the job and rather enjoyed it. It required me to be on rooftops of tall buildings. It also was in the middle of the summer so the job was incredibly hot. Despite all of this, I enjoyed the job. On top of that, my wife said that I seemed happier.

Then I got distracted and made a pretty poor decision. One of the jobs I applied for was a substitute teacher at a psychological rehab facility. When I met the man in charge of the school, I liked him very much. The job was challenging but the manager gave me flexibility in my teaching methods. He said, as demand increased, he wanted to hire me as a full-time teacher. It made me reconsider teaching as a full-time profession. It was not August and school would be starting soon. I applied to a high school in a very small and rural county. They hired me very quickly and paid me a little more than the construction job. I told myself, “Take the job. The construction job is friggin’ hot as hell and our 63-year-old knees hurt when I have to climb those ladders.” I now have second thoughts about that move. Not only that but the conflict with school hours prevented me from being trained for the part-time teaching job.

Looking ahead to the summer, I plan to throw 110% into the real estate gig and see what happens. If I don’t sell enough real estate, I will return to teaching another year. Or maybe I will go back construction.

Then came the holidays. Several events have shown me that my social skills are quite poor. This mostly due to a poor social upbringing. I came to realize that I need to work in an area that requires very few social skills. I know what you might be thinking; “Why the hell did you choose to teach teenagers and sell real estate if your social skills suck so much?!” Okay, maybe you didn’t think that…but I did! That is the reason I have returned to blogging and looking at books about freelance writing. I guess only time will tell where all of this takes me.

In the mean time, I will continue to teach, while putting out Google ads for math tutoring (drboguynn.com) and real estate sales (boguynn@abbitt.com).

I recently met with my school principal to talk about my teaching methods. I was nervous and skeptical about what he was going to say. It started off like this;

“One thing you need to work on is Framing the Lesson. You need to tell the students what you are attempting to teach. I always like to use this analogy; suppose you are taking a trip in the car. If you said, “Everybody get in the car”, nobody would want to get in the car because they don’t know where they are going and they aren’t sure if they want to go. On the other hand, if you said, ‘We are going to take a trip. We are going to take a trip to Washington, DC. We are going to the Smithsonian Institute, The White house and The Capitol’, then they would want to get in the car. That is what we mean by Framing the Lesson. It sets the stage for the rest of the class. Brain r research tells that students will lose focus if they don’t know where they are going intellectually.”

Maybe that principal was right but I would prefer to look at this a different way. Suppose a student walks out of his house and sees three cars with a driver standing outside the car. The first one tells him, “Get in the car. We are going to take a trip.” The second one says, We are going to take trip to Washington, DC. We are going to visit the Smithsonian Institute, The White House and The Capitol.” Outside the third car is a driver, leaning on the fender. He is staring into the air and has a happy look on his face. This student walks up to the third driver and says, “Where are you going?” He looks at the student and says, “I got some ideas but where do you want to go?” Which car would you get into? Let’s look at the merits of each.
For the first car, the driver is a take-charge guy. He doesn’t care what the riders want. He has an unspoken agenda and he is going to pursue it, no matter what. The rider has little ownership or choice. On the positive side, the rider needs to make no decisions. As long as he does what he is told. Not much pressure but not very interesting or fun.
As for the second car, the driver has a very clear vision what he is going to do. His plans are very precise with a clear objective. First of all, to me, he sounds a little weak. It is almost as if he will be judged if he doesn’t tell the rider exactly what he is doing. In addition, he is a little more open but the rider has just as little ownership when he is compared with the first driver. On top of that, he still seems a little stiff. Clearer agenda but rather stiff. I feel a little more comfortable with this guy because he has revealed his agenda. This is still not a scenario that would not make me run into the back seat of his car.
Then there is the third car. No apparent agenda and the driver seems to be enjoying himself. Enjoying himself when nothing is apparently happening. He has an idea what he should be doing but he is willing to do just about anything, short of violating some core values. We might make it to DC or we may end up watching foot traffic in a park. Either way, you will end up in a place where there is potentially much to learn. If the driver is of decent integrity, you probably learn as much, if not more, than the people who made it to The White House and Capitol. On top of that, you probably had a really great and interesting time learning it.
If you are not sure of this last driver, Hollywood has banked on this character for years. The most lovable characters in many movies are these kind of guys. If this wasn’t the case, Bill Murray and Tom Hanks would have had very short movie careers. My wife have had many experiences in social events where one of us got stuck at the “boring” table and the other experienced the “fun” table. On a more serious note, the “fun” table is a great analogy of how famous psychologist Carl Rogers viewed the therapeutic relationship, as opposed to Fritz Perlz.

Why am I questioning this approach? Because, I feel, that it is not about education. In 2000, I was a new teacher. The administration, after observing my methods, decided that I needed to introduce the lesson better. As a result, they stressed having a class opening; a few problems to help transition into the lesson. Late, they asked me to write the standard down where the students can see it. Since then, administrators have stressed ‘framing the lesson” in many different forms. However, as I have gained experience teaching mathematics, I have learned that a framing can be easily replaced by a trusting relationship between the students and the teacher. In my study of psychology, I have learned that this is very similar to the therapist-client relationship.
Despite that, every new principal I have had has tried to move me (and other teachers) back to “Framing the Lesson.” So it makes me conclude that it is not really about education but about control. I mean…I don’t remember any college math classes that were forced to go through this kind of distraction. I have even taught some remedial math classes at a community college and nobody has asked me to do anything similar to this.
Another aspect of modern teaching in America is how mechanical it has become. Medicine has become more mechanical. Major sports are less about flow and more about Analytics. Western education has fallen into that trap as well. Education is no longer seen as an art form and now is seen as a science. I have always felt that, when you are dealing with human behavior, it is always an artform disguised as a science. Music is very logical and mathematical but the true masters of music are artists. The same can be said of education. The truly great teachers are artists and performers, not logicians with great precision. But mechanics are safe. They are repeatable. They can be put in a box and said that the teacher is masterful. I wonder (and am scared) if the Rock N’Roll Hall of Fame induction will ever be decided by a mechanical template. Musicians got to that level because they saw they way things should be and they were fearless. I am not sure if the same hing could be said of most educators.

Just a thought lately; I have reading a lot about Ayurvedic medicine lately. It is an ancient Indian practice that literally means Life Knowledge. One of the basic things it teaches is our bodies have a daily rhythm. From 6 to 10, it’s reaction to exercise is the strongest. From 10 to 2, our digestion is it’s strongest and from 2 to 6, our thinking is the strongest. My education and experience is mostly in education and psychology. So here’s my idea; Why don’t we design high schools this way? (By the way, I see digestion as digesting ideas and facts, as well as nutrition.) We could allow for exercise (or phys ed classes or schedule sports competition) from 6 to 10 AM, teach new material and eat from 10 AM to 2 PM and practice this knowledge from 2 to 6 PM. As for starting school late, I understand that there is plenty of research to support this.

That’s just an idea that popped in my head during my thinking hours (5 AM).

500 miles to watch

My dear aunt die

Would like eulogize her

But I didn’t really know her well

 

That being said

She gave me

Hope and relief

Which now causes me grief

 

She loved her brother

And that love

Was extended to me as well

Without her, my life

Would be more of a hell

 

But that is not

What this trip was about

It was a benchmark

Of what  I am

Then and now

 

You see,

I recently learned

All the crap

Of my early life

Just wasn’t my fault

 

The shame of our dirty house

And the mess that we were

Was not my fault

Time to drop the shame

 

The abuse and the neglect

That we had to survive

Was not my fault

I can drop it before I die

 

The shame of our poverty

Only in a social sense

I can release it

Because it was due to sense

not cents

 

Most of all

I can release the shit

Literally and figuratively

It’s not my fault

And that’s it

 

It feels so good

To release this from my past

And speak my truth

And feel the pleasure

That lasts and lasts

 

So goodbye  to my hometown

Gone from farm to shopping mall

Now it’s all ugly

Just like the past I had to endure