Imagine a wheel with a 100-mile radius rolling at 1 mile per hour.
You gaze out your kitchen window, let’s say 4 feet tall by 3 feet wide.
What will it look like as the wheel rolls past?
Last year, I attended the annual Knowles Science Teacher Foundation meeting in Philadelphia. The Knowles Foundation strives to support and retain exceptional young teachers and helps them become leaders in education. This is a noteworthy mission since: 1) they chose me, and 2) the first few years of teaching are particularly difficult.
I remember feeling a sense of professional isolation and rubbing my toe in the ground whenever people asked what I did — after all, those who can’t, teach. This is a hard-hitting one-two punch whose misery has company. Approximately half of all high school teachers in the United States leave the profession within five years. A veteran colleague told me that teachers aren’t “worth a darn” until they’ve taught for seven years, so this five-year turnover is concerning and, in turn, the Knowles Foundation is important.
At the Knowles meeting, I talked with an exceptional young teacher about whether we instruct “life lessons.” Will a student ever again apply a trigonometric equation or find the roots of a polynomial? I mean, the ability to use a compass rarely circumscribes your annual review. I was split. I believe math is important, but life lessons sound greater than inequalities.
I took a small vacation, rented a car, and drove to Franklin Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water home outside of Pittsburgh. On my way back, I stopped at the National Clock and Watch Museum. The museum fascinates in its chronicle from grandfather clock to quartz watch. But, ironically, I arrived late and had little time. As I hurried through the exhibits, every piece became more valuable. I thought, “At least I got to see the steam clock run,” and, “That’s how self-winding works.” My memories are vivid, as if squeezing them through a smaller opening concentrated their impact.
Reflecting on the plane ride home, I realized that this clock experience was a life lesson, and that I teach this lesson in my math classes: We call it scale. What does it mean to be big, to be small, to be contracted or concentrated? It’s more than a ratio. Students can calculate dilation factors and build ships in bottles, but to see the world through scale is to understand economy, gravity, and what you see out the window.
And that is the essential role of a teacher: I help students fashion lenses with which they focus the world. One turn of the wheel may necessitate math while the next may necessitate history. But the spokes that support these lenses are thick and the life worth living is one that minimizes the transition from lens to lens until the time in which the world appears out of focus is imperceptible.
My struggle as a teacher is to make these connections. In today’s climate, where I am only as good as my students’ last test scores, how can I justify taking time to talk about clocks? I presented this question to the teacher from the Knowles meeting. He responded: “It’s not a matter of if we can teach life lessons; it’s a matter of how we can, and once there, is it really different to say we must? I mean, why else send children to school?”
Next year will be my fifth year teaching. Statistically speaking, it’s a dead heat whether I’ll make it another. I wind my clock by searching for small openings through which to squeeze content into “greater than” life lessons. Because it’s true that my students may never again factor a quadratic. But might they see the world a little clearer for having done it?
So here’s what it looks like as this giant, full wheel of life rolls past: a flat spoke descending and then that flat spoke rising again; there will be no curve closing in.
Now, class, let’s figure out how long it takes the spoke to transition.
Thomas Greene of Arvada (thomasdgreene@gmail.com) is a Colorado native, outdoor enthusiast, and high school mathematics teacher.
