In my first year at Northside, a colleague told me that teaching is very isolating. Yes, we spend our day with people – adolescents – but it’s not the same as spending it with adults. I love teenagers, too. I generally don’t complain about spending time with them. But I don’t work with them in the same way that I work with adults. Most teachers I know work so hard in a typical day that they don’t have time to have regular, adult conversations with other teachers. We sit in our classrooms to grade and plan when the students aren’t there. We eat lunch in 10 minutes while reading and sending emails. We don’t even need to go to an office to use a phone anymore because it’s easier and quicker to use our cell phones when we call parents. I knew what that teacher was talking about immediately – teaching can be a lonesome profession, even when you are surrounded by (smaller/younger) people all day. It takes a concerted effort to collaborate with other teachers.

I have made that concerted effort to collaborate with other teachers and the teachers at Northside make it easy to do so. We readily share resources, offer and accept advice without ego, and generally work very well together, even given the little time that we have to do so. On a good day, we can plan an entire lesson in the eight minute passing period. OK…that might be a stretch, but sometimes our most productive collaborations (have to) happen on the fly. One year, the stars were aligned: My friend/colleague Jill and I were teaching the exact same classes and had a prep period and lunch period at the same time. It was glorious. We co-created lesson plans and assessments; we revamped activities to integrate technology; we talked about how to grade assessments and create rubrics; we talked about students and how to best engage them. We hit our groove and kept it for the year. Alas, it was one year only.

I met with a new colleague, Amy, at CCSS today to talk about a lesson that I am going to teach tomorrow (btw, yay!). I had observed her class yesterday and today for about 30 minutes each. She is teaching a unit on graphs of functions and graphical solutions. She asked me whether I wanted to use Desmos in a lesson and, of course, I jumped at the chance. In yesterday and today’s lessons, she taught students the general characteristics of cubic functions and how one could use a graph to solve equations involving cubics. I’m doing the same thing tomorrow, but with reciprocal functions. The sections in the textbook after that are for exponential functions and then gradients of a curve. (On a side note…I can say that I don’t really understand how the learning units are organized in the math textbooks. It seems like the books jump from topic to topic. I should save this observation for another blog post, though, when I have time to really process it.)

So, Amy and I talked for a while about a range of topics, including technology integration and barriers to that integration.  We talked about how to get students engaged and how to help them to better retain what they learn. We talked about O-level test questions. We talked about the flow of the lesson. We were collaborating! Yes! I worked for most of the rest of the day on a Desmos Activity Builder that was modeled off of resources that she and her department already developed. I don’t know that I would have approached the material in the same way if I didn’t use the Sec3E1 Maths Resource Book, but I wanted to honor the work that she already put into the topic. I also wanted to challenge myself to use it *and* make it as thought-provoking and constructivist-aligned as I could.

My conversation with Amy continued over lunch after class. She took Alex and me out to nearby HDB mall with a small, air conditioned food court. It was nice to get off campus for a little while. At the other schools I was attached to, there were coffee shops, hawker centers and large malls nearby. However, CCSS is surrounded by HDB’s and there’s major construction of a new MRT station right in front of the school; it makes it hard to get off campus for lunch. I like the food at the school’s canteen as there is always a Chicken Rice option, but getting out of the building for a few minutes is always welcome. Amy drove us over while we talked shop the whole time.  We talked more about differentiated instruction, about assessments, about cultural differences in the approaches to teaching, and about PLCs. We probably could have talked for another hour or so, but Amy’s lessons and my work pulled us apart.

As I continue to work here on my project, I’m realizing more and more how much I miss collaborating with like-minded colleagues. When I hit my stride, I can be productive – aligning standards and assessments, planning activities, generating thoughtful questions, creating Desmos activities and Google forms and slides. But, it’s still not the same as working on all of this with colleagues who are just as invested in the outcome as I am. Of course I knew it going into this project that I would be on my own in completing it. I’m getting tons of support from the good folks at AST/MOE, from my adviser at NIE, and from the teachers and administrators at all of my attachment schools. I’ll be sharing some of my work next week at an AST-sponsored Fulbright Sharing Session. Still, it’s just not the same as digging in with my peeps and seeing what we can produce together.

Dinner with Liz and LayKheng. It was my first time eating Fish Head Curry and it was delicious!

On a related note, I’ve also been missing having girlfriends around to talk to easily.  My conversations with friends about work, parenting, politics, etc. are kind of a collaboration on life. I was craving a ladies’ night out over the weekend and luckily two of my new friends were available. Liz, a Fulbrighter from NYC, and LayKheng, a Singaporean Fulbrighter, met me for dinner, shopping and dessert on Saturday night. I’ve had plenty of that combination with my two *ahem* younger ‘girlfriends,’ Hazel and Lulu, but Liz and LayKheng didn’t incessantly ask me to buy them everything as we walked through Bugis Junction and Bugis Street. The three of us could talk freely about our Fulbright stuff, about food and travels, and about life in general.

Of course, my main collaborator on life (and education and teaching and parenting and paying bills and everything else) is always helpful. Johan and I have certainly proven that we have a strong marriage as we have learned to lean on each other more in the past few months, bringing this idea of collaboration to a whole new level. I’m grateful to have such a great collaborator in that regard.