4.6 Pattern 3: Survival
4.6.2 Kasey Zimmerman: Remained Committed Despite Desire to Adjust
I do not present Linda’s case as one of a complacent veteran teacher who was too set in her ways to take up new technology. Instead, Linda’s pursuit of survival during a time of great disruption offers insight into the limits a passionate and open-minded teacher may reach when changing their practice threatens their personal visions of good teaching.
aged children, Kasey often reflected on his children’s schooling experiences –– particularly when they were learning from home during the pandemic –– to inform his teaching.
4.6.2.2 Personal Vision of Good Teaching: Building Students’ Love for Mathematics Kasey’s notions of good teaching were rooted in fostering his students’ curiosity – mathematical or otherwise, as he described in Interview 2:
My goal is that they understand that we're creating a space and a place that despite all the distractions where they can go to learn and be curious [...] I think if we were in person, I'd sprinkle a little bit more math in there but at the beginning of the year my goal is always the non-math stuff (Interview 2, August 2020).
He likens creating a space for students to be curious to “helping them see the beauty in math”
and moving students’ feelings about math “in a more positive direction.” He often discussed good teaching in the context of “meeting students where they were at” – both in terms of their mathematical abilities and love (or dislike) of math – and working toward mathematical understanding and positive feelings toward math from the students’ current mindsets.
4.6.2.3 Response to Situationally Feasible Adjustments: Attempting to Change Practice In interviews, Kasey described two different attempts to adjust his practice to meet the demands of online teaching. First, he explained that the math department at his school had decided to switch “from a curriculum I really loved” (Interview 2, August 2020) to the Illustrative Mathematics Curriculum because of its more natural integration with technology.
Despite feeling less comfortable with the new curriculum, Kasey initially aligned himself with the department and taught Illustrative Mathematics.
Second, Kasey expressed an interest in learning Desmos to help foster student engagement:
To be honest, I think [Desmos is] what I should be doing. I think that would solve a lot of the concerns that I have about how to engage students. I started watching a webinar before school started about Desmos Lessons 101. I got 20 minutes in, and I just never finished the video. I think if I can find time to do that, the students would like it. I feel like that would solve a lot of my problems with the students who don't want to engage. I feel like if they were on Desmos, they could engage without the fear of “everybody is looking at me” or “everybody is looking at what I'm saying.” I can see who is doing stuff.
Who is participating, who’s not, who’s struggling, who’s not. I need to do it [...] Doing that Desmos stuff would benefit me and my students more than pretty much anything, which of course means I should do it (Interview 3, October 2020).
In this excerpt, Kasey describes the features of Desmos he found valuable in relation to his vision of good teaching, particularly his desire to meet students at their current mathematical understanding. In fact, as we talked during this interview, Kasey drafted an email to the leaders of the professional development organization requesting support in learning how to use Desmos, claiming that he felt “really guilty” for not doing it earlier.
4.6.2.4 Consistent Line of Activity: Reverting to Old Teaching Practices to Self-Preserve As the year went on, Kasey’s mental and physical capacity to make adjustments waned as pandemic life wore him down in numerous ways. Instead of maintaining or extending the
adjustments he started with, he reverted to using his old curriculum and gave up trying to learn Desmos. As Kasey described it to me, “I'm staying up until 1:00. Every night it's all the teaching and then so much time spent planning, emailing, administrative tasks, it's so much stuff that we have to do” (Interview 2, August 2020). This workload took a toll on his mental health:
Because we're at such deficits on free time and mental health and the other side of being a human being and surviving, being a father, being a husband, whenever we do have free time, that's where it goes and that's where it needs to go [...] That analogy of just trying to keep your head above water is such a perfect analogy, because I just always feel like my chin is below water but my nostrils are above water (Interview 3, October 2020).
To decrease his workload, Kasey started teaching from his old curriculum instead of Illustrative Mathematics, as the department had agreed on, a change he estimated decreased the amount of time he spent on schoolwork by 30%. He also recognized his shortcomings when it came to technology, saying, “I feel like I'm pretty good with technology, but I think that I'm also really resistant to trying new technologies and my capacity to learn them” (Interview 3, October 2020).
As a result, he stopped pursuing incorporating Desmos:
I've now gone from hope to find time to utilize Desmos better, to resigned that there is not time to utilize Desmos better. Actually, I'll be honest, even if I had more time, I don't have the capacity to just create more (Interview 4, March 2021).
4.6.2.5 Short Term Loss: Doing a Poor Job At Teaching
Important to Becker’s (1964) framework of committed, Kasey pursued his old curriculum and gave up on learning Desmos in the face of a short-term loss, namely, being a bad teacher temporarily. When reflecting on his online teaching year, Kasey explained:
I was really bad at [teaching]. I just felt like I did a really poor job, I didn't feel like I was teaching. I didn't feel like I was using the tools that other people were using. But, at the same time, I did the best I could, it was just a really bad job. I just didn't have the
bandwidth to make the investment to use Desmos lessons the way that I feel like I should have. So, I don't feel bad about that. I know that it would have been better if I invested
more in Desmos, but I just didn't have the bandwidth. It's weird because I feel like I feel bad about a lot of things, but I don't feel bad about how bad of a teaching job I did because I was doing the best I could, and I just couldn't. I needed more support in order to make it there, and even if we had it, I was just so done every day (Interview 5, June 2021).
Kasey made peace with this loss, as evidenced in his admission of not feeling bad about it.
Furthermore, he offered a reason for this acceptance: namely, his survival. He explained, “Now in a pandemic, it's just like, ‘Well, now we've just got more weights dragging us down,’ but it's still that feeling of trying to keep your head above water. I'm just trying to get to the next day.”
In sum, Kasey’s vision of good teaching involved fostering students’ curiosity and love for mathematics by identifying their current understandings and mindsets as the primary drivers of instruction. While situational adjustments to his practice (such as using the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum or adopting Desmos) would have served this notion of good teaching, and he expressed a desire to do so, he ultimately did not find them feasible, resulting in a short- term loss.