Adam's guide to making friends in a new place

I've been lucky enough (or unlucky enough, depending on how you look at it) to move around a lot ever since I came to China six and a half years ago. The good part is: when you move around, you see new things, have new experiences, learn about different cultures, and you kind of learn what is necessary in your life and what isn't. The bad part is: you have to make new friends every time you move. This means your friendships will probably be shallower and you have the hard work of starting from scratch each time. Nevertheless, the bad part also has it's good part, which is that you may learn about how to make friends.

So I'll share with you what I've learned.

1. Most good friendships don't happen by accident. If you want to have friends rather than just acquaintances, you need to have meaningful experiences with people. Going to a bar or a social gathering with a bunch of people is fun and you can meet new people, but it probably won't lead to friendships. However, it can give you an idea of who you might gel with and who you think is interesting. Then you can purposefully try to establish a friendship.

2. Everyone wants friends.

This is the good news. Everyone wants friends. Introverts want friends, extroverts want friends, people who don't believe in introversion or extroversion want friends. The only people who may not want (more) friends (at the moment) are people with lots of friends already. But even for those people, their friend circle will experience turn-over. They probably will want more friends eventually. We are at a time in history where a lot of people are lonely, so there are lots of people who want friends.

    Nevertheless, an important warning:

3. Be wary of trying to establish a friendship with very popular people.

Friendships require work, but the one kid of work you don't want in attempted friendships is trying to be friends with someone who doesn't want anymore friends. If that happens, just drop it and try not to be offended because it's probably not about you. One way to avoid this kind of frustration is to not try to pursue friendships with people who already have a lot of friends. Maybe just let them be acquaintances. Adding another friend might not be that much of a marginal benefit for them. Instead, you can look for people with moderate to few friends. These are people who might just be waiting to find a good friend.

4. Figure out what you want from a friendship.

In my mind, a friendship is based on trust, mutual admiration, shared interests, and a shared history (which starts out as shared experiences). In making new friendships, it’s important to seek out people who are similar to you in some ways (like what they want out of a friendship) but could be very different in other ways (which will make the relationship more interesting). Usually, you can figure out if another person fits this description just by interacting with them. If not, you can ask a few careful questions, like, “What do you look for in a friend?” “Do you have expectations for yourself and the other person in a friendship?”

You may also have to negotiate how much time you’re expecting to put into a friendship. People with more friends will often want to devote less time to each individual friendship (and vice versa).

5. Practice the 51% rule.

This is something I learned from a friend at a church I went to in California. Every friendship will have some sort of give and take. In order to not make the friendship about figuring out how you can balance favors given with favors received, try to give a little bit more in the relationship (but not too much more, as then you might feel used). This is where the idea of 51% comes from. If both sides try to do this, then there is very little likelihood that one person will feel that they’re being taken advantage of in the friendship.

6. Purposefully do things together.

With all that as a foundation, here comes the most important step: Do stuff together. Remember that friendships are based on “trust, mutual admiration, shared interests, and a shared history” (quoting myself). Doing stuff together is where most of that happens. Even shared interests can be discovered as you do things together and talk. This usually needs to be something that you purposefully try to schedule or invite the other person to participate in. If not, it may not happen.

I like to invite people to go on walks, which is relaxing, a good opportunity for conversation, and good exercise. Other good options are: inviting people over to cook together, going out for coffee or meals together, playing games together, reading books concurrently and then discussing them. Usually, active things are better than passive things. E.g. cooking together may be better than going out for a meal together, because cooking is an endeavor that you can do as a team. But of course, both activities can be done at different times.

During this time of doing things together (and especially trying to schedule them and invite the other person to participate), you will see if the friendship is viable and whether it’s one that you want to invest time and effort in. It should be noted that friendships are not free. They require time, effort, and some money. This is something that needs to be considered. But if it is a good friendship, then it is often worth it.

 

 

 

My Best Work in the TeachNow Program

I'm getting close to being done with doing a nine-month teacher certification program with TeachNow. This has been a lot of work, but it has been worthwhile, as I have learned a lot and grown a lot as a teacher. Here are some of the products that I've created to document my learning relating to teaching, pedagogy, the psychology of students, and more...

Videos:

The History of Education Laws in America 

Building Positive Student Relationships

Establishing Rules and Procedures 

Blog Posts:

PBIS Report (Positive Behavior and Intervention) 

Using Formative Assessment 

Establishing a Positive Classroom Climate 

Follow the links in the articles or videos to see more content on my blog or youtube channel.

Other Projects:

Scientific Methods Card Game

Project Assignment on Global Warming Opinions

Curriculum Map for Geometry Class

Pre-Assessment for More Effective Teaching

Nowadays, much of the focus of teacher training and development is on differentiation, providing each student in a class with different learning experiences based on their individual needs. This focus is based on several things. First of all, students may come from different back-grounds, such as countries, cultures, sub-cultures, etc. Second, students have different baseline abilities. Some students have special needs, some students are learning English while they learn everything else, some students have innate talent and are already ahead of other students. Even within the same culture and the same group, every student is an individual with different experiences, learning styles, and interests. All of this leads to the inevitable conclusion that the most effective teaching will be teaching that is individualized for every student.

Unfortunately, this just isn't feasible in most classrooms. With the help of technology, learning is becoming more and more personalized. But currently, this challenge is addressed through differentiation. Teachers will provide different learning experiences to different groups of students in their classes based on similarities in a few students' needs versus the rest of the class. Any teacher with some experience will quickly be able to tell which students are ahead of the rest in a class and which students need extra support, so this is the starting point of differentiation. But in order for differentiation to be more effective, each unit of teaching can begin with a pre-assessment. A pre-assessment is an assessment before teaching that gives a teacher a clear idea of exactly where each student is in relation to what they should learn during a unit. Generally, a pre-assessment will not contribute to the students' grades. Not only does a pre-assessment help with differentiation, but it also gives an idea of where the class as a whole is relative to the teaching goals of a unit.

The most important part of a pre-assessment, in my opinion, is prerequisite skills. These are skills and knowledge that students should have coming into a unit. It's basically assumed that most students will not know most of the core content of a unit before going through the unit (although some of course will), but if they don't know the prerequisite skills, that's a warning sign that they might struggle during the unit. I made a unit plan for teaching about circles in a geometry course where the prerequisite skills are the following:

They need to know how to do proofs, what are the relationships between postulates and theorems. They need to understand congruence and similarity. They need to understand coordinate planes and how to use them.

So in a pre-assessment for teaching this unit, these skills would be the first thing to assess for. Secondarily, I would want to assess for ability to accomplish the unit objectives. These objectives include "Students understand terms about circles, such as tangent, secant, chord, radius, diameter," " Students understand and can use the properties of tangents. For example, using a tangent property to find the length of a tangent segment to a circle," and others. These objectives cover a lot of material and information, so it is unnecessary to fully assess on the objectives in the pre-assessment, but it's good to get information about the students basic knowledge, like vocabulary, and a little bit about whether they can already do more difficult tasks related to these objectives.

My fellow TeachNow cohort members have compiled a list of pre-assessment strategies in this wiki page. These include things like pre-quizzes, KWL charts, graffiti (a.k.a. mind-maps), and other techniques. I will probably use a combination of different pre-assessment techniques during my teaching. For example, for the above-mentioned unit on circles, I would start with  KWL chart (or perhaps the extended KWHL chart--"know," "want to know," "how to learn it," "what have I learned"). Then I would have a pre-quiz. A KWHL chart is more for students. They will identify for themselves where they are and what else they need (or want) to know. The pre-quiz is more for me as the teacher. As mentioned, I would assess for prerequisite skills, basic knowledge, and some parts of more advanced knowledge. I've made a pre-quiz for that unit, which you can find here.

After pre-assessment, I will have data on the different levels of readiness for the material in the unit. This can guide differentiated teaching during the unit. One example of how this can be done is shown in the article Differentiation: It Starts with Pre-Assessment by Emily Pendergrass. She describes a science class in which students are divided into task groups for the day based on a pre-quiz at the beginning of class. As a high school teacher, I feel this strategy wouldn't be as useful to me, because high school students are highly sensitive to perceived unfairness, whether it is there or not. Another strategy is described below.

My cohort members also made a great flow-chart of how pre-assessment can lead to teaching and progress-monitoring during and entire unit. For dividing students into groups, I would go with pairs, which is a natural grouping based on the fact that students generally sit in pairs anyway. For most of the time, I will have students in heterogeneous groupings, to allow stronger students to help weaker students through the unit, but for some activities, I may switch to homogeneous groupings. I will also have differentiated homework, which will give the weaker students extra work and help in the areas that they struggle in. Throughout the unit, progress will be monitored through in-class problems, homework, exit tickets, self- and peer-assessments. For example, on an exit ticket, students will be asked, "How well do you understand the material from today's lesson?" so they can evaluate themselves. Likewise, in-class problems will sometimes be done individually followed by pair discussion so peers can give each other feedback. Other times, the pair will do it together to practice collaboration.

Advanced students will be given chances to do challenging problems during homework and also to do projects where they extend their knowledge individually. A report or presentation on the history or and idea, or the way it can be applied in other fields, are examples of these projects.

A differentiated classroom with individualized instruction for every student is the ideal. A pre-assessment followed by differentiated instruction and progress monitoring is a way to move toward that ideal. It will also help teachers and students be on the same page and work together more effectively.

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REFERENCES:

TeachNow February 2018 Cohort 3. Pre-Assessment for Differentiation. Retrieved from http://218cohort3.pbworks.com/w/page/126881315/Pre-Assessment%20for%20Differentiation

TeachNow February 2018 Cohort 3. Pre-Assessment to Groupings. https://www.lucidchart.com/documents/edit/417b3a04-9916-48f2-85c0-dc3ad1db08b4/0?shared=true&

Pendergrass, E. (2013, December). Differentiation: It Starts with Pre-Assessment. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/dec13/vol71/num04/Differentiation@_It_Starts_with_Pre-Assessment.aspx