Today my wife and I got in a carpool full of teachers and headed down to the ferry to storm the castle in Victoria. With some inspiring fight songs on the road we made it to a ferry that I think had about five teachers for every random commuter.

Every corner you turned there was someone either carrying or making a sign.

We even had a visit from the living dead.

Bill 22 is our provincial government’s proposed solution to stalled contract bargaining. It “fixes” this by setting a government-chosen (ie. non-independent) mediator in place who has to “mediate” negotiations within the limits set in place by the government, pass along some recommendation which the government will then legislate in place.  The mandate includes suggestions from the employer such as removing our control over our professional development time, putting easily-abused criteria like “suitability to the school” on the same level as experience and seniority, and more. It also specifically removes changes that were added ten-ish years ago that were recently deemed illegal by the BC Supreme Court – only to then re-add the same language almost exactly later on in the same bill.

“We removed the parts you said are illegal! Problem solved!’

“But then you added the EXACT SAME THING back in.”

“Oh, that’s a new law – you’ll have to take that to court all over again!”

Classy! And did I mention that this was the bit that defined limits on class size and composition – limits that kept classrooms manageable and helped keep kids from falling between the cracks? Right.

So anyway, we met and marched down Government Street:

The undead shambled past us at some point, making for a great photo op as we carried the ADTA banner.

Here’s me looking a bit cheesy.

And we arrived at the Legislature lawn. (Sorry, Comrade Groundskeeper, although I noticed you showed your support by keeping grass long enough that it didn’t turn into a total mud puddle!)

Other unions showed up with banners flying in support. We found out later about picket lines being set up on non-school locations to bring other union workers to the rally – nice. (There was some fuss about whether this was violating the terms set by the LRB, but I don’t even know if it was teachers doing the picketing or other unions.)

Here’s our crew standing tall with our fancy ADTA banner:

I was impressed to see students make an official appearance in support as well.

The entire Flickr stream is available with some more pictures. It was a beautiful day, and the atmosphere at the rally was generally really positive. The only highlight that wasn’t mentioned by the news coverage was a special-ed teacher who shared how the government’s actions have impacted her, and teachers in similar positions, for the last ten years. Watching support positions disappear, watching more and more special-needs students packed into classrooms with little or no support, and teachers left to magically “differentiate” their instruction for everyone in an environment where they can’t even find face-time with each kid every day, never mind understand all their needs and adapt the curriculum for them all.

Anyway, I can’t do her speech justice; I think the BCTF got the entire rally recorded, and her bit (near the beginning of the rally) is worth hunting down.  I’ll try to update again later with more links to things.

I hope the message gets out there that this is NOT just about the 15% pay increase. (A number which sounds large until you look at just how long our cost-of-living adjustments have been left in the cold; this is just catching up for short-sighted “savings” in the past decade.)  Teachers were out there for bigger reasons than money.  We want to be able to bargain our contract fairly, with actual bargaining and not just an employer stalling for time until they can have everything they want legislated into our contract.  We want to have previous illegal actions undone, not just shuffled under the carpet and left there.  And most of all, we want to be able to do our jobs well with the support the kids deserve.

This past Saturday I attended the BCAMT New Teacher Conference for 2012. I’m not as new as I used to be, but I’d heard good things about past conferences and felt like I could use a boost of inspiration and ideas after last semester.

Keynote

The open ing keynote was by Ray Appel, a consultant and Faculty Advisor in SFU’s education program. His focus seemed to be elementary and middle school teaching, but his message about students’ sense-making ability in math class applies across the board. The opening example:

Kyla is inviting 8 people to her birthday party. The party takes place in 4 days.

How old will Kyla be on her birthday?

What would your students do if you gave them this question? Apparently in the average grade 3 class, over 40% of kids will grab the numbers and try to solve this somehow. (What’s even more depressing is how unsurprised I was to hear that.)

The top suggestion I picked out of the keynote was a simple one: give students “word problem” style questions that don’t make sense and ask them to explain why. His worksheet example used a t-chart with two questions on the left, space to fill in why it’s crazy on the right, and he specifically said he found this necessary. Putting the question into a box makes it visually distinctive from the usual format of a word problem, highlighting that you *aren’t* just supposed to read it and “solve”, I guess. But presumably you could make this a discussion question as well.

An example of a linear rate nonsense question that was closer to secondary curriculum:

Ray eats two hot dogs in ten minutes. How many hot dogs will he eat in an hour?

(Apparently he doesn’t really like hot dogs, and wouldn’t eat any more after that.)

One of his student teachers took over the last third of the keynote, which was impressive (both that a student teacher was brave enough to do so, and that he gave that opportunity). The big Stealable Idea was a structured approach to having students teach each other by integrating it into a “Homework Wheel”. Every day kids spin a wheel to see which additional homework questions are assigned (above and beyond a core set of q’s), with a 1/3ish chance of getting a blue/red mix option. At the start of class students have already dragged their name on the smartboard into either a red or blue group; if the blue/red thing comes up, then one group makes up some number (five?) of new questions on that day’s topic and then works with the other group on solving them. The question-writers play the part of the expert, assisting where the students are having trouble. I’ve been too clumsy or unstructured when I’ve tried to have students teach each other, and this looked like one good solution to that problem.

AM Workshop

Fred Harwood put on an excellent session in the morning, demonstrating his Top 10 List of things that have improved his teaching. And he authentically demonstrated them, rather than just talking about them – step one was moving desks around into small groups, giving us a discussion question around what education means and giving us space to talk to each other. I dunno, call me crazy but the moment we started moving desks out of rows I knew I’d found the right workshop.

Highlights of his list:

Discovery learning. His example of a rich space for this was giving expansions of fractions like 1/7, 1/49, and a few other 1-over-denominator examples. He set them in front of us and simply asked us to look for patterns and generate questions.  Each expansion had at least 3-4 lines of digits printed, and his last example (1/999081 or something) was a full page long – like staring at a sea of digits.

But these digits were PACKED with patterns I had never noticed before. Take this one here:

1/49 = 0.020408163265306122448979591836734693877551020…

Just start reading across … 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 65…okay, powers of two until it breaks at 65 so I guess it’s a coincidence, right? But what would the next number have been? 128? What if the 1 carried over onto the 64?

MIND BLOWN

I’ll be honest, I’m still not feeling awake enough to have followed all of the ideas that came out of this. But I’m hooked enough that I want to come back to it.

Which led to the next highlight concept: named student discoveries. As in, he has had students discover patterns that he hadn’t known before, and which he couldn’t find any reference of anywhere. When this happens, he names that discovery after the student.

One of his first examples came out of Pascal’s Triangle. A student discovered a really quick way to generate powers of 11 out of Pascal’s Triangle. It’s similar to the above pattern in that it looks like it breaks after a few early steps, until you start carrying digits and realize it just keeps going all the way down. I won’t spoil it beyond that – go take a look and spot it yourself. A student by the last name of Wong discovered it, so Fred named this technique “The Wong Way”.

His website has a list of other student discoveries (possibly not up to date, but still lots of great stuff). Fred gave one small anecdote of a student who was struggling with math coming into grade 9, but after having a discovery named after him he turned around and within a few years was in an honors math class.

The other key highlight was group problem-solving, and we practiced this rather than talking about it. I think we got sucked in for a good 20 min at least, but to be honest I was so absorbed in this annoyingly hard problem (the first one on the page) that I don’t know for sure. All I know is a bunch of us kept working on it over lunch, and swapped emails after in case one of us figures it out later. (I think I’m close but not there yet – no spoilers please.)

Oh, also great tip: Fred was very deliberate in our session about referring to us by name as soon as he could – in this case we had conference nametags to go by – and it really made the room feel more inclusive. His classes don’t have nametags, so his approach to opening day seating plans is a preprinted sign for each four-person group, and groups are deliberately of mixed gender, mixed race – narrowing the problem for the teacher of knowing which name on the sign goes with which face at the table.  (Race guessed at by last name, which obviously doesn’t always work, but it works often enough to be helpful.)

One thing that he practiced but didn’t mention was that he had some relaxed instrumental music playing at a background-sound volume throughout the first half of the session; it set a nice tone to the room without being obvious or cheesy. Something I’ve tried but usually made it a little too obvious; it worked really well here, so I’ll keep it in mind next time I’m starting a course.

PM Workshop

I attended Marc Garneau’s “Secondary Math Concepts Across The Grades” workshop for the afternoon. He opened up with a slightly modified version of Dan Meyer shooting a basketball (and gave credit), and then transitioned into a few more examples of rich activities that can be used at different levels across the grades.

Activity #1 was taking a piece of twine, measuring it, and then tying knots and measuring it to fill in a table connecting rope length to number of knots. Collected data, plotted it, and then we looked at a set of questions with some explanation as to how the questions asked afterwards can scale this to anywhere from grade 4 to grade 9 linear relations.

(My partner and I ended up rabbit-trailing into adding excessive amounts of knots to find out if it would go non-linear, and creating uber-knots on top of each other to see if that breaks linearity.)

Second one we worked on was a set of three diagrams made of colored tiles with a growth pattern. Fill in the table, recognize a growth pattern, predict what the next two will look like, generalize. I’ve done one like this before where students create their own growth patterns (with tile “creatures”).  One thing this activity had which the tile-creature one doesn’t is that you can highlight how many ways there are to interpret visual patterns; we had about half a dozen different ways of connecting the visual pattern to a generalized algebra expression.

There were a few more activities we didn’t have time to dive into for long; the afternoon felt to me like a natural continuation of the morning, working on math in a setting where discussion and question-generation was a norm.

Overall

Coming off of a long, overwhelming semester back into a semester of on-call teaching, it was good to see examples of how things can, and do, get better. When you’re new at teaching plus trying “new” things that aren’t the norm, the usual newbie flaws and mistakes end up being pinned by others onto your “new” techniques. It’s relieving to see experienced, skilled teachers who have taken the ideas I want to explore – collaborative group work, discovery / inquiry work, and other techniques to emphasize real comprehension – and see that yes, they can work, and can work really really well.

Like most things worth learning, it’s just going to take a lot of practice.

Yesterday’s post by Dan Meyer hit all the right buttons for a comment frenzy.

Even worse, at this moment in history, computers are not a natural working medium for mathematics.

For instance: think of a fraction in your head.

Say it out loud. That’s simple.

Write it on paper. Still simple.

Now communicate that fraction so a computer can understand and grade it. Click open the tools palette. Click the fraction button. Click in the numerator. Press the “4″ key. Click in the denominator. Press the “9″ key.

I’m sympathetic to anything that brings media studies analysis onto our teaching techniques, but the mixed targets and strawmen examples confuse me.  The first example sounds like a struggle with typesetting mathematics in Word (or some other word processor).  Yet for software that actually understands fractions, I can get away with typing “4/9” and I am done.  Simple, and at least as quick as pen and paper.

The key there is which software we’re talking about.  Some software is horrible at communicating mathematics. This can even vary wildly between versions; Word 2007 is significantly more useless than Word 2010 when it comes to typing in math equations.*  On the other hand, something from Wolfram is going to get math because it was built with math as its focus.  If you give Wolfram Alpha “4/9”, it will not only make it look right, but it understands it as an irreducible number and will inform you that 1.333333333 is only an approximation.

So maybe we can’t treat all software as equal when thinking about it as a medium?

On the other hand, there are things which even W/A will only understand if typed in a cryptic format, or with excessive parentheses to keep things unambiguous.  I don’t know if that’s really getting to the heart of what Dan’s complaint is about, though.

Do you want to know where this post became useless to Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and big thinkers? Right where I said, “Computers are not a natural working medium for mathematics.” They understand computers and they understand how to turn computers into money so they are understandably interested in problems whose solutions require computers.

Okay, so full disclosure, I have a Computer Engineering degree and I like doing recreational programming from time to time.  However I’ve also tried to teach kids with little-to-no computing background how to do math on Geogebra, and watched them flounder, and I get that there’s truth in here.

The thing that confuses me is that mathematics is the medium by which computers operate.  This doesn’t mean that the reverse is true, but it does mean that it’s weird to me to think that computers are a bad tool for doing math when that’s the very domain in which they live and breathe.  (Or one branch of mathematics, at least.)

So we’re closer to but not quite at Dan’s real point which is that computers are lousy at assessing mathematical ability.  His strongest examples, the ones which are carrying his message, are not really about computers as a communication medium but about computers as an assessment machine.  This is where it starts to actually make sense to me.  I don’t see any reason why a computer would be a poor medium to use to communicate mathematical reasoning to an actual human teacher – kids can type their math essays as well as they type their English ones.  Where this falls apart is when we use computers as more than a medium, but rather as an analysis tool to do the assessing for us.

Assessment defines what students are told is valuable about a subject.  If all you assess is computation, students will get the message that computation is all that matters in mathematics.  And computers are only good at assessing what they’re already good at doing – computation.

If we tell students that math ability is only about doing what computers can already do better, we’re clearly not going to convince them of the importance of math.

So, I don’t think this discussion has ruled out computers as a medium to communicate mathematics.  But it definitely highlights that in education, just as in applied mathematics and engineering, we can’t expect a computer to do the thinking for us.

* Word 2010, in fact, does let me type “4/9” and typeset it properly – if I’ve made an Equation object, which is an extra click.

In six days I will begin teaching an entire year’s worth of math crammed into four weeks.  I am oscillating wildly between looking forward to the challenge and wondering how in the world to do this such that the kids actually learn this stuff for reals.  This is compounded by the fact that most if not all of these kids will be there specifically because they tried this Math 9 thing once and weren’t successful at it.

Yesterday I wrote up a draft of my SBG concepts for the course. Today I will go hunting for textbooks and course notes from other teachers I know in the area.  I don’t know if I’ll want to use someone else’s notes – I don’t even know if I like premade notes right now. But if I want the option available I’d better find them now.

Before the end of the week I want to have a final exam for the course so I know where I’m headed.  I’ll be doing a common final with the other teacher covering the course at summer school, and I want us to have the same target in mind right from the start.

I want that first day to be something special that sets these kids into an expectation of showing up ready to think and share ideas.  I am formulating a plan; I’ll let you all know if it works when I get there.

In the meantime, if anyone has a favorite WCYDWT or other great opener on any of the following topics, please share the wealth!

• linear functions (solving, graphing, defining them from a situation)
• polynomials (ie. what the heck are they)
• order of operations
• powers and exponent “laws”
• square roots (defn’ of, and estimating roots of non-perfect squares)

I may post my whole concept list once it’s in its mostly-final form, but these are the big ones that could use something to break through the “OH geez those are EQUATIONS WHAT DO I DO” panic thinking that my students will probably have a well-established pattern of falling into.

Professional development days for teachers tend to be very lecture-oriented, which is ironic since this seems to be the norm even when the people lecturing are promoting more progressive teaching methods and letting students construct their own understanding of new ideas. [1]

What if we had WCYDWT pro-d days?  What would that look like?  I’d suggest starting with this image from Frank Noschese‘s latest blog post:

I’d bet this could generate an interesting discussion on assessment without any lead-in or context whatsoever.

1. This was totally not the case in my teacher training at SFU – which tended to drive people nuts who were wanting to get an information dump and get on with teaching.

I got an email today from WordPress.com, giving me a summary of how my blog has done over the past year.  I thought I’d share it for a few reasons:

• I like stats, and it’s funny / interesting seeing how publishing summary stats lends authority to the “You’re doing a great job!” tone of the message.
• I’ve been seeing much of this data along the way, and it highlights why this blogging thing has been so strange for me.  I’ve tried to keep a tight focus on what I blog about, so as to have a chance of building up a regular readership, but as you can see below my focus has wandered as my life and career path have shifted.
• I still can’t get away from that one day that I scratched a mental itch about Portal’s weird feminism.  And the search terms thing just makes it look like all my visits are accidents.
• Seriously, “fresher than ever”?  At less than two blog posts a month?

Anyway, here’s the auto-generated stuff.

Continue reading →

So, I am going to jump topics from either of my usuals. Bear with me!

Data visualization is a fantastic, growing field of artistic work where artists grab large data sets and generate meaningful, compelling visuals from them.

However, when I first started reading about “data art” a few years ago, there was (I think) one source that mentioned, what about using the database itself as the artistic medium?  What about art that *is* data?

Something in there combined with the politics of the time gave me an idea that I never felt compelled to finish, but which I’m going to share here because I’m concerned that no one else is doing something like this and maybe they could be.

The specific plan was to take the non-combatant casualty data set from IraqBodyCount, and generate a set of (semi)fictional data based on it.  The data set would have one entry for every non-combatant death, with

• a statistically generated American name
• a location of death, also statistically plausible (ie. generated based on population density across the country)
• the nature of the death (from the IraqBodyCount data)
• the original location of the death (in Iraq)
• whatever other data is in the IraqBodyCount entry (date, and I forget what else is there)

The goal was to take a step to break past the disconnect we have for the deaths of those who are “different”, who live far away with names we aren’t familiar with in places we don’t know the geography of.  To be able to look at the absolutely massive death toll from the war and start to comprehend what it would look like if this many people died right here.  It also served to give a name to the otherwise nameless tally in the IBC data set.

After the data set would’ve been generated, it could have been made available for Google Earth mashups, custom visualizations, or even physical memorials left in the documented locations where these people “died”.

Why am I sharing this?

• I’d love to hear of other existing projects already doing this kind of semi-fictional data generation
• If someone was really hooked by this and wanted to make it happen, I might be interested in partnering on it
• It concerns me that I may have an idea here that *hasn’t* been done, that is, the general idea of making a greater artistic statement by fictionalizing or otherwise transforming the raw data into something that more strongly makes it’s point (without, you know, lying to people)
• 140 chars wasn’t enough.

I’ve gone on record before saying that ideas aren’t worth a lot next to an actual implementation.  I suppose I do think that if someone went ahead and did this, it’d be great if they mentioned that I inspired them.  But since I don’t see myself making this happen, I’d rather the ideas at least cross-pollinate out there and nobody really owes me anything.

Why am I not making this happen?

• I felt uneasy about mapping the deaths onto America when I am not American. I considered mapping them onto Canada instead, since that’s where I am, but it seemed to lose some of the power of identifying the victims with the aggressors.
• The war front where Canada is more strongly involved, Afghanistan, doesn’t have a project like IraqBodyCount generating a source data set – or at least not that I’ve found. And when I looked into this recently I found out that the war in Afghanistan has produced far, far less civilian / non-combatant casualties than the war in Iraq.
• Generating statistically-plausible American names didn’t look too hard, based on census data, but generating plausible locations for the deaths looked tricky.  Accessing some kind of heat map of population density and using that to generate latitude/longitude per person could’ve worked, I think, but (due to the other reasons above) I stalled out on the first small roadblock.

A couple months ago, I had a teacher I’ve worked with in the past email me to see if I could cover his class for a week in October.  I’m working part-time right now, but made arrangements so that I could take his class for the whole week.  (Good hours, good pay, good classroom to be working in, a nice mix of Honors Math and Essentials Math kids to work with.)

So a few weeks ago, I was in the swing of things, trying to learn names as I would actually be there long enough to make it worthwhile.  A bunch of kids in his Math 9 class remembered me from subbing at the middle school next door, which was pretty cool.  It was generally great.

At about 3:30am on the Wednesday of that week, I got a phone call telling me that my sister had very unexpectedly died.

Imagine an emotional rollercoaster, since I won’t actually go into that in depth right now.  But, you know, just pretend.  I got an hour more sleep before heading to work that morning.

Well … it sucked.  I thought about telling them that my sister had died, but chickened out and just told them “I got some incredibly bad news this morning” or just said I was having a really bad day; nothing that really did justice to what was happening.  I was tired and grouchy, a handful of the grade 9’s were acting useless and infuriating, and 1/3 of the 11 Essentials class was composed of kids who just would not stop talking, ever.  Probably the worst day I’ve had teaching since the day last year when some kid hurled a rubber stopper at my head.

I went home and faced trying to travel to be with my family in time to help plan a funeral.

At this point, somewhere in my rational brain I knew I really didn’t owe anybody anything.  I had one day left in the week (Friday was a pro-d day), and friends telling me that to get away from work so I could deal with … everything else.  I looked at travel plans, considering flights that would leave early Thursday vs flights leaving shortly after work.  My wife had already figured that she could get all of next week planned for her class to have a sub, but that she’d need to finish the week off.  I wasn’t sure if I’d get a paid day off as an on-call teacher, and getting all 4 days in a row bumps up my pay scale for that whole week.

But really, I was feeling stubborn.  I had looked forward to this week – I wanted it. And I had already heard the story of a student teacher coming to work with these kids who gave up after one day of teaching the grade 9’s. One freaking day. I did not want to become the next chapter in that story for these kids. I did not want them to see me as someone else who gave up on them after having a crappy day, after being frustrated dealing with their behavior. (This is as much or more about wanting to be accepted by the kids as it is some kind of noble pursuit of improving their self-worth. Still trying to sift through how much of that is healthy and how much isn’t, but there it is.)

So I decided I would finish out the week.  One more day.

This time, I knew I had to tell them the truth.  It wouldn’t be easy, it would be incredibly awkward, but I had to.  At the start of class I would explain that my “bad day” comment yesterday wasn’t really fair to them or me, that I had found out yesterday that my sister died and I was WAY beyond “bad day” and that if they had to deal with me being zoned out or short-fused or whatever that they should know what was up.  That if I wanted them to treat me like a human being, I should probably let them know that I am one.

Thankfully the first two blocks were the classes that were easier to deal with and hadn’t frustrated me the day before.  They were my warm-up, and I told them as much – that they had been great the day before and that honestly I was telling them this so that I’d be able to tell the afternoon classes.

I told the afternoon classes too.  The annoying 9’s were less annoying, and the fantastic 9’s were even more fantastic.  The 11 Essentials class blew my mind.  The worst offenders the day before were the last ones to finish up their work, and they were not only repentant but stuck around and chatted for a minute. They treated me like a human being; they cared.  A few of the others in the class made me a quick makeshift card with one of those stick-figure portraits that are becoming one of my favorite parts of being a teacher.  (Mr. Giesbrecht, smiling and pointing at a board with the words “COMPOUND INTEREST”.)

(By the way, ever felt the room shift when someone says something?  Well, you couldn’t have missed it when I said the words “…my sister died.”  One girl in the last block actually did a minor spit-take, which despite everything made me laugh every time I remembered it for the rest of the class.)

When the bell went, I packed up and got out of there fast so I could catch a flight in two and a half hours.  I was *so glad* I had gone to work that day.  Those kids had made that day worthwhile – they completely healed up what had happened the day before and then some.  I trusted them with something real and they proved they were worth trusting.

Riley Lark says, “You can implement SBG (standards-based grading) without any fundamental changes.”

…Just group grades by knowledge. Don’t say, “you have 95% in projects, 80% on tests, and 85% in homework.” Instead, report that “you’ve earned 95% in graphing lines, 80% in graphing general functions, 85% in composing functions.” It doesn’t have to be philosophical – this is just more information for your students.

I want to agree, in that I think SBG comes with a lot of extra tools and philosophy attached to the bandwagon that don’t absolutely need to be bundled in for this to be a useful approach.

I wonder, though, if SBG has much of a point if the improved reporting doesn’t create an opportunity for improvement.  If the grade is already set in stone, does any student really want to hear exactly what they got wrong and how?  Wouldn’t that just feel like rubbing salt in the wound?

Another question is whether SBG really means anything without a slight philosophical shift.  Reporting back more information to students is great, but many teachers already do that in the form of reporting every individual quiz and test score.  Quizzes are already grouped by similar material – does that make it SBG?

My thought is that at its core, SBG needs to be about attempting to report what a student understands and what they don’t understand, as opposed to reporting back specific assessments.  This is what Riley was getting at in his example, but it’s worth emphasizing that this isn’t just more information, it’s different information.  At its core this is something of a philosophical change.

The specific implementation can be as revolutionary or as subtle as you want.  Even if you don’t implement a particular system of reassessments, this core SBG philosophy empowers you to choose how to assess and reassess a student’s actual understanding any way you wish, at any point during the year.

Virtual Conference on Soft Skills

I was lucky enough to have some fantastic teachers to work with during my student teaching practicum.  One in particular had a great rule that he introduced all of his classes to at the start of the year, by showing this particular clip:

This pretty much summed up how students should behave in his class, and students got the idea.

What really impressed me, however, was not just the memorable way to deliver the message.  This teacher modeled this message throughout the year, and not just in the classroom.  Even in chatting with other teachers about school politics, or war stories of bizarre people who used to work there before scandals sent them off to another career, his contribution to the conversation was always positive (or as positive as was reasonably possible).

I learned some other good tips from him, things like trying to always deal with misbehaving students outside the classroom door (where the student can be an individual and not a ringleader, and you can be a person instead of crowd control).  But I think the biggest lesson I saw was the unspoken one, of living out and modeling who you want your students to be, even when they aren’t around to see it.  Or, take it in the reverse – don’t demand that your students be someone better than you.  (I don’t know, I’m trying to find a way to word this without falling back on quoting Ghandi.)