April 21, 2014
The Human Variable in Teaching
Greg Kahn, GRAIN, for The Chronicle
Daryao Khatri (right), a physics professor at the U. of the District of Columbia, works with Marc’Quinn Davis, who knew little math when he started college.
By Eric Hoover
Washington
D
aryao S. Khatri noticed the young man, the one who walked in late. The
professor did not know if he could solve basic math problems, or if he wanted to
learn. Mr. Khatri knew just one thing: When he first looked at Marc’Quinn Davis, the young man looked away.
It was June 2007. Arriving at the University of the District of Columbia that morning,
neither one was sure what the weeks ahead would bring. They were as different as odd
and even, the physics professor from India and the black teenager from across town.
1
Mr. Khatri had come to the university long before Mr. Davis was born. One breathed
numbers, the other shrugged at them.
They met that day because Mr. Khatri was tackling a problem of his own. For years
students had vanished from his classes. He would start the semester with no empty
desks and end up with eight or 10. Some students seemed lost as soon as they
enrolled; they did not know algebra, geometry, or even how to multiply. So Mr.
Khatri came up with an experiment: a two-month summer program. Could a crash
course, carefully taught, prepare the weakest students for college math?
Enlarge Image
Greg Kahn, GRAIN, for The Chronicle
To keep students engaged, Daryao Khatri, a physics professor at the U. of the District of Columbia, asks questions constantly.
Before the first class, he memorizes students’ names and matches them to faces.
The professor believed it could, because he believed in equations. Solving them was a
matter of identifying all the variables. Some were familiar, like the fact that UDC,
Washington’s only public university, served many low-income students, who often
finished high school with shaky skills and little confidence.
But Mr. Khatri was tired of hearing what his pupils lacked, as if squandered potential
were all their fault. The professor, then 60, had been around for four decades. After all
that time, he had come to question how he taught. The summer program was a chance
to try other approaches. He wanted to know if, in the problem he saw, one of the
variables was him.
Teachers everywhere give lessons and tests, yet their underlying task is more
mysterious: finding a way to reach students. Mr. Khatri knew he must step beyond the
bounds of his job description to guide a student like Marc’Quinn Davis.
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On that June morning, the slim kid with long braids just wanted to sleep. Having
coasted through high school, he had no interest in college. He had come to placate his
mother, Veronica Davis-Addison, who’d heard about the summer program and signed him up. After losing her job at a grocery store the year before, she’d enrolled full time at UDC and hoped her son would do the same. She was the one who encouraged him,
scolded him, pushed him. He depended on her as he couldn’t on his father, who’d spent years in prison, floating into the family’s life only to vanish again.
When Ms. Davis-Addison asked her son to do something, he couldn’t say no. So she drove him to the campus, where students had to take two math placement tests. Mr.
Davis and his mother made a deal: If he passed, he would take the course and apply to
college.
He decided to flunk the tests on purpose. Still, he couldn’t resist picking a few right answers he thought he knew. What he didn’t know was that only the students with the lowest scores would get into the program.
While Mr. Davis took the tests, his mother introduced herself to Mr. Khatri, telling
him how much she wanted her son to succeed. Her presence there encouraged the
professor. Just get your son into college, she remembers Mr. Khatri saying, and I’ll take care of him.
After the tests, Ms. Davis-Addison introduced the two. The short, bespectacled
professor spoke like no one the teenager had ever met: "Don’t worry," he said. "We’ll shape this guy up."
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Greg
Kahn
,
GRA
IN,
for
The
Chro
nicle
Dar
yao
Kha
tri (left) reviews a math lesson with Marc’Quinn Davis.
That irked Mr. Davis. I don’t need shaping, he thought. He had a part-time job, plenty
of friends, a neighborhood court for shooting hoops on hot, hazy afternoons. Four
hours of math five days a week sounded like hell. Then again, there was the money. If
Mr. Davis finished the course, he would get $900—a stipend from the university—
plus $100 for perfect attendance. What he earned in a month. He was saving to buy
himself a car.
Days later, Mr. Davis went to the first class. Despite his scoring in the 20th percentile
on the placement tests, Mr. Khatri intended to help the young man conquer math and
persuade him to enroll at UDC. The professor knew it would not be easy. After taking
an assigned seat in the front row, Mr. Davis put his head down on the desk and closed
his eyes.
N
umbers gave Mr. Khatri an identity. Growing up in Narela, a market town in
Delhi, he solved equations that stumped older students. His father, a landowner with
no schooling, wanted him to take over the family business, managing acres of
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tobacco, wheat, corn, and peppers. He did not understand why his son wanted to go to
a university.
But Mr. Khatri’s Uncle Rupram did. He had a high-school degree and a government
job. On registration day, he insisted on accompanying his nephew to the University of
Delhi. They awoke at 3 a.m., walked a mile to the train station, rode side by side, and
then, because the bus was not running, walked to the campus. When they lined up,
around 6, the sky was still black.
At the university, Mr. Khatri admired the best professors, the sharpness of their
words, the way they looked into students’ eyes. He decided he wanted to teach. After graduating, in 1968, he went to work as a physics instructor at Jamia Millia Islamia, a
Muslim university in Delhi. In a new shirt and slim-cut pants, he strode confidently
through the door.
What he found was mayhem. As soon as he had taken attendance, some students
walked out. When he turned to write on the blackboard, others pelted him with chalk.
Nobody listened to his lectures. After two weeks, he recalls telling his parents, "I’m ready to quit."
But then he devised a plan. If the students could intimidate him, he figured, he could
do the same to them. One day, while covering a lab section, he decided to surprise the
two worst troublemakers from his lecture class, who would not have expected to see
him there. When they showed up, he barred them from entering the lab. They could
return, he told them, only if they brought their parents to his office the following day.
The two students wailed in protest, but he held his ground. Finally they left, and he
taught the day’s lesson, on specific heat, without incident.
The next day, Mr. Khatri told the troublemakers’ parents that their sons were
misbehaving. The students had to stay in their seats, he said, and listen. From then on,
they did just that. Classes were calm and disruptions few. Engage someone with
authority over a student, he concluded, and the student will change.
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Mr. Khatri knew the strength of family bonds. He grew up in a house where the young
knelt to touch the feet of their elders, a sign of respect. His family expected him to
stay in Delhi, with his four sisters, under their roof.
But Mr. Khatri saw men coming back from the United States with Ph.D.’s, getting jobs as professors, driving flashy cars. Intrigued, he applied to a doctoral program
himself.
When an acceptance came from the Catholic University of America, his uncle hid it
for days. You are not going anywhere, his grandmother said. Although relatives
begged him to stay and look after his sisters, they were proud of him. As the summer
of 1970 waned, his uncles threw him an all-day party, with tables of sweets. Friends
and family members packed three buses to follow him to the airport.
At Catholic, in Washington, Mr. Khatri worked day and night with liquid helium,
studying how electrons behaved in metals at low temperatures. His Ph.D. in hand, he
took a job at the University of the District of Columbia, then called Federal City
College, a five-year-old land-grant institution. The chairman of the physics
department told him he had been hired as a researcher, not a teacher.
The words stayed with him. Getting grants, running experiments, publishing articles:
Those were the important tasks. "Anyone can teach," he heard his colleagues say, and
he believed it.
E
very student is a puzzle. In the summer of 2007, Marc’Quinn Davis was a jumble of pieces.
For years he’d skipped classes and shot dice in bathrooms. He was kicked out of
middle school after two quarters of F’s. At Dunbar High School, where more than four in five students aren’t proficient in reading or math, he was friendly with teachers. That’s why he graduated, he thinks. Rarely had he really tried.
6
In the summer course at UDC, he might have looked to anyone like a lost cause in
baggy pants. But there were other pieces to Mr. Davis, other variables. For one, he
was curious. Growing up, he’d asked himself questions he never shared, like "Why does the moon shine?" He often looked up at the big, glowing rock, wondering, What
made it shine?
On weekends, Mr. Davis worked 15-hour shifts at the city’s main fish market. He made enough to buy shoes and to take out girls, but the work was draining. Each day
he would clean the boat, ice down the catch, and lower shrimp and crab legs into a big
steamer, angling his body so he wouldn’t burn himself. Some nights he was too tired to shower off the stench, and some mornings he cried when he thought of the hours
ahead. This, he thought, is where life landed me.
At UDC, on the third floor of Building 44, Mr. Davis looked down at the yellow,
peeling floor and tried to sleep. Mr. Khatri didn’t let him. The professor would pound the desk with a yardstick. Demand his attention. Call on him constantly.
Each day Mr. Davis chewed toothpicks, and Mr. Khatri told him to spit them out. "I
don’t care what you do," Mr. Davis would say. "I’m not going to college."
Still, he would pay attention. To stave off boredom. To please his mother. To keep
Mr. Khatri off his case. As the young man listened, he realized: I actually get this.
Although Mr. Davis didn’t raise his hand, the professor heard him whispering answers to the young woman beside him.
Over time, Mr. Davis felt the tide of his curiosity
pulling him in. He started staying after class.
Over time, Mr. Davis felt the tide of his curiosity pulling him. He wanted to know
more. He started staying after class with Mr. Khatri and Brenda Brown, a math
professor. When he wasn’t around the other students, she noticed, he opened up, asked questions.
7
At the end of the course, he passed the placement tests, along with 12 of the 15 other
students. He scored in the 90th percentile. Mr. Khatri pulled him aside: "I want you to
come to UDC," he said, and to major in physics. Mr. Davis didn’t really know what "physics" meant, but he trusted Mr. Khatri, whom all the students called Dr. K. The
professor had refused to let him fail.
Mr. Davis asked his mother why someone he hardly knew was so nice to him. Once
he’d looked up to a basketball coach, a guy who stayed on him and yelled a lot. The coach had wanted something from him: baskets, victories. Mr. Khatri, the young man
decided, was different. All the professor asked was for him to show up and work hard.
Mr. Davis enrolled at UDC that fall, one of four students from the summer program
planning to major in science. Each one got a paid teaching assistantship and
"academic parents."
Mr. Khatri and Ms. Brown told Ms. Davis-Addison that they wouldn’t try to take her place, but would act as her son’s parents at the university. The professors followed the four students to class, checked their homework, and would not let them leave on
Friday until the work was done.
Students who had struggled, Mr. Khatri and Ms. Brown believed, needed shepherding
that others did not. That meant rules. Every morning and afternoon, Mr. Davis had to
stop by Mr. Khatri’s office, which was stocked with cookies and candy to sweeten the deal.
That first year, Mr. Davis made the honor roll in both semesters. He nailed
intermediate algebra. He tutored older students. When he walked into a class, he felt
like Superman. He heard the note of surprise in people’s voices when he told them he was majoring in physics, as if the very word crowned him with respect.
Mr. Davis got a paid internship that summer at the Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory, near Chicago. Before he left, Mr. Khatri gave him a book, Conceptual
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Physics. When Mr. Davis opened it, the first thing he saw was an explanation of how
the sun’s light reflects off the moon, making it shine.
T
ime carves lessons into a teacher, but only if he lets it.
In the early 1980s, UDC needed someone to teach faculty members how to use
computers. Mr. Khatri was known as a skilled programmer, and Anne O. Hughes,
then the chief development officer, asked if he would do it. "Are you out of your
mind?" he replied. If he failed, he said, his colleagues would know he could not teach.
Eventually Mr. Khatri accepted the challenge. Ms. Hughes, an experienced teacher
with a doctorate in educational psychology, helped him prepare. He had never been
meticulous about lesson planning, and she urged him to plot out each session
carefully, logically. He followed her advice, and in two semesters, dozens of his
colleagues had mastered computers; many credited him with helping them overcome
their fears. Maybe the way you teach matters, he thought. Maybe not everyone could
do it.
Over time, Mr. Khatri talked with Ms. Hughes about his classes. One day he showed
her a problem that consistently baffled his students. She asked him how many steps it
had. He shrugged: "You just do it." So she asked him to. She identified seven or eight
steps and labeled them. For the first time, he saw teaching as a process, with pieces
and parts, an equation to solve.
Mr. Khatri resolved to "reteach" the basics and reimagine his role in the classroom. In
Color-Blind Teaching, a book he and Ms. Hughes wrote, they describe how a teacher,
like an actor on stage, should move around, change his tone of voice, make eye
contact with students. "If you choose to … treat your students as nameless passengers in a waiting room, or present your message in a monotone," they wrote, "then you
really are a spear-carrier in the drama, not a star." Calling on all students the same
number of times was a form of "equal participation."
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To see if such strategies would help students bound for remedial math, Mr. Khatri
dreamed up the summer program, securing funds to offer stipends as an incentive. The
first summer, 2006, 14 students came in with low scores on the placement test, and six
weeks later, more than half passed it. Three went on to major in physics at UDC.
In the next summer session, the professors set rules for classroom behavior, taught
students how to take notes. They identified common, vexing holes in students’ knowledge, like cross-multiplication and the addition of negative numbers, which Mr.
Khatri dubbed "the two devils." They designed lessons and handouts to vanquish
those devils.
Mr. Khatri carried successful experiments from the summer program back to his
regular classes. He checked students’ homework, anchored concepts to real-life
examples. Who had used a tire gauge? A washing machine?
To keep students engaged, he asked questions constantly. For years he had called on
some students and not others, going entire semesters not knowing who was who. Now
he memorized students’ names before the first class, then matched them to faces.
He spent more time reviewing material. Eventually he ditched textbooks—too heavy
on reading—and replaced them with notebooks of homemade handouts. What
students needed was more practice, he decided, enough to deliver lessons from their
heads to their fingertips.
Convinced of the power of repetition, Mr. Khatri required students to write out the
solution to each homework problem three times. That creates recall, he says, the
mastery that instills confidence. In evaluations, students have sworn to the
effectiveness of the "3X" ritual.
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Greg
Kahn
,
GRA
IN,
for
The
Chro
nicle
Mr.
Kha
tri
(right) has become a mentor to some students, including Marc’Quinn Davis (left), who has kept in touch since his graduation.
By the end of the second summer session—Mr. Davis’s—Mr. Khatri had decided
something else: Some students needed more than a teacher. They needed a daily
mentor circling over them, checking their work, sometimes buying them dinner. What
he and Ms. Brown would come to call academic parenting.
Mr. Khatri, who had raised two boys with his wife, Monika, drew on his experience as
a father. "You have to constantly guide them, hold their hands," he says. "You don’t let them go astray. If you do, they might not succeed."
W
hen Mr. Davis got back from his summer internship, he wanted to have fun.
Eighteen years old and more confident than ever, he let himself relax a little. He cut
classes, hung out with friends, wooed women. "My head was gone," he recalls. He got
two F’s one semester, all F’s the next. The university put him on academic probation.
Seeing his glittering transcript trashed scared him. He told his mother he wasn’t sure he’d stay in school;; she worried about him tumbling into the streets. As a kid, Mr. 11
Davis had idolized his cousin Tony, who was always nice to him. Tony dealt drugs,
drove fast cars, vacationed in Cancun.
Then Tony was shot to death by a friend. For a long time, Mr. Davis couldn’t shake the feeling that he, too, would end up dealing. For years he had bought the clothes and
shoes he saw dealers wear. They were the ones with nice stuff.
After Mr. Davis’s freshman year, Mr. Khatri had pulled back, checking in on him less frequently, hoping he would be OK. Still, the professor had not left him alone. Once
Mr. Davis was sitting outside when Mr. Khatri called his cellphone. "Hey, I’m in class, I can’t talk," the student whispered. Mr. Khatri laughed. "Marc, you’re sitting on the damn bench," he said. Mr. Davis looked up to see his professor standing at a
window.
Sometimes Mr. Davis would hide from Mr. Khatri. The young man wanted room to
goof off. But he didn’t like the feeling of his Superman cape’s unraveling. He wanted to make his mother proud. To impress his academic parents, too.
In his third year, Mr. Davis knew he’d lose his financial aid if he didn’t bring up his
grades. So he grudgingly agreed to Mr. Khatri’s rules, like turning his cellphone over each morning, although sometimes he lied, claiming he’d left it at home. Only after displaying his completed homework each afternoon did he get the phone back.
Some days Mr. Davis felt trapped. He argued with Mr. Khatri, occasionally storming
out of the professor’s office, threatening to drop out. Mr. Khatri would give him a day or two to cool off, then call. "You want to do some work now, guy?" he would ask.
"You want to come back now?"
Other times, when he thought Mr. Davis was slacking off, Mr. Khatri lost his
patience. He would tell the student to get out of his sight.
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Ms. Brown, the math professor, had also grown close to Mr. Davis, who told her he
felt as if he was drifting away from his old friends. Most of them hadn’t gone to college, or had dropped out.
When they finished working out a problem on
the board, Mr. Khatri erased it. "Do it over," he
told Mr. Davis.
Ms. Brown saw the bond between Mr. Khatri and Mr. Davis. Once she sat in the back
of a classroom watching the professor help his student work through a problem on the
board. When they finished, Mr. Khatri immediately erased the solution. "Do it over,"
he told Mr. Davis, taking a step back.
Now and then, wanting Mr. Davis to learn responsibility, Ms. Brown would tell her
colleague not to baby him so much. "There’s a fine line," she says, "between an academic parent and an actual parent."
Mr. Davis’s mother also saw how close he and Mr. Khatri had become. She once
called and asked the professor to deliver some bad news. Mr. Davis’s father, who’d just been arrested, was back in jail. The professor took Mr. Davis aside. Hearing the
news, he said he didn’t care. But Mr. Khatri could tell that was not true.
For the first time, the professor shared a personal story: In the first year of his Ph.D.
program, his uncle wrote to say that Mr. Khatri’s father had died. Mr. Khatri, overcome, felt he must go see his family at once.
But final exams were fast approaching. If he failed, he would risk the future for which
he had come across the world. So he stayed.
As Mr. Davis listened, he saw Mr. Khatri’s eyes get heavy. The story stuck with him, as did the moment the professor chose to tell it. "He saw this as a time where I could
sink or float," Mr. Davis says. "Where I could just say, ‘Oh, to hell with school.’"
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A
s his third year went on, Mr. Davis vowed to commit himself to his studies.
Probably, he thought, the rules he’d railed against were just what he needed. He starting handing over his phone gladly, a temptation out of sight. When he wasn’t in class, he was in Mr. Khatri’s office, a book open.
Already close with his three classmates from the summer program, he spent more and
more time with them. Many evenings they’d study together in Building 44, walk to
McDonald’s for dinner, then come back to study more, until security guards kicked them out. Mr. Khatri managed to get them keys so they could stay as late as they
wanted.
Although Mr. Davis struggled in chemistry and quantum physics, he brought his
grades up and kept them there. He wanted to prove himself to Mr. Khatri. When he
got C’s on tests, he’d show the professor where he’d gone wrong.
Mr. Khatri and Ms. Brown realized that they had to stay on him. They resumed
following him to class, checking his assignments. But as the semesters went on, Mr.
Davis’s independence grew along with his confidence. He sought out other instructors, took harder courses. The more credits he earned, the less he could picture
himself making a living on the street. He fell hard for physics, how it explained
everything, even why your pupils expanded when the lights went out.
After six years at UDC, Mr. Davis graduated last spring with a bachelor’s degree in physics. His mother cried. Mr. Khatri mailed him a card with a check for $500. In the
fall he enrolled in a master’s program in math education, planning to go on to a Ph.D. in physics. In his daydreams he held a prestigious job, earned big bucks.
The professor had long encouraged Mr. Davis to consider another path, which he
resisted right up until Ms. Brown called with an unexpected lead: Wilson High
School, down the street from UDC, needed a math teacher. A week later, he got the
job.
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Greg
Kahn
,
GRA
IN,
for
The
Chro
nicle
Mar
c’Q
uinn
Davis, who never expected to go to college, prepares for a day at work.
On his first day, Mr. Davis, who used to wear T-shirts stamped with skulls to class,
put on a tie. He drove across town in the gold Pontiac Grand Prix he’d bought himself. When he arrived at Wilson, his heart shook. He stopped to breathe deeply before
entering the classroom.
Now Mr. Davis, 24, teaches algebra and geometry to ninth and 10th graders, many of
whom remind him of himself. Some don’t know much, some cause trouble. On bad days they want to talk about anything but math, so he listens. Mr. Davis has developed
his own style, more laid back than Mr. Khatri, less a stern father than a big brother.
Still, some of the professor’s tricks have come in handy. When one kid kept causing trouble, Mr. Davis thought about telling the dean, who might have suspended him.
"The easy way," Mr. Davis says.
Instead, he called the student’s father early one morning to request a meeting. Since then, the young man has been more attentive, sometimes staying after school for extra
help. Mr. Davis has praised him in front of other teachers, hoping he might start to see
himself as a serious student. "You have to give them an example of what you want
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them to do," he says. "Once you set an example of what you want somebody to be
like, they’ll slowly start to mimic it."
On a Monday in April, Mr. Davis stayed at the school until after 6 p.m., helping a
group of students with their homework. He didn’t have class at UDC that night, but he drove to the campus anyway, to visit Mr. Khatri, as he does almost every day. In
recent years, few students have dropped the professor’s classes: Last fall, 47 students enrolled in College Physics I and II courses, and all 47 completed them. Mr. Khatri
attributes this to changes he made as a teacher. Sometimes students from nearby
colleges travel across town to take physics with him.
Mr. Davis told Mr. Khatri that he’d find him some physics majors, but that is no longer possible. Late last year, UDC cut physics and 16 other degree programs, citing
low enrollment and a lack of resources. Mr. Khatri will continue to teach physics
there; most of the students who take his courses major in other subjects. Typically the
university has awarded just one bachelor’s degree in physics each year, with Mr.
Davis among the last to earn one.
Just after 6:30, Building 44 was quiet. Mr. Davis walked down an empty hallway to
an office adjoining Room 321, where Mr. Khatri’s students were finishing an exam.
"Hey, Marc," the professor said.
Mr. Davis, who had stopped calling him Dr. K years ago, greeted him the way he
always did. "What’s up, Dad?" he said, clasping his shoulder. For a while the two men sat close and talked, one teacher to another.
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