Pausing for Station Identification?

This is Day 19 of a 30-day challenge, and I'm not giving up this easily.

Tonight may be the first night that I get to bed at a decent time, so I'm not spending a lot of time on this entry. And when I went to Twitter, trolling for ideas for a quickie topic, I discovered that the #WeirdEd chat tonight was going to be about Pixar! Seriously! Can I miss that? How long can I participate?

And can I tie it into math, other than counting the sequels: 1, 2, 3 . . .

There's plenty of education opportunities there, but finding the numbers isn't quite as easy. Unless I count back the years to the time when I had many of those toys from Toy Story, but, uh, no.

First education question was this: "In NEMO Marlin has to learn to let go and trust Nemo. How do you learn to trust your students to do right on their own?"

How do I? Other than to put the work in front of them and stop hovering. Oddly, they need to trust themselves more, take that first step and discover that they don't need to call me over so much. I try to get them to work in groups and rely on each other. They can relate to each other better than I can sometimes. This is true even if their initial conversations are as far apart as Buzz and Woody's were. (see what I did there?)

Okay, that's all I have until tomorrow. I could talk more about the stock market, and how the lessons went.

Or about the AP visiting my Common Core Algebra class for about 10-15 minutes today, and my students informing me that she took "like six pages of notes!". Or the fact that when they asked why she was there, they seemed to believe me when I said, "You have an important test coming up next month, and she wants to know that you're ready."

The best part about today was that they were thrown off just enough by the A.P.'s presence that they settled down a little, just a little unnerved. I was, too, but I ran with it, and asked 99 questions, at least, and just kept asking. Using names and getting volunteers, and holding my clipboard. In hindsight, I wish I'd checked off random boxes on my clipboard just for the show.

Okay, I think I have enough for today. If this page looks like this tomorrow, that will be cheating.

Good night.