Just What the Teacher Inscribed!

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(C)Copyright 2017, C. Burke.

I would've put 'Mom and Dad', but I had space limitations. Space: the final frontier.

Plus, from real life, there's a good choice that it's a single parent carrying on the good traditions while the other is poisoning their minds with 'weird stuff'.




Come back often for more funny math and geeky comics.

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.

Day 12: I'm the Sugarless Gum of Math Teachers

I'm the sugarless gum of math teachers. Four out of five classes have high scholarship. This is a new experience for me. I've had good marking periods before, but never this good. Did I suddenly become a highly-effective facilitator of learning? Or did I just happen to take over a bunch of classes at a school where more kids seemed determined to go to college (or at least get that last math credit)?

Smart money (and empirical data) would bank on the latter.

Granted, I was a little surprised when I calculated the grades. I know that there were some poor showings here and there throughout the marking period (roughly six weeks and some vacation times squeezed in), but most of the people having difficulties only had it in one spot or the other. It wasn't continuous. And the homework and assignments were being handed in (even if there wasn't enough "originality" to that pile on the corner of the desk). It seemed worse that it was mostly because of the noise level in the classroom. Now, I've had APs who like noisy classrooms. If they aren't noisy, then discussions aren't going on. No discussions means learning isn't taking place. However, the inverse of that is most certainly Not logically equivalent. By this I mean that Discussions DO NOT mean learning IS taking place.

Sometimes it's just noise. However, that is on me. That's a classroom management issue, and I have to adjust my approach any way I can. The main way to do this is to establish rules on Day One. However, my Day One and theirs were NOT the same day. I started in the end of October, and I was their third teacher. I was in a new school and I tried to ease my way into my "temporary" role (I wasn't supposed to still be there at this point). That was a mistake, but it's one I'm dealing with. They get a participation grade, and for some it's lower than others, but that's only a small part of the grade. The testing is the largest part, and they are, for the most part, doing better. For this, I'm thankful. And they aren't just squeezing by, they're getting high numbers.

A little true time: the classes with the highest grades are "Financial Algebra", and anything involving logarithms have been dropped. It's math that they can use (although I'm not looking forward to tomorrow's lesson on Life Insurance, which will be even less exciting than Pensions has been), but it's still a lot of compound interest formulas and other computations. And it's planning and thinking about the future. Good stuff. The best part: I don't have to be crazed about the amount of material in each assignment or on the tests.

My Common Core Algebra class is an entirely different situation. I have to push and push and push, and still I'm behind. However, I'm making sure that they know the material I cover. I just keep reminding them that knowing 90% of 70% of the material is 63%, which isn't a good result. So while I'm happy to review to answer everyone's questions, we still have to move along. Today, they were asking me when we were going to start reviewing for the exam, which is less than a month away. I told them the truth: when I finish covering the material.

Sadly, this brings me to the one class that's totally disengaged. I've called parents. I've written anecdotals. I've failed students. "Whatever" is the response. "You're just going to fail me anyway, so why bother?", which is only slightly more annoying than, "When am I ever going to use this?"

They might be lower performing students, but they can do the work when challenged to do so (or mildly coerced by a parent). I've been told that if you raise the bar, the students will rise up to meet that challenge. Not all of them. Some will look at that bar and walk away. Some will want to do a limbo contest no matter how much you lower that bar. There are carrots to dangle in front of them: no summer school, seniors get to go home earlier, hey wasn't there a college you were interested in?

Still working on it for next year. Highly effective? Pipe dream. I hate to say that I'm wondering what next year will bring.

In the meantime, I'm still thrilled by four out of five, and how high they were.

And I'm starting to understand that fifth dentist a little more.

Pass?

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(C)Copyright 2013, C. Burke. All rights reserved.

Yes, they say "testses". I've heard it every year.

alt. alt. text: That was be a "Pass" Fail!

So I Had a Moment Like This Today

So I had a moment like this today . . . Someone decided to have a snack, spilled some on the floor, didn't do anything about it, and I don't know anything until I'm walking through it . . . and all I can think (and I'll only publicly admit to "thinking" it) can be summed up in one sentence:

There wasn't really any more to say after that.

Math Playground

So it was a really, really rainy Friday morning. Half of my class, the one with the smallest roster, was absent, and half of those attending were taking a makeup test from the day before. I needed to motivate the remaining students to learn something, and, frankly, needed to motivate myself because that wasn't exactly the most conducive environment for starting a new topic.

But this one classroom had a working Smart board. So I started googling math videos, looking for something in particular. Instead I found a game that gave me the following:


At first, I thought it was just a goofy game, and the students were going to give me strange looks and ignore it. WRONG! They ate it up. The smart, go-getter had pencil in hand and was working them out, but the girl in the back was responding almost as quickly. I can't remember the last time I saw her that engaged. (And I had her in a different class last semester.)

We went through all 10 questions of level one (like the first four above) and almost made it through level two (questions five and six, above).

The site, if you're curious, was mathplayground.com, and I found this under videos. Apparently, there was a video attached to this game (which I discovered today), but my school's server blocked it. It didn't matter to me because they were solving multi-step algebraic equations!

The only difference was that they were using popsicles and clocks instead of x and y.
I captured a few of them and edited the images to make an extra-credit worksheet. It's simple enough that I can make my own in the future.

And I probably will.

EDIT: If you're going to print out this picture to photocopy, you might want to load it into paint first and work on the coloring. Those gray rectangles turned black and made reading difficult -- especially considering that I used this as a substitute lesson, so I wasn't there to clarify anything.