If it is math, then it must be my fault.

Next week we are starting the logic part of Geometry. Thanks to Direct TV ads, everyone has seen syllogisms. So my plan is to have kids make their own. Honestly, I wanted to see this – I made it as a project, but I can’t get anyone to do projects, they all want book-based work. Our principal is an English teacher, and he wants everyone to do a writing project. So I plan to use this as my writing project.  And  video-creation project. I hope thereby to avoid the usual whining about why we have to write in Math.

We shall see.

Last week we had the first test using Webwork. I was introduced to this by a math professor. The advantage for me was that it gets students used to working on complex problems from the computer, writing out their work. Since we’re going to have to do that next year for common core, ti seems like a good plan to use this format. The grading is easy, retakes are easy (for me!) and my students liked that I included the feature that they could grade their work and then fix their errors.

I also see that the calculators for smarter balanced are available to use, so I will try and get my students to use these too.

In the last week, we have had 2 teachers collapse with stress-related symptoms. Somehow this has to stop!

Week 4 – stability?

I think we are at week 4. I hope they have stopped moving kids in and out of classrooms. I hope that all those kids who decided to come back way after everyone else have come in, because some of the late starters last week looked pretty shellshocked when I gave them their catchup work. I am pretty mean – just because you decided to take an extra couple of weeks’ vacation doesn’t mean you get to skip work.

So this week  I decided to join together triangles and circles in the wholemovement way.  Seriously, if you get a chance to see Bradford  in action, do so. He’s in Ann Arbor in October and it is sooo cool, if a bit whacky (oh, like you’re not!). One of my former student’s dads runs this conference, which is how I found out about the circle thing in the first place. I have no vested interest.

 

geometry strings

ooh string designs. Our book introduces these as straight line patterns. Minimath projects has very affordable card supplies and patterns that even I, the inartistic math teacher, can follow. I made one example of each for the students to see what they look like. Really, only card 3 is very mathy, since it uses coordinates. However, one has to follow instructions in order, which is a challenge in itself for my students.

I use crochet thread and tapestry needles, to minimize the eye-poking-out possibilities in the classroom. The last time I had geometry, 5 years ago, some students liked these, and made them as christmas gifts. Not bad for the mean Jewish math teacher.

Our cups floweth over

Three types of Styrofoam stackable cups. Each group gets three of each type. Choose one type to find the number of cups to be the same height as teacher, another to reach the same height as a group member, and use the third to match a Perfect Man.
We even did “try it.” You think 18 cups match me? I am pretty short, but stack ’em up, and show me. Are they my height? No, they are up to my knee. No, don’t come back with a new guess of 30 cups. Go away and measure. Measure one cup, measure two cups, measure three cups. I want a table, a graph, and an equation, and an explanation. How do you put oen guess into a table? Maybe that should make you think about your one guess.
How many groups managed it? One. The hardest part? Me staying out of it. The three measurements were the only hint. Should we use Excel? good idea. Can we do this by hand? good idea. Should we look for a pattern? good idea. I hope they come to their senses by tomorrow.
This is high school? Thanks Fawn

I blame the decoupling of measurement from reality.

Woah! Slacker poster! Perfect Man and Hot Dogs

Has it really been 2 weeks since I posted? Oddly, in my head I posted the results from the great hot Dog experiment and the Perfect Man project (which I stole unbashedly).
First, the Perfect Man. yes, i know it’s a middle school project, so it was well within the range of challenge for my low performing students. I solicited contestants for the “Perfect Man.” I am so lucky to work with some great guys who were willing to be measured, as long as all the measurements were along the outer sides of the body. It was enlightening for some of our English teachers to see the measurement skills of our students – they are getting an inkling of the skills our students need to master at 9th and 11th grade in “math” class.
Then we calculated ratios of the “perfect man” and of the “measured man.” Finally, the students calculated the percent difference, and were able to create posters for “their guy.” We put the posters outside in the hallway, and we’ve had several visitors. Now I have created an essay contest for the “Perfect Man”- persuade me that the person you pick is indeed perfect. I have a give-away TI84 calculator as a prize.
Then last week, we completed the Hot Dog experiment. I bought 100 hot dogs and 50 buns. I found we only had 6 thermometers in the entire school (it was school of Health, Science and Technology – now the school of Health Science, apparently we have no technology). So we had groups measuring the temperature drop over time of a hot dog in air and in a bun. I did this at home, and I had a good difference between air and in the bun, but we did not see this at school.
We did get nice exponential drops in temperature – clearly not linear. And most kids got the excel modeling done in 2 days instead of a week. Clearly some skills are improving. Hurrah!
Too many hot dogs. I blame the ‘flu, as having 25% of the students gone meant there were too many hot dogs, even for teenagers.

M&Ms

I like this newer version of the M&M exponential increase and decay. I started with 5 M&Ms, so that the kids could see that the first value was related tot he 5, otherwise the 2 gets mixed up with the half. Then I had the kids use Excel to make a mathematical model, using the sum of the squares of the difference. We used solver to minimize. They got to see their graph line goign form crazy not fit to ooh looks fabulous.

“I see that Excel does the hard work for you.” Yes, yes it does, my little friend!

And at the other extreme I have someone who is trying for the first time, but does not know how to round numbers.  Actually he may not be at the other extreme, since there are still 8 others who are doing no work. Is it because they cannot or because they will not? Or both? Anyway, Rounding Boy has persisted for four days, and we have actually completed the first two sides of the M&Ms handout in that time. Nobody works with him, because he was so nasty to them last semester, and I have enough problem children that I can get back to him for only about 2 minutes in every 15. He is quite obnoxious when I offer assistance, but I can be obnoxious too. Should I consider it a victory that I have a 15-year-old who now might be able to round numbers? It’s really a waste of time, because he’s not going to be able to pass the class, or the real algebra class. And yet, like a moth to a flame, I can’t help but try. Maybe I can get him to graph a line – maybe, if I try hard enough…

I blame the candy. It went to my head.

Well, I have to shift too

I empathize with my students. They operate at a 5th grade level, they’re being given 9th grade work ( or 11th grade work), obviously dumbed down so they can understand it, and they come in day after day, to be made to feel bad about themselves.

I feel ground down too. I have grandiose ideas to bring in new projects, I have tried to make up applications that will interest kids and… nothing. Meanwhile, we got these new text books which provide an exploration/hands-on application for every lesson ( I don’t have those, I have a “lab” class). And the other teachers are hunting down our old traditional textbooks to use them. No, they didn’t work either. We’re a failing school.

Anyway, after some personal PD, I have given myself a good shake at the nape of the neck, and kicked myself. I have found a website to teach LOGO to kids, I have written step-by-step instructions for making math models on Excel from the M&Ms activity on growth and decay.

I had accidentally started dragging the poor beasts through an “all do this together” lecture-type interaction, so I had to undo myself, and give it back to the kids. I was wavering on not giving instant feedback to the Math Mistakes warmup – and then some kids said they realized on day 4 how to do day 1’s work, so they were glad they had a week to think about it.

But I realized it’s lonesome. Even though every teacher operates in a vacuum, we continue to get the slurry shoveled down about what we should be doing. And being the salmon swimming upstream, because I read all the common core stuff, and Dan Meyer, and the entire panoply of “let’s do it” blogs, is tiring.  I don’t even know if it works, but what we were doing does not work for teaching math skills. And then – somewhere in someone’s blog – I found Mathematical Quality of Instruction § MQI Training Site  Hooray! I feel as if I have something to fight back with. Stop evaluating me on whether students comply, start looking at what math I know and what math they can do.

And I recognize that Mike Pershan is such a nice boy, I only hope my son is half as kind. And Fawn Ngyuen sharing her lovely ideas, her work, her classes with us. I have been ungrateful, and I repent. Will try to do better.

I blame winter. Hate those short sunlight hours.

What boys need in school

One of my classes has 15 year old boys. Why should they learn Algebra? When are they ever going to need it? How dumb is this? Etc. And in my class, I have been mainly teaching how to use Excel for math, because I think it’s actually useful.

On Wednesday, when I heard the moaning again, I had an answer. I have squirrels in my attic. Again. I finally called in the squirrel relocation service. So I told my boys, the squirrel relocators come for an initial visit for $119, and then charge $65 per squirrel. So I wanted to know how much I would have to pay if there were 10 squirrels. The boys thought this was great, and asked if they could use this for their warmup. Sure can.

After the initial visit, I found that they would also fix the squirrel damage for another $200, and that they expected no more than 6 squirrels. So the next day, I went back in and changed the question. The boys thought this was great. They were asking how much you could make every year by doing squirrel relocation, obviously you don’t have to go to college ( a plus, by the way), and there was no shortage of squirrels. Especially if you relocate them near someone else’s house.

So, I learned that boys like (a) squirrels, (b) ways to make money, (c)not going to college, and (d)honesty. Sadly, girls had no interest in the squirrel problem.

I think I’ll tell them more financial troubles and see if they like them. I’m told we’ll have snow, so perhaps we can address how to make money by shoveling sidewalks.

I definitely blame the squirrels.

(cartoon from clker.com)

Real life models

https://flunearyou.org/

…is tracking flu incidence in the US. I can only hope for an epidemic. Note the graph, you can slide along and save the data if you like. If we get a nice epidemic, like we did a couple of years ago, we’ll get some lovely graphs for data analysis. ( Yes I did get the vaccine, if I have to take 5 days off,  I’d darn well better be enjoying them!)

It occurs to me that I am immensely impressed with sunscreen. I wonder whether there is an experiment that I can devise with sunscreen, UV light, and something (bacon?) to show how well it works. I must ponder this.

I blame vaccines. Destroying diseases everywhere.

“I don’t have to know how many inches in a foot.”

Good to know, kid. Thanks.

We used 101qs (thanks, Dan) for our warmups last marking period – students had to come up with a question. One of the pictures was of people tiling the floor with pennies . We noticed that students had no clue about ratios, so my student teacher (bless her) created an activity for the students to do today, to estimate how many pennies it would take to tile our lovely room. We linked it to the tattoo artist who claimed that tiling with pennies was cheaper (real life, you know) and asked the kids to figure out if it was really cheaper.

So ourkids had to figure out what area means. Did we really want them to lay out pennies to make one square foot ( if we had to!) or could they find another way… multiplication? What is a square foot? What is a foot? is it that long stick ( meter stick)?

Then they had to measure the room dimensions.After we explained what dimensions were. Thus we discovered that students did not have to know there are 12 inches in a foot. We were amazed.

Finally, we asked what the value of the floor would be in dollars. And there we found that many students did not know how many cents in a dollar. (Or how to move the decimal point to divide by 100.) Many of our 17 year olds. Oddly, they are not doing well on the state tests. Clearly, the state test makers are unaware of what students do not have to know.

I blame the Romans ( or whoever invented inches).