All Grand Rapidses are alike

This summer I went through the other Grand Rapids. I took pictures of their Central High school (okay, it’s not in use as a school any more, but it still looks delicious).

So imagine my surprise when I got an email from the other Grand Rapids asking for help in setting up the use of their on-line book. I spent about a month getting ours set up for kids to use. The book company created a lot of extra work for teachers, which makes me sad. But we used it today, and it worked, so hurrah for technology (sometimes).

Here’s my question – how did they find me? It’s a little creepy. Is my school email address hanging out there somewhere as a resource person for the book company? Are all Grand Rapids secretly connected?

Sometimes the internet is just weird.

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.

Pre-school school

This week I have been part of a pre-high school camp, to help our students get used to working together in  high school. It’s free for kids – 50 places. We had 17 the first day, down to 12 by the second day. How sad.

The kids who did come were quite amazing –  total participation, total effort, working together. There were 4 adults, and 2 of us did everything, despite our unfitness and age. We were whipped. The other two – not so much.

If we could get half the incoming freshmen to be part of this group collaborative, our high school experience would be completely different. I can only imagine a high school where students work together, support each other, and try new things. I plow on with a different style of geometry ( sadly, I have been here 8 years ago, when we made terrific progress, but then I got taken out of that slot, being too unconventional).

Life goes on 🙂

Another new start

Whee! I have Geometry this year- at least so far! I have my same beautiful room, with a  refinished floor. Rumor has it there will be a smartboard in place of the one whiteboard, so I have wildly spent $13 on the piece of panelboard from Home depot, and had it cut into 6 pieces. As I covered the edges with fancy duct tape, I realized that someone will complain. My 6 groups will have to cooperate at their little piece of whiteboard. If I have to, I will get more.

I love geometry. The cavils of Paul Lockhart notwithstanding, I love Geometry. It includes art, language, construction, design, awareness, observation, interpretation… It’s the closest math to Physics, since it’s about naming of parts, and watching for when they come back again ( ooh, let[‘s call that a circle – wait, there’s another one! We are masters of our universe, we have named something!).

I’ve also learned how to make problems in WebWorks, and I’m going to use them for students to self-assess and then for assessments. No more multiple choice rubbish, no more re-creation of tests for students to take them endlessly over and over. And every kid gets a different test. Yes, Mike Pershan, the master of patience when it comes to teaching me LaTex, might be shocked, but I have learned a new computer skill!

So I hope the combination of hands-on activities, computer interaction, reading Alice in Wonderland, and groups in the classroom will provide at least one positive experience for every child. I plan to try the number talks from “how to learn math. ” All of these are a direct violation of the orders to endlessly grind on ACT questions. We’ll see how it goes.

Mary, Mary, interruptin’ my vacation

So here I am sitting in Thunder Bay, hoping for less thunder and more Bay, checking my email.

Will 5 links have to wait?

I love

Kaleb

Asymptoticallycool

Ninja math

brain

mathastrophe

What does Mary want to know?

Questions for my nominees.  Crazedmummy We want to know more about you!

1. What are you most proud of? Right now, surviving the “Coastal Path” at Agawa. I thought I was going to die. But I didn’t.
2. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? It doesn’t matter. Wherever I go, there I am.
3. What’s your favorite movie of all-time? Fantasia (the old one) – hippos and crocs.
4. What song or artist is on your favorites play list? Queen
5. What book is on your nightstand? Teacher Man
6. What’s next on your professional development list? How to Learn Math(?)  – the MOOC
7. What’s your favorite vacation spot? Cozumel
8. What’s for dinner tonight? Something warm without mosquitoes
9. If you had an extra hour each day how would you use it? swimming
10. What advice would you like to share with the parents of your students? Love them, they’re teenagers.
11. What inspired you to blog? Sam Shah.

The rest has to wait – I am on a trip!!

 

oops the end my friend

Well, it all went to hell in a handbasket in the last quarter, didn’t it? Completely lost the thread of the blog.

On the positive side, I have a job for next year: on the down side I don’t know what I’m teaching. Up side – there will be students. Down side – over 30 per class, so 150 students. Upside – we wills till have the health-science bias. Downside – also mixing in 3 other small schools for which we have done no special planning.

So I am learning WeBWorK over the summer. I’m learning Matlab over the summer. I signed up for the Standford Educ115N MOOC (Dan’s recommendation). I’ve got to have something that doesn’t require me to waste my time writing corrections on papers that children ignore. This year I noticed that students were willing to correct items if they could still get 100%, and if the corrections came from the computer. If the school powers let me teach math or physics,  then WeBWorK does that for me. I’m hoping that what I write is generic enough to be used in any one of the classes.  If they give me the nebulous courses with no curriculum again, I will concentrate on math instead of English. The English teacher last year got way too much credit for improving English scores, so I am willing to release him on his own recognizance for next year. Ha!  Our kids desperately need help with math to get them out of the 5th percentile.

And Matlab is what universities use for Engineering. I introduced LOGO and Scratch last semester (it took me 3 months to get them loaded onto our computers): we need more programming experience. I refer to all these as “programming applications,” because programming in our state has to be taught by a computer science certified teacher, whereas applications can be taught by any certified teacher. Gosh yes, I’d love to see the English teacher try to teach any of the above. Sadly, I don’t know of any computer programmers who then went on to get a teaching certificate – they are not completely crazy. So our kids never get to learn actual programming ( yes, 10 years ago the math teachers taught Java, and Basic. Kids don’t get the opportunity now. So sad).

Last quarter – such improvement

I have been worried that my students didn’t “get it.” I set up work, I help students with work,but I have refused to go through the pretense of “making them work.” I can’t make people learn. I can’t make them want to learn. I can’t fight the social decision to not learn so that kids fit in. Sorry. I just want people to have a go. Just try.

So here we are at the last quarter. Kids came in, asked, “Is this the same as the last three quarters?” Yes, the projects are on the web site. There are puzzles to do, there are reports to write ( I included math games as well as the book reports, I am amassing quite an array of math games that kids like, all of which involve gore and violence), and there is a warmup every day (thanks to mathmistakes.org).

And most kids got on with it. The first day back after break, kids who didn’t feel like deep thinking spent their time on some of the easier puzzles. Those who like to write grabbed a book and started a book report. Then there were kids who were ready for some math work, and they clicked on a new project and got busy! I was so impressed. Even the kids who chose not to work did admit that they knew what to do, they chose not to. Let’s face it, there a re a number of them who don’t have the internet at home, and it takes a while to catch up on 9 missing days of Facebook.

On Thursday I sat down with a small group for almost our entire class time to help them, as they were deeply floundering. Everyone else just carried on. It was wonderful.

No, It’s not the entire set of students.  It is more than half overall. I still have one hour where only3 kids work. But I feel that there is no success if there is no failure. Students who choose to fail should have that choice. I am not sure what to do about the odds stacked against them, but they still have a genuine choice. And when students begin to choose to learn, I am happy.

Climbing robots -Super Science Saturday

There are a lot of weekends in the year. Having Science Olympiad and FIRST Robotics on the same day left me feeling as if I had one day of strawberry festival, and I gorged myself. Totally sated.

I actually prefer the intellectual nature of Science Olympiad, but I am satisfied with a comment from another adult running between both venues – Science Olympiad is better to participate in, FIRST robotics is better to watch. I like that I can take one kid to Science Olympiad: for a couple of hundred bucks, she can participate. FIRST costs a small fortune. But the pole-climbing robot is way cool. And I can be grateful that someone else runs a FIRST robotics team where our kids can participate. I could not do his job.

I blame the adults for wanting to train kids for jobs – let’s just learn it first, people!

Rolling down to spring break

Last week felt like a lull in the pace. Sure I had 2 kids do a perfect job on the styrofoam cups. I had one kids begin to work (!) after 24 weeks. I guess it finally got boring. But I feel as if – this is their second math class. They are being passed along in their regular math class, and it’s clear they have no clue what any of the math means. Are we doing them any favors? I think not.

I blame the “every child is perfect” culture. We have Little Buddhas too.

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.