I chose an Algebra II Twitter discussion to read for this mission and found it really interesting. The discussion focuses on the transition to Common Core, providing support and sharing knowledge among teachers.
In reading the Twitter feed I noticed similarities between what teachers across the country are experiencing in the transition to Common Core and my personal experience at my school. One of the first questions on the feed was if schools are taking an integrated or traditional, clear-cut approach in transitioning to CCSS. All the teachers on the feed responding with the transition being traditional and there was some frustration expressed in comments such as "#Alg2chat Traditional…always traditional…VERY". For me as a first-year teacher with everything being new I don't have as much frustration in the transition but I've heard other teachers at my school express anger at the plan for moving to CCSS.
Further along in the conversation the topic came up of what's different in the Alg II CCSS standards compared to previous standards. Answers to this included:
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#alg2chat To me, the increased emphasis on Statistics is a HUGE idea in Alg2 CCSS
big ideas graphing, transformations, patterns all for quads, polys, exps, logs, rationals, radicals, trig
functions, modeling within context, identifying constraints and reasonable solutions, seeing structure
I taught honors alg 2 for 8 years, now this is "just" adding precalc to it (it was already full)
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Again, for me being a new teacher and continuing to better understand the range of material in high school math classes, I found it interesting to read the comments but couldn't relate to the changes as much as I could have if I had a few additional years of teaching experience.
Overall I feel that having read this discussion makes me want to be part of discussions in the future as a math teacher. I realize that it's valuable to hear the experiences of math teachers across the nation and I'm definitely looking forward to connecting more often with math teachers across the nation to learn about resources and get ideas for making improvements in my classroom.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
Mission #7: A Day in the Life
I decided to title this 'A Day in the Life' rather than 'A Typical Day in the Life' because everyday teaching is different. Having variety in schedules is exciting, exhausting, confusing, interesting and a lot of other things too :) Of course there's some structure with the general class schedules so here's how the day went one day this week:
5:20am - wake up!
5:25am - start making breakfast and talk with one of my housemates, who is also a teacher, about the upcoming school day.
5:40am - continue eating breakfast in my room while watching an episode of Hart of Dixie
6:10am - fill up my pockets with the materials that I need at school today. I like to think of my pockets as a tool belt. I take 3 erasable markers, 5 pencils, 3 pens, 30 reward tickets leftover from yesterday, wallet, phone, keys, water jug (unfortunately doesn't fit in pocket), and wireless remote.
6:20am - put everything in my car and begin the drive to school.
6:25am - call my girlfriend to talk about the upcoming day at school. She's a teacher too!
7:00am - arrive at school. Sign in at main office, chat with a few teachers and head to my classroom.
7:15am - write the agenda for the day, organize homework assignments, set up PowerPoint and fill up water jug with water.
7:50am - first period starts. There's state re-testing today that's going to start sometime during 1st Period. Half my class will leave for the state re-testing.
8:30am - students are called for state re-testing. There'll be a few students missing from each of my next few classes who are re-taking a state test that they need to graduate from high school. It's a good opportunity for them to show what they've learned from when they previously took one of the state tests.
8:50am - second period starts. We're going over graphing linear and quadratic inequalities with real-life situations. It's pretty cool, talking about Kendrick Lamar's album sales and deer hunting.
9:50am - geometry class finding missing sides and angles using trigonometric functions. This is fun!...at least for me :) students seem to be doing pretty well with it.
10:50am - algebra II with seniors. We review graphing for awhile, talk a little about college, and work in small groups. A good period.
11:50am - my lunch break/planning period. What do we begin with? Definitely lunch.
12:30pm - organize assignments collected so far during the day. Tonight there's gonna be a one person grading party.
1:20pm - sixth period algebra II with sophomores and juniors. A little routy today. One student sent to the office.
2:20pm - seventh period geometry. A little routy today too. One student getting a write-up who just got a write-up last week. He's pretty good academically but just likes to goof off too much. I pull him aside at the end of class and remind him that I know he can act better and that he needs to be a leader in the classroom.
3:30pm - end of school. Clean up the room a little. Mr. Graham the janitor comes in to sweep up the room and we talk about fishing and football.
4:00pm - on the road towards home. It's raining a little but not much.
4:40pm - go to Walmart to get school supplies and food stuffs.
5:10pm - get home, make dinner, relax with roommates.
7:00pm - start grading
8:00pm - finish grading, look over lessons for tomorrow
8:30pm - print lesson materials for tomorrow
8:40pm - talk to girlfriend
9:30pm - go unto Lumosity and do some brain training. Watch a few Hulu and YouTube clips.
10:30pm - go to sleep
5:20am - wake up!
5:25am - start making breakfast and talk with one of my housemates, who is also a teacher, about the upcoming school day.
5:40am - continue eating breakfast in my room while watching an episode of Hart of Dixie
6:10am - fill up my pockets with the materials that I need at school today. I like to think of my pockets as a tool belt. I take 3 erasable markers, 5 pencils, 3 pens, 30 reward tickets leftover from yesterday, wallet, phone, keys, water jug (unfortunately doesn't fit in pocket), and wireless remote.
6:20am - put everything in my car and begin the drive to school.
6:25am - call my girlfriend to talk about the upcoming day at school. She's a teacher too!
7:00am - arrive at school. Sign in at main office, chat with a few teachers and head to my classroom.
7:15am - write the agenda for the day, organize homework assignments, set up PowerPoint and fill up water jug with water.
7:50am - first period starts. There's state re-testing today that's going to start sometime during 1st Period. Half my class will leave for the state re-testing.
8:30am - students are called for state re-testing. There'll be a few students missing from each of my next few classes who are re-taking a state test that they need to graduate from high school. It's a good opportunity for them to show what they've learned from when they previously took one of the state tests.
8:50am - second period starts. We're going over graphing linear and quadratic inequalities with real-life situations. It's pretty cool, talking about Kendrick Lamar's album sales and deer hunting.
9:50am - geometry class finding missing sides and angles using trigonometric functions. This is fun!...at least for me :) students seem to be doing pretty well with it.
10:50am - algebra II with seniors. We review graphing for awhile, talk a little about college, and work in small groups. A good period.
11:50am - my lunch break/planning period. What do we begin with? Definitely lunch.
12:30pm - organize assignments collected so far during the day. Tonight there's gonna be a one person grading party.
1:20pm - sixth period algebra II with sophomores and juniors. A little routy today. One student sent to the office.
2:20pm - seventh period geometry. A little routy today too. One student getting a write-up who just got a write-up last week. He's pretty good academically but just likes to goof off too much. I pull him aside at the end of class and remind him that I know he can act better and that he needs to be a leader in the classroom.
3:30pm - end of school. Clean up the room a little. Mr. Graham the janitor comes in to sweep up the room and we talk about fishing and football.
4:00pm - on the road towards home. It's raining a little but not much.
4:40pm - go to Walmart to get school supplies and food stuffs.
5:10pm - get home, make dinner, relax with roommates.
7:00pm - start grading
8:00pm - finish grading, look over lessons for tomorrow
8:30pm - print lesson materials for tomorrow
8:40pm - talk to girlfriend
9:30pm - go unto Lumosity and do some brain training. Watch a few Hulu and YouTube clips.
10:30pm - go to sleep
Mission #6: Organization strategies. Yeah, I need that
When I started this first year of teaching I knew there was going to be a lot of things happening, lots of tasks to complete and a need for organization. I already had strategies that were successful during college and past work experience. I knew I could always go to http://www.khanacademy.org/ to brush up on a particular math subject or do a general Google search for different ideas. At the start of the year I spent a little bit of time working on how I would organize things during the year and felt alright about it.
Given I plan to continue teaching math beyond my two years with Teach For America, there's definitely a lot of resources this year that I'm working to organize for future years. This mission helped me explore different organizational options for math lessons and resources that I'm going to be sure to utilize in the future.
One website I learned about in this lesson is LiveBinders, a website that allows users to store information in the same way a person would store documents in a three-ring binder. I only wish we had the technology at my school for students to be able to use LiveBinders instead of three-ring binders...if we could scan student work along with the assigments, file them in different tabs and then essentially have a website portfolio for each student of their work. Maybe next year, but at the very least this will be an effective tool that I can use to organize all the math resources I find and have them ready for future use.
Also, in looking through a PowerPoint presentation on organization, I found a screen shot of how a teacher organized her lessons on her computer to be helpful.
One of the projects I have for Christmas vacation is to put files on Dropbox like Tina did here. I have a similar filing system as Tina, with folders for each unit and documents in each unit, though I also have my documents numbered in order. I'm hoping at the end of the year to be able to put up all my lessons online for future TFA first year math teachers and any math teacher to utilize in the future.
I'm thankful for this mission getting me to think about organizing. I'm certain this will help me with staying on top of things during the remainder of the year and being prepared for future years too!
Given I plan to continue teaching math beyond my two years with Teach For America, there's definitely a lot of resources this year that I'm working to organize for future years. This mission helped me explore different organizational options for math lessons and resources that I'm going to be sure to utilize in the future.
One website I learned about in this lesson is LiveBinders, a website that allows users to store information in the same way a person would store documents in a three-ring binder. I only wish we had the technology at my school for students to be able to use LiveBinders instead of three-ring binders...if we could scan student work along with the assigments, file them in different tabs and then essentially have a website portfolio for each student of their work. Maybe next year, but at the very least this will be an effective tool that I can use to organize all the math resources I find and have them ready for future use.
Also, in looking through a PowerPoint presentation on organization, I found a screen shot of how a teacher organized her lessons on her computer to be helpful.
I'm thankful for this mission getting me to think about organizing. I'm certain this will help me with staying on top of things during the remainder of the year and being prepared for future years too!
Mission #3: Collaboration initiation
Having just become a math teacher a few months ago I continue to learn a lot about the resources available online for math teachers. In doing this mission I learned of a few websites that I'm excited to get examples from and bring them into my classroom.
The first site, http://www.101qs.com/, uses images and video to spark interest in students and is an idea I've already begun to incorporate into my classroom. Below are a few images from the site:
This set-up for a lesson is interesting to me because depending on the student and the question that comes to mind a lesson could go a lot of different directions. That's exciting to me because it seems that it'd be more natural (and less mechanical) to start lessons this way and to let the interest of students lead lessons toward a learning objective that students want to learn and, of course, is based in math.
For example, in my geometry class we have a circles unit coming up after Christmas where using the candy cake picture could get students interested in learning about circumferences. I also think back to the start of the school year with my algebra II students when we covered arithmetic and geometric sequences that when I teach that again in the future it'd be neat to have the candy cake picture and have students figure out an equation for the number of candies in each circle and if it's a geometric or arithmetic sequence. With the pennies picture I'm thinking of a unit after Christmas on squares and cubes where this would be interesting to use to spark student interest.
I also looked at the website http://www.estimation180.com/ and it seems like a really neat way for students to gain an understanding of estimating distance, time, size, etc. in a very practical way. We are just finishing a unit in geometry on trigonometric definitions with right triangles and I noticed that when I told students to round to one decimal many students didn't know how to round. I'm planning to do a lesson on rounding for all my classes after Christmas and it'd be neat also to include a few of these problems from Estimation 180 to ease students back into school after the long break.
The first site, http://www.101qs.com/, uses images and video to spark interest in students and is an idea I've already begun to incorporate into my classroom. Below are a few images from the site:
This set-up for a lesson is interesting to me because depending on the student and the question that comes to mind a lesson could go a lot of different directions. That's exciting to me because it seems that it'd be more natural (and less mechanical) to start lessons this way and to let the interest of students lead lessons toward a learning objective that students want to learn and, of course, is based in math.
For example, in my geometry class we have a circles unit coming up after Christmas where using the candy cake picture could get students interested in learning about circumferences. I also think back to the start of the school year with my algebra II students when we covered arithmetic and geometric sequences that when I teach that again in the future it'd be neat to have the candy cake picture and have students figure out an equation for the number of candies in each circle and if it's a geometric or arithmetic sequence. With the pennies picture I'm thinking of a unit after Christmas on squares and cubes where this would be interesting to use to spark student interest.
I also looked at the website http://www.estimation180.com/ and it seems like a really neat way for students to gain an understanding of estimating distance, time, size, etc. in a very practical way. We are just finishing a unit in geometry on trigonometric definitions with right triangles and I noticed that when I told students to round to one decimal many students didn't know how to round. I'm planning to do a lesson on rounding for all my classes after Christmas and it'd be neat also to include a few of these problems from Estimation 180 to ease students back into school after the long break.
Monday, October 14, 2013
The beauty and power of public education and math education
"I believe in the beauty and power of PUBLIC education and MATH education. Get the right math to the right student at the right time" - Noah Sharrow (on Twitter)
A fellow math teacher tweeted this and it got me thinking.
I've always thought of learning as both beautiful and powerful. I was one of those curious kids who always wondered about everything and wanted to learn about everything. I still am. And growing up going to a public school in my neighborhood and being in college track classes, my experience validated my belief in the beauty and power of education. I sat in classes with 98% white students from middle class homes in a suburb of Minneapolis, MN. Every student planned to go to college and just about every student took their learning seriously. There was very little yelling and no fights that I ever saw. Most students did their homework. There were study parties for every test. That was the culture.
Starting to teach in Mississippi, I knew I would find some type of power in Mississippi public education (Public education inherently has power because it's an enforced law for children to be at a school in the US). What I had some doubts about was finding beauty.
Mississippi is ranked 50th out of 50 states in public education. High poverty rates and lack of access to quality health care are also currently part of Mississippi's reality. To me, that's definitely not a beautiful reality.
Yet now, after my first quarter of teaching, I can say with certainty there's a lot of beauty in Mississippi education and, therefore, a lot of power too.
First of all, the community involvement at our school is amazing. Parents and guardians are at the school all the time making sure their students are working hard and doing their homework. I've had phone conversations with guardians of over half my students and at least 90% of the guardians I talked to specifically told me to call if there's any concerns about their child and they'll make sure to their child improves. I've talked in person with at least 50 guardians and the vast majority expressed support in getting their child prepared for college and beyond.
So first and foremost, our community has a lot of beauty.
Our students, of course, bring a lot of energy that enhances our learning environment.
I hear staff members sharing laughter and supporting each other every day.
The farm land that we're surrounded by brings a lot of natural beauty to our eyes.
So yes, there's beauty in Mississippi education and we're working to prove that to the rest of the country with an improved education ranking.
I wouldn't be surprised if next year we're up a few spots...I expect next year that we're up a few spots.
A fellow math teacher tweeted this and it got me thinking.
I've always thought of learning as both beautiful and powerful. I was one of those curious kids who always wondered about everything and wanted to learn about everything. I still am. And growing up going to a public school in my neighborhood and being in college track classes, my experience validated my belief in the beauty and power of education. I sat in classes with 98% white students from middle class homes in a suburb of Minneapolis, MN. Every student planned to go to college and just about every student took their learning seriously. There was very little yelling and no fights that I ever saw. Most students did their homework. There were study parties for every test. That was the culture.
Starting to teach in Mississippi, I knew I would find some type of power in Mississippi public education (Public education inherently has power because it's an enforced law for children to be at a school in the US). What I had some doubts about was finding beauty.
Mississippi is ranked 50th out of 50 states in public education. High poverty rates and lack of access to quality health care are also currently part of Mississippi's reality. To me, that's definitely not a beautiful reality.
Yet now, after my first quarter of teaching, I can say with certainty there's a lot of beauty in Mississippi education and, therefore, a lot of power too.
First of all, the community involvement at our school is amazing. Parents and guardians are at the school all the time making sure their students are working hard and doing their homework. I've had phone conversations with guardians of over half my students and at least 90% of the guardians I talked to specifically told me to call if there's any concerns about their child and they'll make sure to their child improves. I've talked in person with at least 50 guardians and the vast majority expressed support in getting their child prepared for college and beyond.
So first and foremost, our community has a lot of beauty.
Our students, of course, bring a lot of energy that enhances our learning environment.
I hear staff members sharing laughter and supporting each other every day.
The farm land that we're surrounded by brings a lot of natural beauty to our eyes.
So yes, there's beauty in Mississippi education and we're working to prove that to the rest of the country with an improved education ranking.
I wouldn't be surprised if next year we're up a few spots...I expect next year that we're up a few spots.
Community grit, college and careers
One thing that happens in my classroom that's unique is the emphasis that we place on grit and community. Grit is the determination to keep moving forward even when there's obstacles...to always have a goal that you're working towards and to work towards that goal through anything that happens in life.
In my classroom we are gritty together as a community. We work through math problems together. We help each other. We grow together. We support each other. We dream together. We are a family together. To foster transformational change we need to all rise up together.
A second unique part of my classroom is the focus on college and the expectation that all students will attend college. Throughout the year students take five practice ACT math tests (one at the start of the year and one at the end of each quarter). I also plan to have various weeks during the year where the lessons are all on ACT material and provide a refresher on previous math courses (algebra I, geometry) that are part of the ACT. During these ACT weeks I plan to place particular emphasis on word problems, something a fair number of my students struggle with. An additional part of my focus on college is that whenever we do a review game (about once every two weeks) student teams choose their college team name. Doing this gives students a reminder at least a few times a month that the focus for our class is developing the skills and abilities that will make students successful in college and beyond.
A third unique part of my classroom is the emphasis on STEM careers. Every week I aim to provide students with information on STEM careers related to the subject we're learning about. This allows students to explore future possibilities and understand how math relates to the real world.
In my classroom we are gritty together as a community. We work through math problems together. We help each other. We grow together. We support each other. We dream together. We are a family together. To foster transformational change we need to all rise up together.
A second unique part of my classroom is the focus on college and the expectation that all students will attend college. Throughout the year students take five practice ACT math tests (one at the start of the year and one at the end of each quarter). I also plan to have various weeks during the year where the lessons are all on ACT material and provide a refresher on previous math courses (algebra I, geometry) that are part of the ACT. During these ACT weeks I plan to place particular emphasis on word problems, something a fair number of my students struggle with. An additional part of my focus on college is that whenever we do a review game (about once every two weeks) student teams choose their college team name. Doing this gives students a reminder at least a few times a month that the focus for our class is developing the skills and abilities that will make students successful in college and beyond.
A third unique part of my classroom is the emphasis on STEM careers. Every week I aim to provide students with information on STEM careers related to the subject we're learning about. This allows students to explore future possibilities and understand how math relates to the real world.
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Turn Up!
Hey y'all,
I'm setting up this blog to start writing about my experience teaching math in Rosedale, Mississippi and to connect with the community of math teachers online so that we can collaborate and share resources.
I'm excited about starting this! I encourage you to leave a comment on posts and let me know what you think.
Thanks and looking forward to writing/thinking/collaborating/supporting/inspiring us all for the benefit of our students!
Jon
I'm setting up this blog to start writing about my experience teaching math in Rosedale, Mississippi and to connect with the community of math teachers online so that we can collaborate and share resources.
I'm excited about starting this! I encourage you to leave a comment on posts and let me know what you think.
Thanks and looking forward to writing/thinking/collaborating/supporting/inspiring us all for the benefit of our students!
Jon
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