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.
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