Mission #5: Twitter Math Teacher Convo

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.