This week is my first full week of teaching since break, except for a few meetings I have to attend.  Now the preparation is replaced by action and adjusting, as each this cycle begins it’s narrative.  Will this be the cycle I get all my classes to do insanely well?  Will this be the cycle that I learn how to respond to all my students needs?  Will this be the cycle that I blog for a week and a half and then give up?  The answer to all of these questions will be much clearer by the end of this week.

What I’m Teaching this week:

This week I plan to introduce probability to my equations and patterns class.  We will do a task that which explores the law of large numbers through rolling lots and lots of dice.  I have been doing a task for the past few years, but I am hoping to find ways to improve it and make it better.

In my Investing class, I want to find a website that allows students to invest in the real stock market.  Investing in the stock market is a fraction as exciting as kids expect, and my enthusiasm isn’t really good either.  Last time I did it, I explained the basic info in the Wall Street Journal, talked about the information available online and I gave them $1 million to spend in a virtual simulator.  Despite all this, kids ended up looking the brands they recognized, and did only superficial research.  Do you know of an effective way to teach students to invest?

What I’m Blogging this week:

This week on the blog. I on outlining how I intend to dominate my next observation.  I want to try to meet the description of highly effective in every area of classroom instruction according to Charlotte Danielson measures of effective teaching rubric.  Doing this would be the equivalent of pitching a  perfect game.  This was something that I wanted to try when it was announced that NYC was trying this new evaluation system. Also, there is a good chance that this system will be changed, now is my last chance to be evaluated on all these features.  I’ll document my preparation and the observation this week with as much detail as possible for how it goes.

What I’m Thinking this week:

This week I’m thinking about a file cabinet that up until now was very successful at keeping food safe.  Apparently mice were going in and out of this metal cabinet, eating most of an unopened bag of microwave popcorn.  While cleaning up the mess, I drifted to thoughts of vengeance immediately as I looked for ways to seal up the file cabinet and catch the mice.

As I thought about it more, I realized it was my fault.  If I cared more about stopping mice from running around, I would have not let his happen.  This made me think about a lot of other things that I don’t care about.  Sometimes I get so into what I’m doing that I let lots of little things slide.  I realized that I needed to do a lot more of the little things, like filing papers.  After school I spent an hour cleaning the mess in my file cabinet, and filing papers until I could see my desk afterwards, and there was no room to for mice to run around.  What’s the small stuff that you’re forgetting to do?

 

9/30 #MTBoS