This week I am coming off a weekend where I got VERY LITTLE done on the blogging end. My school had a planning retreat and spent a lot of time working through the school’s vision and values, and how those should guide our response to the challenges we face. As we were ready to leave we faced a more immediate and unexpected challenge when a teacher’s jack russell terrier ran into the neighborhoods behind the retreat center and nine of us had to go traversing through this suburb looking for little Bruce.
It was quite an ordeal, and also an exercise in the collective nature of hope. In the 2-3 hours of searching there was a point in which each person sort of said some form of “We’ve done all we can,” or at least thought it. However, one other person kept thinking of one more thing we can do. “Maybe we can ask the neighbors?” “Maybe we can hang up signs?” “Maybe we can drive down past the forest?” When one of us had a little hope, we all got a little more hope, and that gave us the energy to throw ourselves into each new task in hopes of finding Bruce.
Eventually we received the text that Bruce was found. He ran into a giant forest and ended up covered in grass stains and ticks 2 miles away from where our retreat was. I keep thinking of this story because fixing what needs to be fixed in education seems like an enormous task. And perhaps thinking of enormous solutions isn’t the answer. Perhaps what we need are lots of little infusions of hope coming from a community of people all around the world. The MathTwitterBlogosphere seems to be just this, and I am honored to be a part of it.
What I’m teaching this week:
This week I am going to take my equations and patterns class and start working on the first third of their project. This Carnival Project was actually 1 piece before, but I am breaking into 3 so that I can give them feedback one piece at a time. I am going to collect the first game on Wednesday and then help the students by Friday. In Banking and Investment I need to start the project which means a class about using functions to model the behavior of certain markets. Hopefully the markets from the “Dunshire Abbey” game will provide the data if we can push through getting the kids to work on it.
What I’m blogging this week:
The Coast2Coast group is off and running and we are going to try and do a bunch of posts together around our teaching context. I plan to have a post about City-As-School and all of the things we do here. To really portray my school realistically, I am going to have to write a lot, and probably talk a little with my principal.
I also want to do a lot of reading of the other #MTBoS30 blogs so I can get another Around The Blogosphere up before Memorial day.
What I’m thinking this week:
Right now I’m thinking about this giant spike of traffic I got yesterday when @ddmeyer made this tweet, and @mythagon, @wahedebug, @k8nowak, of other people followed up with other positive comments.
Today’s math educator growth stock is @carloliwitter. Love the vibe & ideas. Strong buy. Follow and subscribe: http://t.co/dPWrTp7RME
— Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) May 19, 2014
I really appreciate all of the positive comments, and I am glad that so many people have found things that they like here. That said, I’m now noticing all these things that I need to fix, like this sentence from Beware of the Awesome Lesson
I tried to squeeze a whole separate exploration with a big meaty context inside of one the kids were already infested in.
Umm, that was supposed to say ‘invested’. So it looks like I have to go read through and double check my posts to make sure they all make sense…
19/33 #MTBoS