This week’s three day week, due to NYC’s observance of Rosh Hashanah, has been an interesting one for me.  It serves as an adjustment period away from the almost full time scheduling that I was doing up until last Friday, and the full teaching load, and department coordinatorship that ramps up next week.  Here’s what I’m doing with my short breather.

What I’m teaching this week:

I currently have about ten students enrolled in a class called mathematical thinking, and we have been doing a variety of different tasks including Dan Meyers meatballs, and an almost daily dose of estimation 180.  In order to capture their thinking I plan to have our first of for reflections this cycle, the last of which will be their final project.  The reflections I have done in the past feel to the students almost like a bookkeeping task.  I’ll tell them “you’re just writing about work you already did,” and some grown about having to write sentences, while others dive into the task while adding thought to what they did.  I’ll tweak my prompts for this year, and perhaps…

What I’m blogging this week:

…I’ll write a blog post about how the new reflection prompts go over with my students.  In addition to this task I have a few posts sitting in drafts, and in my head, that didn’t get out because of my unsustainable and somewhat unbalanced approach to scheduling the students (and I might write some about that, too).

What I’m thinking this week:

I’m thinking a lot about what I’ve read in the book “How to build a better teacher” and the sections about Deborah Ball and Magdalene Lampert’s teaching at Spartan Village elementary school.   When I was a student at Michigan State, Deborah Ball had left for U of M, but Magdalene Lampert was still there and I even “borrowed” a copy of her book “Teaching Problems and The Problems Of Teaching,” but I always kicked myself that I didn’t learn enough about “That Kind Of Teaching” during my time there.  Now that the ideas are getting brought back to life, so has a desire to return to my college aspirations (the teaching aspirations, not the drinking or the fashion sense).