So in my class I thought up a good uses of technology in a “flashes of insight” late last night.  One idea was to come up with a way to have the students play around with the ideas of what mixtures of juice would be orangey-er than others.

This is from the Proportional Reasoning Task from the Shell Center. Click the image to see the full task

I had my Transition Math students work on this yesterday, but I didn’t have a lot of success. This class is for students who typically “get-by” in math, and will probably have trouble understanding the basics of algebra, like proportional reasoning.  Virtually all of them have said some form of “I never understood fractions!”

The trouble yesterday was partially because so many kids only saw me as an answer, and didn’t trust each other enough to justify one juice mixture being more “orangey” than the other. Without a way to really check and see if their strateg was right, they didn’t really see a way to reason through to deciding which cards should be in what order. So I tried a couple things. One thing was showing a video of orange juice concentrate just to make sure they weren’t confused by the concept of juice in a can (a student yesterday was horrified by it). I also had them do a gallery walk of each others work, and I tried to talk through a comparison of a few juice listings on the board.

After class today I created the little tool so that kids could experiment with the different colors and test to see which is more “orangey”. I think I will have students get on their laptops and compare two different versions of the tool and compare their answers in that way. I still need to do some work on it but It seems pretty useful.

Here is the counter:

Original code is here: https://jsfiddle.net/jyzudc44/9/

Now I need to work on what happens when students use this to compare different kinds of juice mixtures. I will come back here and post some results and student thinking when I can.  Let me know if you can think of any intersting questions that could be explored by using this.

This week is important because it is essentially the end of the year.  As much as I’d like to say kids are going to show up to the two days next week, they might not.  Just in case, I need to give them all enough work this week to keep them busy over the whole break.  The kids who do show up on the last day get to work together on the task from the week, and perhaps get to hear me sing a spirited rendition of the Christmas song at our school’s “Milk, Cookies, and Karaoke” next Monday and Tuesday.

I’m able to roll into the week with a surprising burst of energy from the #nycmathtweetup last Friday.  It’s surprising because, despite being excited about the meetup until I was a block away from reaching the West Village building where it was held, I was somehow overcome with two weird feelings.  The first feeling was “I’m a fraud, this was a bad idea, and they’re all going to laugh at me!!”, followed by the second feeling, which was really just the urge to go home, curl into a ball on my couch, and feel safe.   This feeling didn’t go away as I entered the downstairs lobby of the building which felt as warm and inviting as the detention level of the Death Star. 

Then I ran into @kellyoshea and we shared an elevator up to the 6th floor and started into a little conversation.  I was naturally able to talk with all the other people we met once we got inside. Suddenly I felt like I was catching up with old friends, friends who I just met, but friends nonetheless.  I got to meet @nicoraplaca, @wkmukluk, @bkdidact, @mrburkemath, and many other people who up until know I had only known through their tweets.  We hung out until @DavidWees and the rest of the wonderful people at New Visions had to kick us out.  Afterwards a small group including @jacehan, @j_lanier, and @Mr-I-Don’t-Use-Twitter (Ben Blum-Smith) and a small group of people headed out to trendy NYC bars in the West Village.  It was quite nice that @absmarie was able to find one that was not excessively loud, nor excessively expensive. It was excessively crowded, enough that we were about to leave, but then a large group left seconds before we did, allowing us to sit down and hangout.  It all was really positive and really cool.  And just like hanging out with any group of old friends, it was really hard to say goodbye at the end of the night. I really look forward to seeing everyone again at the next one!

What I’m teaching this week

This week I am going to teach the elimination method of solving systems of equations, and I’m going to try to find some context to anchor this discussion in a way that isn’t contrived.  Wish me luck.

I’m also really excited about the economics lesson I’m teaching called “In The Chips.”  In searching for ideas I came across this lesson and realized it was my favorite lesson from when I was in high school.  If it goes well, it will lead towards using the Dunshire Project that I did last year.

What I’m blogging this week

Hopefully something.  I’ve been trying to get two blogs each week, so I’m going to hope I can get two posts, and we’ll see what I can do.

What I’m thinking this week

I just found out that I am going to be a father to a baby girl this summer! It’s hard to think about anything else but that, but it does make me wonder about how children develop quanitative literacy/numeracy at a young age.

It’s been a long time…  The whole idea with this Blog was to create a space to reflect on my work in the classroom, and hopefully grow as a teacher because of it.  Unfortunately, I’ve been slacking on this blog, which is kind of like slacking on myself, really.  The growth can’t happen without the writing, just as the harvest can’t happen without the planting.  I’m going to try to get back on here at least twice a week going forward, feel free to give me crap if I don’t follow through.

The lack of posts are not because I have nothing to say.  If anything it’s quite the opposite.  I have so many things going on that I haven’t had time to sit down and write them all out.  Instead of getting to worried about how to write everything, now I’m going to take time to write at least something, and hopefully that will be enough to stay on point.

What I’m Teaching This Week

This week I’m thinking about how to get students to understand the way that compound interest is related to simple interest in a fun and interactive way.  There are a number of derivations for the compound interest formula that involve lots of parenthesis and exhaustive calculations, but I’m hoping I can help them make the leap from simple to compound with something a little more…  wait for it  …interest-ing.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet, but I asked the kids today would they rather A) get paid $100 a day every day for a month OR B) receive a penny on the first day of the month, and have the money doubled every day for a month.  I’m not sure exactly how I intend to do to explore this context, but I might make a video, or perhaps an illustration of some sort.

What I’m Blogging This Week

Since I have been away from blogging regularly, a whole bunch of stuff has been going on that could make for good posts.  These things are kind of like my “reserves” and I can pull them off the bench if need be.  One thing I might talk about is my idea for an #MTBOS  booth at the NCTM national conference, (hint: it involves internet access).

Another thing is talking about all of the data work I’ve been doing at my school.  I have been more or less buried in spreadsheets and/or teaching myself database programming since the year began, and maybe this is a place to reflect on that.

Lastly, I have been working on a picking speakers for a conference, and it means I have read about 260 different talks.  I ended up learning a lot of information from doing that and I have a whole lot of ideas for posts that I gleaned from trying to understand other people’s proposals.  Perhaps I’ll dig into this this week, or perhaps I’ll write about the actual teaching and learning in my classroom for the first time in a while.  I hope I can do the latter.

What I’m Thinking This Week

At my old school there was a weird feeling that only came after Thanksgiving.  This school was going through a rough patch, and every year it seemed at least one staff member would leave in the early months of the year.  Once we got to Thanksgiving, however, all of the nervousness about people leaving would stop and we could all settle in for the rest of they year knowing we’re all staying until June.  It was a good feeling to know the people around you were around you for the long haul, like after the closing of the door on airplane.  This year has been a little rocky, with our school getting 10 new staff members in August, and one more last month, as well as starting a lot of new programs.  As we start school after this past Thanksgiving, I’m feeling like we’re finally settling in for the long haul.

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).

It’s August 21st, which means that there are only 12 days until the big day where everything starts all over.  That’s right, it’s my Birthday!  But one day after turning 33, I report to school for the 2014-2015 school year.  As the day quickly approaches, I am starting to think through what my big goals will be for the school year.  Most years I have one or two big projects outside of the classroom, such as basketball coaching, or developing new curriculum, and this year will be certainly no exception.  But inside the classroom, one of my big projects will be becoming a totally different teacher (every 2 weeks or so).

The Case For Change

For the first 9 years of my teaching career I was pretty much focused on getting students through the material in as reflective of a way I could.  When I found something that worked, I stuck with it.  Now I have a series of worksheets, chained together into units that reflect not only what content I’ve taught, but who I am as a teacher.  As I approach another year teaching the same material I kind of want to turn my back on my old standards and start something new.

There are so many great resources and lessons on the internet, I want to try actually using those in my classroom.  This of course means eschewing the parts of me that live inside of the lessons I created years ago, and trying to crawl inside the minds of Dan Meyer, Andrew Stadel, Robert Kaplinsky, Mathalicious, Illustrative Mathematics, (am I missing anyone? add it in the comments) and the other educators whose lessons I could use.  I think it will force me to try new ways and approaches to teaching, and ultimately make me a different, and better, teacher.

Using outside lessons could quickly provide little to no benefit.  I could easily take a lesson, re-type into my regular microsoft word format, and implement it in the way I implement my boilerplate stuff.  I’m wondering if I miss out on the potential gains I might see if I try to teach each of these as true the materials’ style, and as differently from my own.  I really like modifying textbook and other tasks, but I think sticking to the plan will actually be a new and interesting challenge.  Doing this 4 times each quarter, or roughly every 2 weeks, will provide enough to selectively choose and reflect on each item.

The S.M.A.R.T. Goal

For this year, in each of my classes I plan to substitute my regular curriculum with quality tasks from the web or otherwise..  When doing this I’m going to try to do it as faithfully to the lesson plan as possible, and only try to modify it when there is clear evidence that it needs modification.  Each Quarter I plan to incorporate an outside task with my students at least 4 days (two-day lessons count as one task), and keep track of it here.