Carl's Teaching Blog

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CLOG: They chose the worksheet!?!?

On May 12, 2016

So I was about to teach standard deviation today, and from the beginning of the unit I had planned to revamp this power point that I originally made sometime before 2010. Unfortunately the revamp didn’t happen, so I got a little flashback to what my teaching was like in the naughts, and it wasn’t pretty. I mean it wasn’t bad, it was a Powerpoint where I go step by step through what Standard Deviation was using an example comparing two sets. There are lots of discussion prompts that get at why standard deviation is useful. Here’s the file if you want to check it out. LINK TO CARL’S OLD SCHOOL POWERPOINT Because my day was busy, I had no choice to but teach it pretty much identically to how I taught it at that time.

Stepping back in time

Teaching this lesson was like taking a quantum leap back in time to my previous teacher self. As I was teaching it I realized that I had not built in a way to see if students really understood the reasoning behind the the calculations, there were a few students who answering the discussion prompts in the class, but the rest mostly stayed silent. I tried to think of a way to modify the lesson on the fly instead of just using the results on a worksheet where they practice finding the standard deviation. I thought up some different writing prompts that would be good ways to see if students understood why they were doing what they were doing, and I offered the class the following choice.

“Either do this worksheet, which asks you to calculate a lot of these giant standard deviations by hand…or answer some reflection questions that shows that you really understand standard deviation. Worksheet? Reflection questions? You pick!”

Would you believe that they picked the worksheet???

Why did they pick the worksheet!?!?

Having my reflection questions rejected was a pretty shocking occurrence in my classroom. One of those things that makes you suddenly question your whole approach in the middle of a class where you don’t have time to flesh the ideas out. Here are some of the things that ran through my head.

Should I let them choose? It wasn’t unanimous, the kids who were really into the lecture were the ones who were the ones who would write the reflection questions everybody else wanted the worksheet. Would allowing people to choose really result in everyone thinking about the ideas equally? (I said no)

What if they just didn’t get it? My first thought was that the pro-worksheet students might be students who may not have gotten much out of my Powerpoint, or any powerpoint in general. How many other times has an oversight on my part prevented a group of students from getting access to the big ideas.

Should I just do more practice? Should I allow students more opportunities to practice computations instead of asking them to describe big ideas? If I do, will math class turn into this thing that everyone hates (including me)?

How do I make reflection more natural? Students in the class need to be able to explain the ‘why’s’ behind all of the ideas in the class, so reflection should be though of as something as important as practice. Should I be doing more to change students thoughts about what math class is about?

Perhaps I am over thinking it. The fact that I had so much to think about made me glad that I am much more reflective teacher than I was when I originally made the worksheet. At the same time, I’m sure it’s unanswered questions like these that I need to reflect on if I want to keep getting better.

This Week: Spread Pretty Thin

By Carl Oliver

On May 10, 2016

In Uncategorized

There are a number of things on the calendar this week, including some exciting things, some programming for school that involves a lot of sitting in front of a computer, and apparently a burgeoning sore throat (ugh).

What I’m Teaching This Week

This week I am going to try to wrap up talking about the measures of center and start talking about the measures of spread. We talked about the IQR and outliers on the day before spring break, but I think I will need to review that since attendance was horrible on that day. I also want to talk about Standard Deviation, but I want to figure out how to get them to tell me what the formula should be. I’ll let you know how that goes.

What I’m Blogging This Week

One thing that I’m doing on the internet is giving a talk at the GLOBAL MATH DEPARTMENT!!! This talk, entitled “Teaching the Mathematical Practices Through Non-Routine Problems” is going to be the exact same 30 minute talk that I gave at NCTM a few weeks ago, with some time built in for doing some math. I’m pretty excited about it.

Hopefully I will be able to continue blogging about the #Shadowcon16 Calls To Action. So far I have talked about Robert Kaplinsky and Gail Burrill, which means that Kaneka Turner and Graham Fletcher would be the next two if I’m going in the order of the event, but I might also change it up and go with Rochelle Gutierrez or Brian Bushart, we’ll see what happens.

What I’m Thinking This Week

Yesterday one of the paraprofessionals at the school asked “what happened to you? You’re not happy anymore, where’s your smile?” I couldn’t really defend my self. It feels like I’m behind on a whole bunch of things at school, and I guess that takes it’s toll on your mood. As a person with a mood disorder, I am very aware of where I’m at, and it has been noticeably down since coming back from break. Sometimes your mood can be operating outside of the external or internal reality and not necessarily tied to that TPS report you need to file, or that thing that kid said. My first response is always to assume that it is on it’s way back around and to just have to ride it out. I get the feeling that in late June I will certainly be happier, so I’ll grind through for the next few weeks while looking for little moments to celebrate.

8/30

Answering the #Shadowcon16 Calls to Action – Part 1

By Carl Oliver

On May 8, 2016

In Conference Talks

Thanks @ddmeyer @Zakchamp @MikeFlynn55 for hosting a great #ShadowCon16 at #NCTMannual
So inspired! pic.twitter.com/EheEUrk5QM

— Carl Oliver (@carloliwitter) April 16, 2016

This year at NCTM I had the honor of helping to live tweet the ShadowCon event. I was super pumped to be sitting in the front row to send messages out about Robert Kaplinsky’s talk, as well as all of the others.

From @robertkaplinsky’s #Shadowcon16 talk.
One has power, the other has influence. Can you see the difference? pic.twitter.com/dWFzAh35j5

— Carl Oliver (@carloliwitter) April 16, 2016

Then I flew home, got back on the grind, and dove into my school work and my home life. For a moment I started to forget about the things I learned at the conference. Luckily, the people behind Shadowcon found ways to bring those ideas back up again and again through twitter. One of the ways the ideas from shadow con are supposed to come back is through the website which provides space to respond to each speakers calls to action.

As a way to connect this #MTBoS30 work with #Shadowcon16 calls to action, I am going to use a few of my 30 posts to address the calls to action. I will post the responses on this blog, as well as on the NCTM website.

Searching For Fraud – Fun group data analysis activity for MMMR review

By Carl Oliver

On May 7, 2016

In Uncategorized

Yesterday I rolled out my Fraud Detection Activity. It was A LOT of set up to make it a year ago, but it is great to use for where my kids are now. At this point my kids need to transition from thinking about computing MMMR (Mean, Median, Mode, Range) to thinking about USING MMMR to solve bigger problems. It also sets up for a great conversation about outliers which is where I am going next! Let me break down the activity.

Searching For Fraud

Here is the opening paragraph:

After a recent scandal on wall street, bankers from around around have started making a number of suspicious transactions around the country, and we as a class have been asked to help figure out which information should be used to help find the culprits.

Our job is to look at all of the data and try to find transactions that are little higher, or a little lower than what would be considered normal. So the first thing you should do as an expert is to look at your data, and talk about which would be the most useful of the number strategies to use in this situation:

Students will have to look at sets of transactions to see if any of them appear to be different from the rest because they might be fraudulent. Each student is given a sheet with 11 numbers and can use the tools they have learned to guess which numbers seem suspicious. All of the sheets have one or two clear outliers, and some others that are murky, while the rest of the numbers cluster closely around the mean.

At the end of their individual work, the students are told to get in groups of three and compare all of the work and use that to refine the numbers they think are suspicious. Students know they need to do the work correctly, and since they all have different numbers, groups can’t just copy if someone has trouble computing. Since all the initial calculation has been done, the groups have to decide the best way to discuss and present all of their data and thinking on chart paper along with a visual representation of their data. Yesterday the four groups used Unifix cubes as a quick visual representation.

The activity has a lot of good aspects to it, and a lot of things to improve.

Good things:

Students get to work independently, and in groups and the group work requires the students to depend on each other.
The groups hold the individuals accountable because they need each other’s information.
The kids get introduced to the difficulties around outliers, and the need for tools like the IQR or Standard deviation naturally.

Areas for improvement:

I should make some of the groups end up producing different numbers, so some of the groups’ outliers will be close to other groups’ median or average. This could get kids to want a method to compare the outliers from different sets of data.
I want to optimize the interface of the sheets so that kids understand the task better, and so that the group work is clearer and delineated.

If you’re interested in this, here is a google folder with the 18 different assignments, as well as the spreadsheet that I used the AutoCrat, the google sheets add-on, to generate each of the sheets.

6/30

This is my second post of the day since I slipped yesterday and forgot. My other post is here.

CLOG: Unfinished Business

By Carl Oliver

On May 6, 2016

In Clog

Today’s class began with the awkward dance of finishing what we left off the last class. The source of the awkwardness 40% of the kids unaware of what we did yesterday and needing to get caught up.

To combat the awkwardness I typically try and quickly get those 3 up to speed, but the students were responsible, and did what they had to do the day before end up sitting their bored. Today that wouldn’t work because it would require too much circulating. Instead I tried to do a comprehensive recap of what happened last class, and then ask the absentee kids to ignore front page of the assignment and instead join the rest of the class on the back page. Instead I caught all of them working on the front because they wanted to work linearly. What ended up happening was the worst of both worlds, where I had to wait for the whole class to finish so I could have the discussion, leaving some of the other students doodling in their notebooks for longer than I’d like. Guh.

Luckily, the discussion was great, as kids were saying exactly the things I hoped them they would say. I felt like Hannibal at the end of an A-Team episode when it was all said and done.

5/30