This week I am going to get start\u00a0posting about my New Years Resolutions. \u00a0Now you may be thinking:<\/p>\n
Hold up Carl, weren’t you supposed to start on those on…umm, you know…NEW YEARS!!!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
How about you hold off on the judgement there Mr. or Mrs. High-Horse.\u00a0 I’ve been actually been doing my New Years resolutions since before the actual beginning of the year, but I wanted to wait until I followed through on them for a while before talking about them. Studies have shown that when\u00a0you tell people\u00a0about your goals you may\u00a0lose motivation<\/a>, so I figured I would take them on a test drive first. \u00a0This year I resolved to re-resolve about a month into the New Year with all the goals I wanted to reach.\u00a0 One of my many resolutions is to use this blog more, so with this post I am going to start my first\u00a0weekly post detailing what I plan to get done this week, as I have done in the past.<\/p>\n
What I’m teaching this week<\/h4>\n
This week is the last week of the cycle, we have about 4 days of class left and all of them are going to be students writing papers, with some nice activities in between.\u00a0 I am going to come up with a feedback survey, and perhaps some other end of class activity, but most of this week I will be grading students’ writing.<\/p>\n
How closely should\u00a0math teachers grade writing?\u00a0 I struggle with finding the line between critiquing a student’s grammar and critiquing a student’s voice.\u00a0 Also, does the kind of writing direction that I give on final written assignments contradict the instruction that the English teachers give?<\/p>\n
What I’m blogging this week<\/h4>\n
Most of my students are finishing my “Road Trip Project”, which has been in my rotation for linear equations for a long time. \u00a0Over the past 4\u00a0years A number of teachers have sat on my presentations, or heard about the project and it is kind of popular aroudn the school. So it was no surprise that when one of the teachers had to go on leave for a few weeks that they suggested sub teach the students\u00a0my “Road Trip Project.”\u00a0 As flattered as I was, I panicked when realizing that I had to take the instruction component of this project, which currently lives only in my head, and detail it for a substitute teacher. \u00a0I actually couldn’t explain to a sub what all to do in order to maximize student learning through the project, and didn’t want to see the project trivialized into a bunch of “answer getting”,\u00a0so I ended up teaching both his and my first period class as a combined group, and using my prep to teach his afternoon section.<\/p>\n
That made me think that maybe it would be a good exercise to go through a project that I teach and really detail all the little things I do along the way in order to make the most of it. \u00a0I wanted to try and write up this project and detail all the different things that are involved in the teaching the project both to get feedback, but to also practice this idea of taking what I do in the classroom and explaining it. We’ll see if I have time for it, as it’s already a short week.<\/p>\n
What I’m Thinking this week<\/h4>\n