While it's fun to pretend to be perfect on our blogs, and let people think that every lesson is as polished as that one that you spent hours putting together, implementing, reflecting on and writing up, we all know that's just not the case. Sometimes a lesson we spent hours putting together totally flops. Or one that worked perfectly for someone else (or you!) in the past, doesn't come together at all this time. Conversation this week has turned to those lessons that don't go as planned. The question a student asked that you didn't know how to answer. The problem someone posed that you still haven't figured out a good explanation for. Kate posted about how wonderful confusion is. Michael shared his goal of practicing the skills of teaching in meaningful ways. I want everyone to have a safe place to respond to this push and share the scary stuff- admit that you have no idea how to fix something, ask for help with a particular class or lesson, do a deep analysis of whatever thought you can't get out of your mind lately. After tossing some ideas around I've decided I'd like to create a blog to do exactly that. A place where it's expected that you won't know the answers, and where people can brainstorm solutions to the biggest challenges in teaching. My vision is something along the lines of One Good Thing - one site with many authors (plus a submission form so that anyone can contribute without becoming an author). At the moment the biggest hurdle to this is I have no idea what to call it. The main issue is, I don't know what to call the topic, in fact it's a conversation I've had many times with teachers:
We want our students to ___ with a problem, because if they don't ___ it's not really learning.
Students don't feel a sense of accomplishment unless they ___ first.
All the words I can think of and have used in the past have such negative connotations. I've used struggle, be frustrated, wrestle... We want students to fail, make mistakes, find their errors, try again. Each of those steps is so connected with negative emotions though. As teachers, we need to do the same thing. We need to... wallow? That's cheesemonkeysf's term.
So, here I am, openly admitting that I need help. I have no idea what to call this blog, this phenomenon of having a hard time with something in order to really understand it. Grappling? I'll stop trying and just ask for help. What do you call this concept? What should we call the blog?
Thank you for your assistance,
Tina
p.s. Some blog title ideas from twitter so far:
Failing Flamboyantly
Need More Practice
Learning from our Mistakes
Making Flops Flip
Fixer Uppers
Where Did I Go Right?
Problem of the Week
Problem for the Tweak
I really want a word for the concept too. Maybe someone should just invent a new word and we can spread it?
January 27, 2013
January 25, 2013
A Day in the Life: Midterms Edition
All this week students took midterm exams, which meant that they only stayed half the day. Must have been the easiest week ever, right? Not exactly. Here's what a day of midterms week looked like for me.
7:15 am Arrive at school, greet students. Learn who gets to school early since I never see this class first. Some students are anxious so I offer encouragement. Other students ask their peers last minute questions or lament the difficulty of yesterday's exams. Students filter in and I'm relieved to see that everyone is present, make up exams are a pain to schedule.
7:24 am Announcements, I stand for the pledge of allegiance then start distributing reference sheets- I want to get started immediately since the last class needed extra time. Something goes wrong with the loudspeaker and they say the pledge again, finally announcements are done. I explain that there are two parts of the test- calculator and non calculator, distribute the first section and everyone gets quiet and focused.
While they work, I circulate the room occasionally and then try to balance getting my work done with watching them. First I reclaim my desk from the piles of papers that have taken over. Thank goodness for filing cabinets!
For the geometry exam we used scantron for the first time and the scores we got back aren't the ones I will use- admin required that we give a state test style exam, then required that we scale the exams. Scantron only gives a percentage which is annoying to scale. I play with formulas on excel until the grades look reasonable and after I put them into the computer system the class average changes by a tenth of a point. Sometimes I wonder why we bother, I grade by standards all quarter and have a good sense of what my students understand, midterms reflect what I've seen all year so they're rather redundant.
Meanwhile, this class is starting to finish the first section of the test. Every time someone wants to switch they bring me some papers to trade for more papers and I remind them to put their calculator under their desk. Constant interruptions means I don't get the inputting done quickly, but by the end of the exam I've completed grades for two classes and comments for a third. Near the end of the period a student raises her hand. I go over and she is very worried that she failed the test, as I reassure her she starts crying. I promise not to count any question from before she transferred in and wish there was something else I could do to make her feel better.
8:55 am The bell rings to signal the end of the first exam. I announce that anyone who is done may leave and those who aren't finished should continue working. We have a fifteen minute break between exams and a few more students finish but quite a few will need to come back after their next exam. The other precalc teacher and I got too excited adding good problems to the exam and didn't realize exactly how long it would take everyone!
9:10 am Bell rings to start the final exam of the week. I was very lucky and had a prep this block so I only have the exams from this morning left to grade. However, I've been grading and proctoring all week (not to mention attending meetings and proctoring make up exams) so I decide to spend some time prepping first. I have ideas for the next unit (polygons) from last year, but I need to edit one worksheet and create another. I take a break from geometry to put in grades and comments from the other PreCalc class, then go back and finalize the worksheets and my smartboard file.
10:40 am Bell rings to end the last exam. Principal gets on loudspeaker to congratulate students and staff on surviving a tough week. I curse my timing, no chance to run off copies before students return to finish their exams.
Students from earlier work silently finishing their exams. Two students from another class stop by to see their grades and are disappointed. I start explaining how one of them didn't retake a test and they confess neither had submitted a project from last week. In a moment of weakness I allow them to finish the project and hand it in now. Sadly, they didn't remember some key information so they didn't get full credit on the project, but anything is better than a zero. The teacher across the hall needs to leave so I get one more student to monitor. The teacher next door offers to re-scan some of my scantron sheets that had issues. We troubleshoot and find a workaround, then she heads off to the scanner.
I tackle my email. Every time I find an interesting blog post, article or image at home, I send it to my school email. Today I finally went through all those emails and sorted them into the appropriate places on my computer. Also sent emails to parents and ask about a course I signed up for a month ago but have yet to hear back from.
11:30 am Only one student remains working on her exam. I decide to open the package of geoboards we ordered last June and realize they will be a great addition to Monday's lesson. Edit smartboard file to reflect this realization.
11:45 am The last student is done! I can finally make copies.
12 pm The teacher next door and I grab our lunches, head upstairs and inform all the members of our lunch crew it's time to eat. It's strange not responding to a bell for once! Lunch lasts an hour but you'd think we were at a department meeting. We discussed methods of scaling exams (and how to make sure we don't have to deal with that headache come finals) and upcoming lessons. It's great that half our department eats lunch together because whenever I have a question about what my students learned last year or how other people teach a topic, I just ask at lunch!
1 pm We track down my co-teacher and six of us sign up for a self paced course through Cantor. While we're passing the phone around getting signed up another teacher walks in and we convince her to join us too. More discussions on scaling exams, misconceptions, areas to focus on and methods of review.
2 pm School is officially over and for once I'm going home. I still haven't looked at the exams students took this morning and while I have a better sense of my next unit in PreCalc based on the lunch conversation, I don't have a plan for Tuesday. However, I'm tired and I can do both those things from home.
2:30 pm Home, on the couch, reading twitter and blogs.
It's now 4 pm and I've caught up with myself. This evening I will probably work on my blog posts reflecting on first semester and look at fractal projects which will allow students to practice and apply complex numbers. While I'm curious how the exams went this morning I probably won't get to those until Sunday. Even though I didn't do any teaching today, it was still a long, busy day. And even with students officially getting out of school at 10:40, giving me "all afternoon" to work, I still have a backpack full of papers to look at this weekend. Surprise, surprise, midterms week isn't a cake walk after all.
7:15 am Arrive at school, greet students. Learn who gets to school early since I never see this class first. Some students are anxious so I offer encouragement. Other students ask their peers last minute questions or lament the difficulty of yesterday's exams. Students filter in and I'm relieved to see that everyone is present, make up exams are a pain to schedule.
7:24 am Announcements, I stand for the pledge of allegiance then start distributing reference sheets- I want to get started immediately since the last class needed extra time. Something goes wrong with the loudspeaker and they say the pledge again, finally announcements are done. I explain that there are two parts of the test- calculator and non calculator, distribute the first section and everyone gets quiet and focused.
While they work, I circulate the room occasionally and then try to balance getting my work done with watching them. First I reclaim my desk from the piles of papers that have taken over. Thank goodness for filing cabinets!
For the geometry exam we used scantron for the first time and the scores we got back aren't the ones I will use- admin required that we give a state test style exam, then required that we scale the exams. Scantron only gives a percentage which is annoying to scale. I play with formulas on excel until the grades look reasonable and after I put them into the computer system the class average changes by a tenth of a point. Sometimes I wonder why we bother, I grade by standards all quarter and have a good sense of what my students understand, midterms reflect what I've seen all year so they're rather redundant.
Meanwhile, this class is starting to finish the first section of the test. Every time someone wants to switch they bring me some papers to trade for more papers and I remind them to put their calculator under their desk. Constant interruptions means I don't get the inputting done quickly, but by the end of the exam I've completed grades for two classes and comments for a third. Near the end of the period a student raises her hand. I go over and she is very worried that she failed the test, as I reassure her she starts crying. I promise not to count any question from before she transferred in and wish there was something else I could do to make her feel better.
8:55 am The bell rings to signal the end of the first exam. I announce that anyone who is done may leave and those who aren't finished should continue working. We have a fifteen minute break between exams and a few more students finish but quite a few will need to come back after their next exam. The other precalc teacher and I got too excited adding good problems to the exam and didn't realize exactly how long it would take everyone!
9:10 am Bell rings to start the final exam of the week. I was very lucky and had a prep this block so I only have the exams from this morning left to grade. However, I've been grading and proctoring all week (not to mention attending meetings and proctoring make up exams) so I decide to spend some time prepping first. I have ideas for the next unit (polygons) from last year, but I need to edit one worksheet and create another. I take a break from geometry to put in grades and comments from the other PreCalc class, then go back and finalize the worksheets and my smartboard file.
10:40 am Bell rings to end the last exam. Principal gets on loudspeaker to congratulate students and staff on surviving a tough week. I curse my timing, no chance to run off copies before students return to finish their exams.
Students from earlier work silently finishing their exams. Two students from another class stop by to see their grades and are disappointed. I start explaining how one of them didn't retake a test and they confess neither had submitted a project from last week. In a moment of weakness I allow them to finish the project and hand it in now. Sadly, they didn't remember some key information so they didn't get full credit on the project, but anything is better than a zero. The teacher across the hall needs to leave so I get one more student to monitor. The teacher next door offers to re-scan some of my scantron sheets that had issues. We troubleshoot and find a workaround, then she heads off to the scanner.
I tackle my email. Every time I find an interesting blog post, article or image at home, I send it to my school email. Today I finally went through all those emails and sorted them into the appropriate places on my computer. Also sent emails to parents and ask about a course I signed up for a month ago but have yet to hear back from.
11:30 am Only one student remains working on her exam. I decide to open the package of geoboards we ordered last June and realize they will be a great addition to Monday's lesson. Edit smartboard file to reflect this realization.
11:45 am The last student is done! I can finally make copies.
12 pm The teacher next door and I grab our lunches, head upstairs and inform all the members of our lunch crew it's time to eat. It's strange not responding to a bell for once! Lunch lasts an hour but you'd think we were at a department meeting. We discussed methods of scaling exams (and how to make sure we don't have to deal with that headache come finals) and upcoming lessons. It's great that half our department eats lunch together because whenever I have a question about what my students learned last year or how other people teach a topic, I just ask at lunch!
1 pm We track down my co-teacher and six of us sign up for a self paced course through Cantor. While we're passing the phone around getting signed up another teacher walks in and we convince her to join us too. More discussions on scaling exams, misconceptions, areas to focus on and methods of review.
2 pm School is officially over and for once I'm going home. I still haven't looked at the exams students took this morning and while I have a better sense of my next unit in PreCalc based on the lunch conversation, I don't have a plan for Tuesday. However, I'm tired and I can do both those things from home.
2:30 pm Home, on the couch, reading twitter and blogs.
It's now 4 pm and I've caught up with myself. This evening I will probably work on my blog posts reflecting on first semester and look at fractal projects which will allow students to practice and apply complex numbers. While I'm curious how the exams went this morning I probably won't get to those until Sunday. Even though I didn't do any teaching today, it was still a long, busy day. And even with students officially getting out of school at 10:40, giving me "all afternoon" to work, I still have a backpack full of papers to look at this weekend. Surprise, surprise, midterms week isn't a cake walk after all.
January 21, 2013
PreCalc: Semester 1
As midterms are this week, we have reached the halfway point of the school year. Hard to believe it! This seems like an ideal time to look back over first semester. In my school we start PreCalculus with trigonometry. Students only see basic triangle trig in Geometry so this is a new topic for everyone. In the past teachers found themselves sucked into review and losing the strongest students at the very beginning of the year, they decided starting with new materials is the best way to avoid this. To be sure all students were starting on equal footing when it comes to the basics of graphing and manipulating graphs we had the honors students complete a summer assignment. Then, the students who struggled came to me outside of class for extra help, and the ones who had already mastered their families of functions moved straight into Trig.
The very first day of class I had students make up a random survey question and survey their classmates (getting to know you activity with ulterior motive? check). I then distributed a large circle with a point at the center to each student and instructed them to create an accurate circle graph of their data (I none too subtly pointed out where various supplies are located in the classroom). Finally, I asked students to precisely find the arc length of each arc in their circle (in centimeters). Students played right into my plan as if they knew exactly what we were doing and asked about using degrees to measure arcs like they did in geometry. Enter the radian! This lesson would have been perfect if I'd had radian protractors, but we did well enough without them (plus, they didn't even exist in September).
From here we continued into your basic triangle trig, build the unit circle, graph trig function sequence. Nothing particularly spectacular to say here. I wish I'd had Fouss' awesome unit circle at the time, it's much more organized than the ones I was using. After we had finished our study of the unit circle, one of my students had the suggestion that if they could fill in an entire unit circle they should get to use one on the tests (I'd been giving them blank ones to use, but his complaint was it took too long to fill in). This was a totally valid request and so I gave everyone this option for the midterm, next year I'll do it earlier.
When we got to identities, students struggled. For valid reasons I outlined before. But also because I forgot to have them ever use what they struggled to prove! Most of the time, we prove something so that we can use it, not just because proofs are fun. I realized my mistake when I was glancing over the midterm some classes used last year. Next year we will alternating proving identities and using them to solve problems. This will quiet some of the pleas for numbers (my students really missed arithmetic during this unit) and will give them a sense of purpose in amongst all of these challenging, many step problems. For this exact reason, laws of sines and cosines were received with cheers- we actually used something we proved and there were numbers again!
Our final unit of first semester was inverse functions. This was part review, part extension. Most students did well and the biggest issue I encountered was students trying to solve everything in their heads. I'm hoping that second semester will be similar since we will now move into topics that should be familiar but we will build up and out and around their current knowledge.
I used a version of Standards Based Grading this year where students assessed on each topic twice. We do short quizzes on one standard and tests on a few standards at a time. I'm generally happy with how that has been going. The honors students are awesome about taking advantage of the retakes and they appreciate only having to retake one section of a test (as do I- less grading!). We do a variety of in class activities for each unit (called tasks below). Some activities are longer and require out of class time, those are collected for a grade.
I thought I'd done a terrible job with blogging about PreCalc but it wasn't actually so bad. I'll try to fill in the holes of how I implemented geometric proof (a post I started ages ago but never finished) and the inverse function unit.
The very first day of class I had students make up a random survey question and survey their classmates (getting to know you activity with ulterior motive? check). I then distributed a large circle with a point at the center to each student and instructed them to create an accurate circle graph of their data (I none too subtly pointed out where various supplies are located in the classroom). Finally, I asked students to precisely find the arc length of each arc in their circle (in centimeters). Students played right into my plan as if they knew exactly what we were doing and asked about using degrees to measure arcs like they did in geometry. Enter the radian! This lesson would have been perfect if I'd had radian protractors, but we did well enough without them (plus, they didn't even exist in September).
From here we continued into your basic triangle trig, build the unit circle, graph trig function sequence. Nothing particularly spectacular to say here. I wish I'd had Fouss' awesome unit circle at the time, it's much more organized than the ones I was using. After we had finished our study of the unit circle, one of my students had the suggestion that if they could fill in an entire unit circle they should get to use one on the tests (I'd been giving them blank ones to use, but his complaint was it took too long to fill in). This was a totally valid request and so I gave everyone this option for the midterm, next year I'll do it earlier.
When we got to identities, students struggled. For valid reasons I outlined before. But also because I forgot to have them ever use what they struggled to prove! Most of the time, we prove something so that we can use it, not just because proofs are fun. I realized my mistake when I was glancing over the midterm some classes used last year. Next year we will alternating proving identities and using them to solve problems. This will quiet some of the pleas for numbers (my students really missed arithmetic during this unit) and will give them a sense of purpose in amongst all of these challenging, many step problems. For this exact reason, laws of sines and cosines were received with cheers- we actually used something we proved and there were numbers again!
Our final unit of first semester was inverse functions. This was part review, part extension. Most students did well and the biggest issue I encountered was students trying to solve everything in their heads. I'm hoping that second semester will be similar since we will now move into topics that should be familiar but we will build up and out and around their current knowledge.
I used a version of Standards Based Grading this year where students assessed on each topic twice. We do short quizzes on one standard and tests on a few standards at a time. I'm generally happy with how that has been going. The honors students are awesome about taking advantage of the retakes and they appreciate only having to retake one section of a test (as do I- less grading!). We do a variety of in class activities for each unit (called tasks below). Some activities are longer and require out of class time, those are collected for a grade.
Quarter 1:
- Task: Summer Assignment on Families of Functions
- Radians (Task: circle graph)
- Evaluate Trig (Triangle Trig, Unit Circle)
- Graphing Sin/Cos (Tasks: ferris wheel, writing prompt) (better method for describing shifts and stretches - use next year)
- Writing Trig Equations (from graph or description)
- Graphing Trig Functions (using graphing calc) (Task: make a picture using trig functions)
- Evaluating Inverse Trig Functions
Quarter 2:
- Proving Identities (Task: geometric and algebraic proofs)
(skipped applying them until the midterm review) - Law of sines/cosines (Task: derivation of each law and area formulas)
- Law of sines/cosines Applications (Task: writing prompt)
- Triangle Area (forgot Heron's formula until after test, should be part of applications)
- Find/verify inverses graphically (includes restricting domain and identifying one-to-one functions) (Task: use tables, equations and graphs to determine characteristics of identities)
- Find/verify inverses algebraically
I thought I'd done a terrible job with blogging about PreCalc but it wasn't actually so bad. I'll try to fill in the holes of how I implemented geometric proof (a post I started ages ago but never finished) and the inverse function unit.
January 9, 2013
Tina's 2012 Report
Dan Meyer set out this challenge last week. If he'd timed it better, I would have shared his video from 2009 with my students when I assigned this project (updated slightly, if the new version seems substantially better when I get around to grading them I'll blog about the changes). There's always next year!
It took me a bit to find the place to download my phone data, so if you have AT&T I'll save you the hassle, (look for instructions at the end of this post). Otherwise this was a fun exercise and a walk down memory lane!
Question: Is it worth it to change my 200 text message limit?
Observations: The months I travel (summer, December, February) are also the ones that I communicate the most. I had 3 sets of visitors in October of 2011, but nearly half of the calls are to/from numbers I don't recognize. Not sure what that says about my month!
My parents call me regularly (I should be a better daughter and call them too, but I hate the phone...). If I'd counted minutes rather than number of calls they would be much farther in the lead. However, my dad and I exchanged a total of 11 text messages over 17 months and my mom has never sent a text message (although we do chat on words with friends - that almost counts!).
The other people are friends who I both talk and text with. Although truth be told, I'd rather see them in person and short of that prefer email. Unsurprisingly the people I communicate with the most are also the ones I see the most. This fact is the most obvious when you consider my amazing PCMI roommate Ashli.
Ashli and I apparently only communicate via phone when we're in the same place. Otherwise twitter and email work just fine!
Now it's your turn! If you have AT&T follow these steps:
Direct link (log in and then go to this link again)
Choose CSV if you have a mac, Numbers told me the xls version was tab delimited and didn't work
It took me a bit to find the place to download my phone data, so if you have AT&T I'll save you the hassle, (look for instructions at the end of this post). Otherwise this was a fun exercise and a walk down memory lane!
Observations: The months I travel (summer, December, February) are also the ones that I communicate the most. I had 3 sets of visitors in October of 2011, but nearly half of the calls are to/from numbers I don't recognize. Not sure what that says about my month!
My parents call me regularly (I should be a better daughter and call them too, but I hate the phone...). If I'd counted minutes rather than number of calls they would be much farther in the lead. However, my dad and I exchanged a total of 11 text messages over 17 months and my mom has never sent a text message (although we do chat on words with friends - that almost counts!).
The other people are friends who I both talk and text with. Although truth be told, I'd rather see them in person and short of that prefer email. Unsurprisingly the people I communicate with the most are also the ones I see the most. This fact is the most obvious when you consider my amazing PCMI roommate Ashli.
 |
| (PCMI is in July but my billing period ends on the 10th so the PCMI data is split between June and July) |
Ashli and I apparently only communicate via phone when we're in the same place. Otherwise twitter and email work just fine!
Now it's your turn! If you have AT&T follow these steps:
Direct link (log in and then go to this link again)
If that doesn't work:
- log in to AT&T
- from the menu across the top choose "My AT&T" then "Bill & Payments" then "Bill Details"
- scroll down to find your phone, click "usage details"
- scroll down, click "download call details" at the top right of the chart
- now choose CSV and download month by month
Choose CSV if you have a mac, Numbers told me the xls version was tab delimited and didn't work
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