Ha Ha to A-Ha

Today's keynote address was called "The Sense of Humor". It wasn't as funny as I hoped it would be, but it made me feel like I'm doing something right. If nothing else, I do know how to make my students laugh.

One point made was that students come into every situation and subconsciously decide if it's a safe place or not. If it seems threatening, that's when the fight or flight response comes into place. Humor, especially making fun of yourself creates fun and welcoming environment. Also, by making the class a fun place to be, students are more likely to show up. A simple concept. Looks like I'm not the only one who hates to miss out.

Some research of humor's effectiveness showed that:

• Humor facilitates learning.
• Humor helps change people’s behavior.
• Humor promotes an increase in creativity.
• Humor reduces stress.

He also talked about having an arsenal of funny things always ready to use. In my class, I am that arsenal. He mentioned including humor on tests and worksheets. Also, to include visual humor and acting, not just telling jokes. Teachers are the greatest improvisers of all time. Especially if you don't make lesson plans. ;)

One idea I liked was making funny name tags. I don't know how I would incorporate this but it could be good for a beginning of the year icebreaker. Or maybe at the end of the year to remind students of how they changed over the year. It sounds like fun anyway.

Although we had to do a lame ha-ha-he-he-ho-ho chant and make weird faces, the lecture was good.

Check out these resources.

The breakout session I chose was called "Math Games to Build Math Skills and Thinking". My first impression of the educational consultant was that she was condescending and rude. She made us feel stupid for teaching the way we teach; as if her way was the only correct way of teaching. Which, I just realized, means I need to be careful about making students feel stupid for not thinking the same way as me, or what I deem as "correct".

We didn't really learn a whole lot about games but one thing I did like was the idea of using a game to teach the concept and then the assessment is that they have to teach someone else how to play the game. We all know learning is done best by teaching others and I think it would be something students would understand and appreciate more. And you can't really cheat.

I wish I could have a cool game, song, video, or idea to go with every concept I teach. I can handle the warm up and the assessment and all the housekeeping crap, but I need engaging, meaningful content and I need it now!!

Some of the games mentioned in the handout were Pig, Math Dice, Roll Two Dice, Two Dice Sums, How Long, How Many?, Capture, Who's the Greatest (version of Capture), Card Countdown, Is It 10?, Number Club: A Game of Place Value, Pigs and Chickens, Twenty-Five: A Math Card Game, Number Thief, Fact-O!, Math Bingo, and Contig. If you've played any of these or want to know more, you can e-mail me for more instructions.

She had some games available for us to play for including Equate, Smath, Set Game, 24 (Fraction-Percent-Decimal) and some others I don't remember. But they did have a pegboard that was the coordinate plane. It came with pegs and rubber bands. It looked really fun to use for graphing, reflections, and transformations.

Check out these links to math games.

Thanks to todays sessions and a Geico commerical, I learned that we need to let kids be themselves. They learn more when they play and enjoy themselves. We should quit trying to place limits on who they are and instead make who they are better and better. Plus I don't plan to spend all day, every day not having fun.

Nothing is quite as funny as the unintended humor in reality. -Steve Allen

Week 8

I'm tired just thinking about the past week.

It started out good and I had high hopes.

I've been doing a lot of intro to proof activities this week including 20 questions and this robot activity, which was so fun. I think the students have been learning just how specific and precise they need to be and that steps can't be left out. The down side is that I think I did all of this too early. We haven't learned enough theorems or postulates to really do any proofs other than algebraic ones. I feel like I've built up all this momentum just to stop the train until a later date.

In algebra, we spent all week working 3 types of word problems: age, perimeter, and consecutive integers. Consecutive integers is loved the most by far, as many students can guess and check. Students are having trouble remembering to substitute values in to the length and width for the perimeter formula. I suppose this is something I need to review and scaffold beforehand. With the age, sometimes they get it, sometimes they don't. Today I gave a 6 problem quiz- 2 of each type and let them use their notes. I'm still surprised that they aren't getting the hang of it more. They seem to understand when we do examples on the board though. I've realized that I don't think I do enough for students to assess themselves. I check homework for completion only even though we go over all the answers, so they're really only assessed for accuracy on our weekly quizzes. Is that not often enough? Do I need to do a mid-week homework quiz or something similar?

On the positive side, I'm happy that my applied algebra classes are moving along at the same pace as my regular algebra classes. Still feel like I am cheating the students by not making it more applied but not 100% sure how to go about that. Plus, there is the rest of the school year to work on that.

I've been slacking on my writing across the curriculum assignments and I realize that I miss them. I truly enjoy reading them and the students give me so much information about themselves without even realizing it. I feel like each week I continue to understand them more and more.

I have to say, I really really enjoy my students. After reading Paul's post, I realized how thankful I am for the relationship and environment that I share with my students. I am constantly bombarded by students in the hallway and between classes and I absolutely love it. We have a great time; lots and lots of laughs. I am not as strict as I should be but so far it hasn't kicked me in the butt too bad. I've learned how to effectively use that as my weapon: "As many times as I could have gotten you intro trouble and didn't and this is how you return the favor?" Yup, got that one in my back pocket. =)

In my after school tutoring program, I've been having steady numbers of 4-8 each day which is really good. There are a range of students with a range of needs which sometimes gets hectic but definitely keeps things fast paced. They've asked me to incorporate an hour of technology which is exciting, but could take away from the math help. Math is my first priority, obviously. But I'm looking for any and all ideas for technology. I am looking for things that can be done in under 1 hour or else done in 1 hour increments as well as being interesting and useful to their lives in some manner.

I'm being officially observed for the first time next week. I'm not nervous at all but I am having trouble deciding which class I would like to have them sit in on. My best class is my advanced eighth graders in Algebra I, but that feels like cheating because of course they're great, they're advanced! I thought about choosing some of my lower students because I would like to show that they can learn and do participate in class. I'd also like to prove that I can handle taking on a challenge. The complicated thing is, I don't plan more than one or two days ahead at the most so I don't even know what I'll be teaching at that point. I asked for a copy of the rubric that they'll be scoring me on and there are definitely things on there that I'm not currently doing. But won't it be too obvious if I start throwing those in there all of a sudden? I can just see me adding something different and the students asking why we've never done that before. lol

That reminds me, I tried this in my mouthy, hyperactive seventh hour class and it worked beautifully. I told them they were each getting a grade for that day's class period. They all started out with 100%- ten out of ten points. Each time they talked without being called on, they lost a point. I told them it was possible to get negative points if they couldn't control themselves. It was literally pin drop silent. It got kind of hairy when we were doing examples because they are used to speaking their answers out randomly. After a couple times though, they got the hang of it. By the end of the class, I think my lowest was 6 out of 10 points left. I gave them 5 minutes to talk at the end and they were all saying things like, "Hey I actually paid attention." "I knew what was going on." "We were actually quiet." Raising your hand to speak. Revolutionary. I am considering using that class for my observation, if nothing else than to show off my new technique. =)

Tomorrow is our regional teacher's institute. The region's teachers come together and we listen to a performance by the bands from all the high school's put together. I played in this band as a high school student and now I get to sit and listen as my two younger sisters play in it. And this time, I get to stay for the meetings. Young and new as I am, I enjoy meetings. Learning is always a priority for me, even if it's learning how to not have a boring meeting. I'm always looking for opportunities to be exposed to more knowledge, more learning, more people, more life. The keynote session is on "The Sense of Humor". (Hmm. That Paul Bogush may be on to something.) The session I'm going to is a 2-hour session on "Mathematical Games to Build Mathematical Thinking." What could be better than playing math games for two hours that I can also use in my lessons? Bingo! Ha ha, pun intended. There was a tech trends session but I'm always leery of those. Pretty sure I get introduced to more tech trends in one night on twitter than they could teach me in two hours. Not being cocky, just going on past experience. Anyway, I hope at the least, I come home with some good quotes and good ideas, and at the most, new friendships with area teachers, great resources, inspiration, motivation, creativity, and new perspective.

Did I mention it's a 4 day weekend and my grading is already done?

So fun.

Week 7

So thanks to my Twitter bff, my week started out more organized than the previous ones. I pulled out my planner, wrote in it, and actually looked at it. I know right! On one side, I wrote who was absent in each class. On the other side, I wrote the homework assignment for each class. This works especially well with the class whose behavior determines how many homework problems they have each night. That way I knew who needed to make up quizzes and I actually knew what homework problems we were doing.

I found that this week with my algebra classes, I tended to use less paper and did more class discussion and using the whiteboards, which hopefully means students were more engaged. That makes me happy. =) I taught solving equations and I really enjoyed it. I know now that I did not set it up well at all but I liked a lot of the things I did. Next year, I will do it better. I really liked this slide:

I had students come up and move the pieces around and put them in the correct order. In one of my smaller classes, we even did boys against girls. This was easy for the students but strangely enough, I put this exact problem on the test and they struggled with it. Then we did the steps to solving an equation:

As a homework assignment, I gave them each a piece of construction paper. They had to solve their own problem, write it out in steps, and then cut it apart. The next day they took turns solving each other's problems. I have to be honest, I only did this with one class and it got pushed to the side in my other classes. Something else to work on. But, I liked the idea. I also used an idea from @druinok to do partner problems. The worksheet has two columns of problems. One partner does the left column and the other partner does the right column. The problems are different, but the answers are the same. If they don't get the same answer, they know they made a mistake and they help each other find where they went wrong. Another thing I did, was to write a couple of problems out the wrong way and each student had to sit down with me individually and tell me if the problem was right or wrong and then how to correctly solve it. This helped me to better diagnose who was 'getting it', who wasn't and what the common mistakes were.

Then on Thursday, thanks again to the help of my twitter bff, I made my own webquest! I actually did make one during college but I can't even remember where it's at or how to get to it. I made this one from PowerPoint. I uploaded my PowerPoint to box.net and gave that link to the students. From there, they each downloaded the PowerPoint and completed the tasks. First, students had to solve 5 problems and show their work on paper. Then they input their answers to the website which showed them the solution and how to work it. I found two really cool games for solving equations. The first they timed you to see how many problems you could correctly solve in 1 minute. My requirement was that they reach 80% accuracy. (They quickly figured out if they did one problem correctly, it would give them 100% accuracy.) The other game was battleship but each time you hit a ship, you had to solve an equation. The students really liked this one. The Webquest went over pretty well but I tried to accomplish way too much in 50 minutes and so they didn't even get close to taking the final quiz which I wanted to count as a grade. On the plus side, they were actively engaged the whole time and were solving problems, which is always a bonus.

Friday's quiz, I broke down very simply, or so I thought. I did one-step problems, then two-step problems, then decimal equations, then multi-step. Again, I made it too long. One class didn't even get finished and others barely made it before the bell rang. I may have spent too much time reviewing beforehand.

My applied geometry class was a fail this week. I spent the whole week on one section, parallel and perpendicular lines. I didn't even teach slope or theorems or anything. Just determining which lines are parallel, perpendicular, or skew. It wasn't even that the students were struggling...I really don't know what happened. I came up with a cool assignment to make a collage of geometric figures found in real world objects. I thought students could do this when I had a meeting. When I came back, only one student could get the website to work.

My regular geometry class went better. We started the week out learning about the converse. I came up with this idea during student teaching and I still love it:

The converse is flippin cool so we flip the if-then statement around. Also, for my examples, I tried to use as many of my students names as possible. They absolutely love to hear their name in a positive light and see it in print. It truly does make a difference.

Then to teach properties of congruence (reflexive, symmetric, and transitive) I broke students up into 3 groups and had them act out or explain each property. This was a good way to break up the routine of my lecture and to give them a more active role in the learning.

From there, I skipped to parallel and perpendicular lines, and had students write their own notes to teach themselves and then do the homework.I had this class also attempt the collage project which went over better but still, for some reason, the site wouldn't work for all students.

My geometry quiz (I actually call them quests because I can never decide if they are quizzes or tests) turned out to be super easy. I had tons of 100's and students in finished in about 10 minutes or so. I guess eventually I will figure out the right balance.

I'm also doing much better at tentatively planning what I'm doing for the week and putting thins in my binder as soon as I copy it. I bought hanging folders for my chaotic desk drawer but haven't had time to put them in yet.

My geometry classes are starting to branch off and become more differentiated.  It's hard for me to decide which theorems or postulates to teach if we aren't doing proofs. My main focus is to prepare them for the ACT and for college entrance exams.

I'm still horrible at getting things done over the weekend. I usually work til 6 or so on Fridays amd for some reason, my Saturday always slips through my fingers. Then on Sunday nights, I am glued to the computer trying to get everything done at once. Not good. If it wasn't for my beloved Sunday nap, I could get a lot more work done. ;)

And my closing reflection for the week...interesting conversation on Twitter resulted in @stoppedupmath changing my whole outlook on what school really is:

stoppedupmath @misscalcul8 I redefine the purpose of high school 4 kids the first week of school. I remind them that it's not job training, but exposure. That way, when students ask the "when" question, I get to tell them, "I don't know, and neither do you. Remember: exposure." Yes, exposure to everything possible. When we start exposing them to diverse topics, they will find SOMETHING they enjoy enough to possibly choose a career path/college major. That's totally different from job training which is teaching students the exact skills they are going to need for a job they have already taken.

stoppedupmath @misscalcul8 Telling HS kids in Alg. we're preparing them for a career is no more true than if we told that to elem. kids during spelling. We're still teaching basic skills. Real job skills come either in college or in trade school, or actually on the job.

What? School ISN'T job training?? Now I have to redefine the purpose of high school for myself. I love thinking about this. How are you working to expose more and more of life to your students?

Week 6

Picture it- my classroom. Monday morning, 7:30. I'm at my desk getting things together. A substitute teacher walks in and tells me she is my sub for today and tomorrow. Ummm...I know it's Monday but I am actually here. I tell her I'm not going anywhere and she leaves to go check with the office. At 7:45 I leave to go do gym duty. I come back at 8:00 and there is another substitute in my room. Another one. At this point I decide to go check with the office my self. When I get there, the secretaries inform me that they don't know what's going on either. There was a bus issue and so the principal has not arrived at school yet. Hmm. I go back to my room and begin teaching, like normal. About 8:30 the principal comes in to inform me that I have a training today and here is my sub. Another one. He tells me to give him my plans and be quick about it. Um hi, my plans were to teach. So I make up an assignment out of the book and leave. In the hallway, the principal then informs me that I am the trainer! Apparently I have a two-day training for next month and the principal had the dates mixed up. So since we had all these extra substitutes to pay utilize, he decided I could train the teachers who weren't currently using our online grade book program.

I didn't do anything with my other classes besides go over their tests from Friday and do our daily warm up. Lame I know, but we're allowed to have bad days. I'm glad that I didn't allow it to be a bad week.

I had planned to do fun functions things on Monday so I regrouped and started again on Tuesday. I intro'd functions by showing pictures of a vending machine and having a discussion on what goes in, what comes out, how many come out, and how each of those can change. I transitioned vending machine into function machine and played the function machine game which was hard to explain but easy to figure out once you started playing. It was fun to watch the students work through the struggle and figure out the answer. If you play it, my advice is to resist the urge to tell the answer too soon! As Dan Meyer would say, be less helpful!

Wednesday. A very very kind twitter-er gave me a link to a pacing guide that had lessons, warm ups, homework, exit tickets, worksheets, and everything! I used the functions lesson and it served its purpose better than what anything I could have created. I think. But the real gem of this lesson was using my whiteboards. I have enough for each student and in this case, they used them to write the function. I modeled function notation first and they then tried to write the function based on the patterns they saw in the input-output tables. Then I had them create their own input output tables where the rest of the class had to guess the functions. The students really got into this and wanted to play again and again. It didn't take long for students to create functions that were 4 and 5 steps long and almost impossible to guess. Another lesson in itself.

Thursday we used the whiteboards again to review. I alternated between giving them tables and they wrote the function or I gave the function and they created the tables. The whiteboards are fun for them and they instantly show me who is understanding and who isn't. I can just shake my head and they try again. Embarrassment eliminated. I love that factor. I also intro'd graphing by having them graph the input/output tables and I wanted to go on with the vertical test concept but didn't. Should have, might still do it, but didn't. We talked about each input having the same output in order for it to be function and I related that back to the vending machine theory. If I put in D2 I get a Milky Way every time, no surprises.

Friday was quiz day. I incorporated celebrity baby trivia into my warm up. I showed a baby picture of Miley Cyrus and had them guess who it was. It was definitely fun to hear students guess boy names but a lot of them got it on the first try. My quizzes seemed to go over pretty well. They all struggled with determining the functions from the given table. But I enjoyed talking them through it and watching them figure out the pattern. Reminds me of a favorite teacher quote: True teachers show you where to look but not what to see. After the quiz I normally have students do a journal assignment. This week I decided to spice it up. I had them draw their own function machine. Anything could go in and anything could go out but they had to give me four examples of each. Note to self: I think this should have come earlier in the unit. Probably after the discussion about the vending machine and before the function game.

In our after school tutoring program, I only have one or two students each time. On the one hand I have a seventh grader who is in pre-algebra and is dying to be in my eight grade algebra class next year. She insists that she only learns if she is with me but she comes to me knowing all her material. But we practice and she feels more confident, which is the goal. My other student is in Algebra II. I asked him what chapter they're on and what they're doing. He didn't know. He continued on to tell me that he passed geometry by cheating his way through and I quickly figured out he doesn't even have Algebra I skills. How does this happen?

For the most part, I only talk about my Algebra classes. This is because I feel most confident teaching algebra and because I have 4 algebra classes compared to the 2 geometry classes. So to talk about my geometry classes...I taught vertical angles and linear pairs. I didn't come up with anything exciting or interesting to teach about these so not to much to say on that. But, on the interesting side, I taught conditional statements using song lyrics. I gave them song lyrics that they then had to rewrite and identify the hypothesis and conclusion. Then we went to negations. I wrote out statements I knew they would feel strongly about such as "Lil Wayne is ugly" and other things about our school, town, etc. It was easy for them to then create the negation of that song. I liked it, they liked it, and even better, I think they remembered it.

The thing I am still struggling with is that my 'applied' classes aren't really applied. My bff teacher friend says that a good teacher makes every class applied. Ouch. I feel like I'm not doing them any favors by this either. I just don't know how to make it applied. Or rather I don't know how to differentiate between the two. It takes me forever to plan for two classes already.

I really want to try problem based learning in my classes but don't really know where to start. I'm thinking about trying some webquests just to do something different. I really want the students to take some ownership of their learning and really have to search for the answer to things because they need it, not because I tell them too. That may be the key to everything.

Teacher Salaries

http://www.theteachersalaryproject.org/

I received an e-mail introducing this project.

The Teacher Salary Project is soon to be a full-length documentary highlighting the importance of education within US society. The project is based on the New York Times bestselling book "Teachers Have It Easy" by journalist and teacher Daniel Moulthrop, co-founder of the 826 National writing programs Nínive Calegari, and writer Dave Eggers. THE TEACHER SALARY PROJECT is produced by Eggers and Calegari, and directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth.

When I checked out the site, I discovered they really want to let teachers know of this and collect stories from the field. It looks like a great way to expose what day-to-day life is like in the classroom.

Here's an excerpt:
We want to highlight more STORIES FROM THE FIELD. We are collecting materials made and submitted by YOU! Express your feelings creatively. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Write a letter or poem
• Photograph a school activity in action
• Document a class with audio recordings
• Create a musical composition
• Dedicate a song and dance
• Produce a music video
• Build something with mixed media and photograph it
• Write a short biography
• Record some of your favorite sayings or activities
• Use crayons, craypas, paint, pencil, chalk, or recycled materials to construct art
• Create a magazine collage
• Share something you use every day that your teacher or student taught you
• Share a funny story
• Put together a video journal

Check out some the clips already submitted as well.

There are a lot of intriguing and interesting reviews and it seems to be a ground breaking type of documentary.

I don't know the entire scope of the documentary but I do know I welcome any opportunity to expose the truth and authenticity of what teaching really is.