As I mentioned in my previous post, I have spent way too much money on Amazon this summer. In my defense, I found some good stuff, so I thought I’d list some of it and how I plan to use it. I’m including links just in case anyone’s interested, but I’m not any sort of Amazon affiliate.
This phone holder was probably responsible for starting my Amazon spree. It has space for 36 phones (I only need 32), and I’m going to use these cards as placeholders (I also used my label maker to label 1-10 on the left side and 21-32 on the right side). I found this power strip with 22 outlets and 6 USB charging ports, which will be cool as long as I can manage the cables. I haven’t always taken up phones, but I think our new principal is going to be much stricter about phone usage.
This is a total shot in the dark, but I found these after watching one of Mrs. Arensberg’s videos (which I can’t find now) of her 4th grade class taking a break by going outside and blowing bubbles. The image of my high school kids doing this just tickled me, and since I’ve been trying to find some class incentives that don’t involve food, I thought I’d give these a try. My only concern is that we’re going to have to wait until it’s below 100 degrees outside!
This item will probably need a post by itself, but the short version is that I have an activity for my Astronomy students in which they do a mock mission of controlling a Mars rover. I used a GoPro to approximate a satellite view of the Mars surface, but unfortunately, someone stole the GoPro, so I’m hoping this dash cam will work as a replacement.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve needed one of these, but I would always forget to order one.
I hope my high school kids don’t find this insulting, but I’m so tired of students’ not being able to tell time from an analog clock. The clock in my new room is pretty tired looking, and at least this clock is colorful.
These circles are probably the reason I wrote this post. They are 11 inches in diameter and dry-erase, but how I plan to use them is to help kids rearrange desks in my room. My usual room arrangement is 8 groups of 4 desks. Whenever a class has a test, however, I go back to the traditional rows. After the test, students often want to help putting the desks back into groups, but I have to tell them that I have a system of what desk goes where.
My plan is to put a quarter circle on each corner of the desk in a group so that the four desks form a circle — this should be a pretty good visual clue of what desks go back together. Since they are also dry-erase, I can use them to number the desks for state testing, etc. I am very excited to get these cut and put on the desks.
I just bought this set of washi tape yesterday. My plan is to color-coordinate my laptops with their power cords.
This has been a very interesting and introspective summer for me. As I prepare to start my 19th (!?!) year of teaching, I’ve realized that I have fallen into a pretty large rut. Somewhat in my defense, there was covid, then there was the nightmare of “asynchronous learning”, and then just when I thought I was going to get back to normal, two things happened: I went back to grad school to pick up some additional hours in math, AND we have had such a teacher shortage in math that I had to go back to Geometry and Advanced (PAP) Geometry.
My school district (along with others in the DFW area) received a grant that would pay the tuitions of teachers who would go to UTA to earn their Master’s degrees or 18 graduate-level math hours so that they could teach dual-credit courses tied to the local community colleges. I already have my Master’s, but it’s an MA, not an MS. Tarrant County College (TCC) agreed to accept 12 of my 33 graduate hours, which means I needed 6 more. I hope you can imagine the fun of going into a graduate-level Linear Algebra and Matrices class not having done any math more advanced than Precalc in about twenty years. I began this in Fall, 2021 with the plan that I would only need two classes. I managed to squeak by the Linear Algebra class, but when I tried to take Abstract Algebra the following spring, my brain ground to a halt, and I had to drop the class. That summer, I took a Linear Algebra/Mathematical Analysis review class which the grant paid for but did not count towards the hours I needed. Finally, I took Analysis in the fall and passed the class. I then went through the interview process at TCC and not only was accepted as a dual-credit instructor, but I was also offered a position as an adjunct instructor for this fall!
The UTA classes were a huge drain on my energies, but I also faced two other challenges, both of my own making:
The textbook we had been using for Algebra 3 (think preparation for College Algebra) had been adopted in 2012. It had no online component at all, which was just spiffy during covid. Openstax.org has some great open-source college textbooks created by Rice University, so in Spring, 2022, I decided I wanted to shift over to their College Algebra textbook in the fall. I’m the only one teaching the course at my school, so I didn’t think anyone would care. Because I knew I would be taking Analysis in the fall, I wanted to get the whole first semester finished before school started, which I did. This turned out to be a very good thing because of challenge #2.
Because we were so short-handed in the math department, my school needed me more as a math teacher than as a math/Astronomy teacher. So instead of teaching Algebra 3 and Astronomy as I had done the previous year, I taught Advanced Geometry, Geometry, and Algebra 3. While I still had all of my Canvas coursework for Advanced Geometry, all of my classwork and quizzes were in the old quiz format. Because Canvas keeps saying they’re going to get rid of old quizzes (and I have become a convert to the new quiz format), I decided to redo all of my old quizzes. This was manageable until spring when not only was I still redoing all of the old quizzes, I had used up my slack on Algebra 3, so I was adapting the new textbook there as well.
As the school year wound down, I made a couple of decisions. The first decision I made was to apply for department chair (our existing one was leaving), which I received. As a part of that, I also decided to change rooms. My room had been at the end of the math hall, and not only would it be inconvenient for anyone needing to speak with me or me to speak to anyone, I was tired of being next to a stairwell. Ironically, I have moved back to the room that was my first classroom here at my school.
Once school was over and I started reflecting on the year, I realized I had been in survival mode for the last few years. As I began to look forward to this coming year, I wanted to take a fresh look at what I’ve been doing. My new room helped to give me a jump start on that as I moved eight years’ worth of accumulation. In order to get some fresh ideas, I ended up looking to the past. I went through every post on this blog and my various bookmarks on Twitter/X, reading/reminding myself what I’ve done before and other people’s ideas that I may not have tried. As I culled through these, it made me feel more and more like a teacher, instead of someone just going through the motions.
Another type of regeneration occurred as I watched videos from Mrs. Arensburg about her “care closet”. On the one hand, I really don’t like that we are essentially training parents that someone else will take care of their kids (don’t get me started on free breakfast and lunch for everyone), but I agree with her that it’s usually not the kids’ fault. Her videos, and the efforts of one of my neighbor teachers last year, got me to thinking about what I could do in my classroom. So I’ve decided to make my own “care drawers” with some basic personal and hygiene supplies. I’ll admit one of them does have an ulterior motive: every couple of weeks, a girl will ask to go to the nurse for a pad. It’s about a five-minute walk to the nurse’s office from my room, which means the girl is out of class for 12-15 minutes. If she can grab a pad from one of my drawers, that cuts about ten minutes from that time (and I don’t have to wonder if she just wanted an excuse to wander the hallways). I’m still figuring out logistics, but I hope this will help the students who need it most.
So for the first time in a while, I am feeling pretty excited about the beginning of school (except for getting up early — I am never excited about that!). My anticipation was increased when I learned that I got Astronomy back! Not only is this cool in and of itself, but we will be experiencing a total solar eclipse next year on April 8th!! Arlington is almost right smack dab in the middle of the path, and we will get about 3.5 minutes of totality! Go here to check if you’ll be able to see anything.
The only drawback to all of this renewed excitement is that I have spent way too much money on Amazon. I’m going to do another post about some of the things I’ve bought, but my bank account is not near as excited as I am!
Here’s the part where people will think I’m crazy. This is my schedule for next year (we’re on an AB block schedule):
A-Days
B-Days
1st – Conference
7th – Algebra 3
2nd – Advanced Geometry
8th – Astronomy
3rd – Business College Algebra (dual-credit)
9th – Astronomy
4th – Advanced Geometry
10th – Geometry PLC
That’s four preps. In addition, I will be teaching a College Algebra class at TCC on Monday and Wednesday nights, so essentially five preps.
The reason why this doesn’t really bother me is that I’ve already made the conversions for Algebra 3 and Advanced Geometry from last year, and Astronomy had been pretty smooth sailing for a couple of years. I definitely plan to make some tweaks, but the major work has been done. That leaves me with Business College Algebra and College Algebra, and I can use some of my Algebra 3 resources on both of these.
Teachers start back on Monday, and I am really looking forward to getting my room set up and finalizing some of the things I’ve been working on. Honestly, the only thing I’m anxious about is being department chair, and fortunately, one of our previous department chairs is still at my school, so I plan to lean heavily on her.
I hope y’all’s preparations are going well, and that you can find something to spark your excitement for the new school year! Good luck!
I had already been thinking about writing a blog post when I saw @druinok’s new post as well as someone else’s in the last few days. My first reason for writing a new post is that I also made a new planner for this year.
For the last few years, my planner has consisted of two parts: a disc-bound notebook with a laminated cover that holds my calendars, class rolls, and gradebook, and a half-size spiral notebook for everything else.
This has worked out really well for me, because the notebook lets me make overall plans, and the spiral is where I keep my notes on everything: to-do lists, notes from meetings, financial stuff about my mother (I’m her trustee), project lists, etc. A couple of years ago, I got even more organized and made a table of contents page and started dating and numbering the pages.
I really liked this system, but this summer I started wondering if I couldn’t tweak it a little. I still love my notebook, but maybe I could improve on the half-size spiral. My practice has been to make a to-do list each Monday, broken out by subject. This meant I was writing the same headings every week. It occurred to me that if I went with a half-size disc notebook, I could buy blank filler pages and print out my to-do pages, which could be inserted where I needed them. Furthermore, I could incorporate one of my goals for this year, which is to have a Bible verse each week to meditate on. Because I’m me, I created a spreadsheet of some favorite verses in Excel and used mail-merge in Word to generate the pages. Here’s the completed product:
(The cover picture is one I took on my trip this summer to Port Aransas, Texas.)
So far, this has worked out really well, especially being able to rearrange pages. I was even able to make a pocket out of construction paper!
If anyone’s reading this and wants the template, let me know.
Posted in General|Comments Off on Been Away, But Now I’m Back
Hello, WordPress, my old friend.
I’ve come to blog at your again.
Because … I’ve got a bunch of links to archive
Like many others, I often use the “like” button on Twitter to bookmark a post to look at/make notes on later. Unfortunately, I never seem to have time to go back and look at them. UNTIL TODAY!
I just did an activity with my Pre-AP Geometry classes that I am fairly proud of. It occurred to me this summer, when I was hanging a bunch of pictures, that I was actually doing a practical application of the Segment Addition Postulate.
Origin Story
It all started when I was hanging my Captain America picture display.
I decided I wanted the five pictures centered on the wall and centered vertically on each other. I thought the math involved in making that happen was interesting, so I came up with a slightly simpler version (DOC)(PDF) for my students.
The Setup
When I introduced the problem, I brought one of the pictures from home to show them what I was working with. I realized that my back blackboard was 12′ long, the same width as my wall, so I decided to make full-size “pictures” for them to arrange once they had their measurements.
What I Learned
I have two Pre-AP Geometry classes on alternate days. The first day, I introduced the problem and just told them to get started. This led to quite a bit of confusion, and I had to spend some time answering the same questions over and over. I thought it was fascinating that two approaches emerged — some groups were making their calculations using the information I gave them, which was pretty much the way I intended them to go. Another group, however, decided they were frustrated with the numeric approach and went directly to the full-size shapes to arrange first. They finally got everything arranged, but the whole “display” was too far to the left, so they had to shift everything over. Once they had, they went back and measured where everything was “supposed” to go. Their numbers weren’t exactly the same as mine, but I was pleased by how close they were.
On the second day (especially since my principal and evaluator were coming), I decided to give them a little more direction before turning them loose. We went through the process of finding the center of the display and how to line that up with the center of the room. I also explained how to align the pictures vertically with each other so that the tallest was 14″ from the ceiling. Overall, it went much more smoothly, and I had fewer students get frustrated and just quit.
Both my principal and evaluator complimented me on the lesson design, and on the “real-world” aspect of the problem. Admittedly, I’m not sure too many people would be as anal as I am about getting pictures aligned in this fashion, but I think the principles can be applied to a lot of practical situations.
One of my favorite sessions at TMC17 was the CO+DE=MATH session by Tamar McPherson (@teachme124) and Stephanie Reilly (@reilly1041). They introduced me to trinket.io, which I really like because you can write code on the left side of the screen and run it on the right side of the screen. I am going to be attempting to do a couple of classes with my Pre-AP Geometry classes this week on coding. We’re going to do some of the Hour of Code problems on code.org on the first day, and then I’m going to attempt to introduce them to Python using trinket on the second day. In the process, I decided I’d have some fun and try to write a program to simplify radicals. I wish I could embed it, but WordPress won’t do frames.
Enter a square root you want to simplify (ex. ), and it will give you the simplified radical (ex. ). Here it is: Simplifying Radicals
What do I want to accomplish this school year? As I started thinking about this, I decided to break it down into school and home:
School
Pre-AP Geometry
Push them harder! Too often, I find myself watering down the lessons I am teaching or providing too much scaffolding. If I want them to be prepared for Pre-AP and AP level work, I need to stop babying them. This change will mainly affect my lesson delivery and practice. I am still committed to flexible deadlines, quiz retakes, and everything else that tells a student, “I don’t care WHEN you learn something as long as you learn it!”
Incorporate more quadratics into the problems (see previous point).
Incorporate more Geogebra
Create a running thread of connecting the logic of programming with the logic of Geometry by teaching them the basics of coding (see CO + DE = MATH).
Change the seating each week based on which students are on pace and which are behind. Place the students who are behind closer to my desk.
Astronomy
I kept the class at too slow a pace last year. There’s definitely a balance between giving students enough time in class to complete their projects and their having so much time that they can just goof off half the time.
Part of the reason for the slower pace was that I realized part-way through that I didn’t have enough material to fill out the rest of the year. That’s not a problem I’ve ever had before, and it kind of caught me flat-footed. I will definitely address that this year by bringing in more lessons that I had skipped over in previous years.
I’d really like to find some sort of way to have the students perform some sort of observations. I’m also toying around with having some sort of star party attendance requirement. I’m really nervous about trying to have any kind of official class activity at night, especially off school grounds, but I don’t know what to do.
One of the pieces I appreciated about the rubric that Matt Baker and Kat Glass shared about their student presentations was that they also graded them on how they spent their time doing prep work. I think if my students knew they were going to receive a grade on how they used their class time, they might take it a little more seriously.
UIL (I’m UIL Coordinator for our school)
I wasn’t crazy about it at the time, but after the fact I liked the table I set up during our “VikingFest”, a kind of school fair that is held the first Wednesday of the school year. It let students know what UIL was and all of the different events that were offered. This year, I want to have some flyers printed that list the events, the coaches, and the rooms where they practice.
I made a whole presentation to a local Rotary Club about how I want to expand student participation, so now it’s time to put those ideas into action. I need to get with the other coaches and set up a rotation of people to speak to the AVID classes to let them know about UIL. I also want to try to talk to some of the upper-level math classes about Calculator, since that’s my baby.
Advisory
We’ve had these types of periods before, and they have usually not worked out well, but I’m hopeful that the changes we have made will give this a better shot at working.
We want students to spend the entire time productively, which means that I need to come up with some “evergreen” activities for students to do if they say they don’t have anything.
This year, especially after all of the inspiration at TMC, I’m having trouble narrowing down what I want to do on the first day of school for my two Pre-AP Geometry classes. The last few years, I have tried to get away from reading through the syllabus/procedures and have kids actually doing math. That has come back to bite me a few times because I think I didn’t spend enough time setting norms while we were doing the math. The 1-100 activity by Sara Van Der Werf has been really popular with the MTBoS this year, and I think this setting of norms combined with doing math has a great deal to do with it.
Here’s what I have to get done on the first day:
I have a flipped classroom, which means that I really need to explain the flow of homework, classwork, and quizzes to my students. The biggest mistake students make in a flipped/mastery learning classroom is getting behind, and I really need to pound that into their heads!
For the first time, we gave all of the Pre-AP Algebra I students a summer assignment. It wasn’t a huge amount (two pages of problems), but if I’m going to honor those who did the work and take this seriously, I need to do some sort of assessment on that first day. Our plan is to give them a quiz on the first day, and anyone who made less than 80% would then re-take the quiz (different version) on the second day.
Gather student information. For the last few years, I have used a Google form to collect information such as preferred name, whether they have internet access, favorite subject, how confident are then math, etc. I always have some students who are shocked when I call them by their preferred name almost immediately, and I have to remind them they told me what they wanted to be called!
I’m figuring that will take about half of the class (about 35-40 minutes). With the remaining time, I can’t decide whether to do the 1-100 activity or have them read an excerpt from Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. I’m currently leaning toward doing the 1-100 activity, and then after my 8th graders leave (they have to leave about 20 minutes early every day to catch a bus back to the junior high), use the remaining time to have my 9th graders read the excerpt. Or we might just use the 20 minutes attempting to explain the wacky schedule we’re going to have this year — we’re going to have a 23-minute rotating advisory period every day.
For my three Astronomy classes, I like the plan I’ve used for the last couple of years:
Let them sit where they like (these are mostly seniors, with a few juniors mixed in), although let them know I reserve the right to change them up if they can’t behave. I usually use a paper form to gather names to make my seating chart, but I’m thinking of integrating it into my Student Info form.
Collect student information. I have a form similiar to my Geometry form that I collect similart types of data.
Create a “Pocket Solar System”. I give each student a 3-foot long piece of adding machine paper. We label one end as “Sun” and the other end as “Pluto” (or “Kuiper Belt”), and I ask them to lay out the planets according to how they think they are spaced out. When they are finished, I have them flip the paper over, label the ends the same way, and I show them how the planets are really spaced out. We can then talk about how little mankind has really explored. To give them even more perspective, we will work through calculating how far away the nearest star is.
I then go over the basic format of the class, how the grading is set up, and what my expectations are. This year, I think I’m going to try using Consensus Rounds to have them come up with respect agreements for Teacher-Student and Student-Student interactions.
If I have time left, I’m contemplating using the 1-100 activity to get them thinking about group work because they will be starting their first group project the next week.
My final “class” is a class babysitting students as they attempt to make up Algebra I, Geometry, or Algebra II credits using ixl.com. Aside from getting them registered on the site and explaining how the process works, I’m not sure if I’ll do anything else with them.
I didn’t quite mean for it to turn out this way, but apparently I only go to Twitter Math Camp (TMC) in odd-numbered years, so this was one of those years. The last two TMCs I attended (TMC13 in Philadelphia and TMC15 in Claremont, CA), I rode the train because I generally find it a more relaxing way of traveling. Unfortunately, the only way to go by train from Fort Worth to Atlanta was through Chicago (!), so I flew this time. Because I was attending the Desmos Pre-Conference, I arrived on Tuesday. One of my goals for this conference was to force myself to be socially outgoing because I know there are things I have missed out on in the past, so when Heather Kohn (@heather_kohn) offered to lead a pre-pre-conference tour of Atlanta, I signed up for a tour of the Georgia Aquarium. I wasn’t necessarily interested in seeing the Aquarium (although I’m very glad that I did — it was incredible!), but I wanted the opportunity to meet some people ahead of the conference and so have some built-in familiar faces for when the conference started.
The Desmos conference was very interesting. I ended up in a two-person session on Polygraphs with Chris Danielson, and we actually ended up playing the polygraph I created for my Astronomy class — which was great, because it made me realize that I needed to edit the pictures to make the names more readible. We ended up working on a possible polygraph idea for parallel lines and transversals, which I’m definitely going to work on this year.
The other session that I found interesting was First Steps with the Computation Layer. This has kind of been my summer for programming, and I thought it would be interesting to drill down into what makes Desmos tick. It was fun, in a frustrating kind of way, but I’m not sure the additional flexibility is really worth my time investment right now.
Again, trying to be more outgoing, I spent the evening playing games with a table of guys — thanks Chris (@Plspeak), Jonathan (@rawrdimus), Bill (@roughlynormal), and Josh for making me welcome!
Thursday, the actual TMC17 conference began. Here are my recaps and takeaways:
Morning Session: Playing with Exeter Math
I already wrote up how much of a blast I had in this session. Part of the reason I chose this session is because my summer conference load has been pretty heavy and I wanted some time just to play with math. The other reason I chose this was to give me an opportunity to experience math from a student’s perspective — expecially the frustrations that happen when you can’t quite get things to work the way you want. I was very glad I picked this session!
Session #1: “An Object to Think With”: The whole body as a tool for mathematical sense making by Malke Rosenfield and Max Ray-Riek
This didn’t really turn out to be what I thought it was. We ended up making 3-D structures out of rolled-up newspaper sticks and tape. What I found interesting was the way Malke and Max facilitate the session: they started us up very open-ended and added structure as we went along. It was also fascinating how different the three groups’ structures were (my group’s was very free-form). I’m not sure what takeaways I have for my classes, but it was a lot of fun.
Session #2: Expos: Student Presentations in Math Class by Matt Baker and Kat Glass
I really found this session to be interesting because they use student presentations to (a) review before tests and (b) practice giving presentations. I especially liked the rubric that they shared with us. I already do presentations in Astronomy, and I think I’m going to add giving students grades on how they work in their groups on the presentation. Part of me really wants to have my Geometry students do presentations for review and part of me is a little nervous about the time commitments by both the students and me.
Session #3: A Trig Exploration: Exact Values and the Golden Triangle by Rachel Kernodle, Jamie Collins, and Molly Tanner
This was a whole lot of fun! After refreshing our memories of 45-45-90 and 30-60-90 triangles (and the corresponding trig values), we were then given a 36-72-72 triangle and asked if there was any way we could use this to find more exact trig values. Very cool!
Session #4: CO + DE = MATH by Stephanie Reilly and Tamar McPherson
This might be one of the most useful sessions I attended at TMC. One of the reasons I’ve been getting back into programming is because I think there’s got to be some way to correlate the logical thinking from programming with the logical thinking in Geometry. This session may have given me a really good tool by introducing me to Trinket.io. Until my laptop’s battery died, I was able to take their templates and build a tool for finding the third side of a right triangle, as well as one for calculating the distance between two points. I’m definitely going to be playing with this as school gets started!
Session #5: An Hour of Codebreaking by Bob Lochel
This was a fun session to play with different types of code makers and code breakers. The simulation of the Enigma machine especially boggled my mind. I’m not sure how much (if any) I can use in Geometry, but it was a good session.
Session #6: Clothesline Math by Chris Shore
I was so happy they added this session on because this I wasn’t able to attend his earlier presentation. I’m not sure I can adequately convey how much my mind was blown by the simple arrangement of some paper markers on a piece of string. For the initial stages, it was interesting to discuss what was the absolute minimum amount of information needed to fully represent , , and on a number line; and I also enjoyed the discussion generated by placing , , and on a number line containing 0, 1, and . It wasn’t until we were looking at solving an equation, that things exploded. On the number line, we placed and clothespinned together. Chris then had us place and , and that’s when we realized that had to be 9 units away from the equality on the left and was 6 units away on the right. The gap between was 15, which was . Wild! From a teacher standpoint, Chris also gave us some good words of advice, such as making sure the students not at the board have whiteboards or the equivalent, so they have something to do.
), and it will give you the simplified radical (ex. 
). Here it is: 
, 
, and 
on a number line; and I also enjoyed the discussion generated by placing 
, 
, and 
on a number line containing 0, 1, and 
. It wasn’t until we were looking at solving an equation, 
that things exploded. On the number line, we placed 
and 
clothespinned together. Chris then had us place 
and 
, and that’s when we realized that 
Take It To The Limit 