My Amazon Haul

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!
	One of our teachers has something like this dispenser, and when I also found 150 pre-sharpened pencils, that seemed like a good deal.
	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.

Why Blog Now?

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!

Been Away, But Now I’m Back

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.