Summer of Conferences: CAMT17

CAMT (the Conference for the Advancement of Mathematics Teaching) was being held in Fort Worth this year, and my principal agreed to pay the registration fee for any math teacher who wanted to go. Because of other scheduling conflicts, Brenda and I were the only ones who were able to go. I figured we would probably not be attending the same sessions, since she would be focused on PreCalc and I would be focused on Geometry, and that’s pretty much the way it turned out. What I did not expect to happen was to run into Tiffany, one of my good friends from my UTA Master’s program. We saw each other after the first sessions of the day, and pretty much hung out together for the rest of the conference. I also ran into Anita, a teacher who used to teach Pre-AP Geometry at my school, as well as two or three other teachers who had been there. It was somewhat surreal.

This is my recap of what I learned at CAMT this year:
Session: Making Sense of Geometry by Andrew Stadel (@mr_stadel)

Even though this session was listed for 6-8, I decided to attend because I have followed Andrew for years on Twitter. It was definitely worth it. One of the things I will definitely use this year is having students guesstimate how a bottle’s circumference compares to its height as a reminder about circumference.

Session: Plick Me! Flipping Geometry by Sarah Ashley
While I have been saying I wanted to use Plickers for a couple of years now, I always seem to find some reason why it’s never the right time. What I appreciated about this session was that she actually had us using the Plickers and showed us how she set things up. She also provided some links to some useful sites, most of which either required iPhones or I already knew about such as Desmos or Geogebra, but she did mention a few I hadd not heard of such as Splashtop.

Session: The Importance of Getting It Wrong by Michele Adams
I’m not sure this session really answered their question of how to get students to persist, but it did have some interesting activities that reminded me why I shouldn’t forget about the Shell Centre for Mathematical Education resources. The activity that I especially want to remember when we hit volume was comparing bottles and graphs of their volume vs. height.

Session: Engage and Motivate All Students by Aaron Daffern
This was one of those sessions where you make a pre-judgement based on your initial impression of the presenter that turns out to be completely wrong. Aaron is an interesting guy. He’s currently a curriculum direcctor for a charter school which he had previously served as principal. One thing he said that really stuck with me was that as principal, he should be able to “walk into any classroom and teach any subject.” I know my current principal also has that philosophy, which (although it can sometimes come across as arrogant) is such a change from having principals stand up and publicly state that they aren’t that good at math (laugh, laugh). Aaron had us model a strategy that I’m probably going to use for my first day classes: consensus rounds. He initially had us come up with three to five characteristics of a good math lesson. At the beginning of the session he had given everyone slips of paper that had three different groupings on it. He then had us find our first group (which got rather chaotic in a room of ~100 people) and come to a consensus of three characteristics. He insisted that each member of the group needed to “own” the list. It was also important that we each write the list down because after two minutes, we regrouped and did it again. After two minutes, we regrouped one last time. By this point, most groups had talked through different ideas, but the main consensus of the whole room for the main characteristic of a good math lesson was “student engagement”. Of course, how we achieve engagement is the tricky part.

Session: Revamping a Classic: Interactive Notebooks Gone Digital by Amanda Packard and Rita Gongora
Although this was billed as a commercial product demonstration, Tiffany and I decided to attend because we thought it might give us some good ideas, which it did. We saw some good uses for OneNote for Classroom, as well as using Google Slides to make a template that students would then use to fill in for their notes.

Session: Breaking Down Barriers – Geometry Redesigned by Julie Kidder and Caroline Robb

This was a very interesting session. These two teachers are fortunate enough to teach at a private school that let them completely redesign their Geometry curriculum. One of the most fascinating decisions they made was to eliminate Pre-AP (Honors) Geometry as a separate course and put all different skill levels in the same classes. How they then handled the Pre-AP part was to designate parts of their assignments as “Honors”, and students had to accumulate a certain number of points to have their course credited as honors. Students were given a choice of ways to accumulate those points, which also included things such as competing in UIL events. While I certainly can’t implement that sort of thing in my classes, I really did like their lesson design.

Playing With Exeter Math 2

I have been at TMC17 in Atlanta since Tuesday, and my morning session has been “Playing With Exeter Math”. In my group, we have been working on the Math 2 problems, which although I have worked through these before, I have enjoyed thinking about them more indepth.

I have been sitting next to James Cleveland, and he has a knack for asking interesting questions, which really make me think. For example, on problem 33, we have to show that a triangle is isosceles by setting the two distance formulas equal to each other. James realized that once you square both sides, you have two circle equations, and connected that to how we construct perpendicular bisectors by drawing two circles and marking their intersections. It became even more clear when I graphed the equality on Desmos, and Desmos produced it as a straight vertical line. Cool!

We also looked at problem 21, which asked us to divide the shape into two congruent shapes. We conjectured that any shape with a 180° rotational symmetry would have an infinite number of ways that it could be divided. In order to satisfy the conjecture to my satisfaction, I set it up in Sketchpad:

Yesterday, we looked at problem 45, in which the corner of a paper is folded down to the bottom of the paper. The original problem asks us to find the area of the triangle created. It then asks us to find the value of x that would maximize the area of the triangle. Working it out algebraically, we found that for a side length of 10, x would be . This led James to conjecture that it would always be of the length of the side. After a lot of hairpulling, I got the following set up in Desmos that shows this to my satisfaction (I used a slider for , and the equations were and along with a parabola to fit the maxima as varied.):

Today, which was our last day, I had thought to finish up problem 45 (I added the vertical line at .) Once again, James was working on a problem, but this time, he got almost the entire group intrigued by it. Problem 133 sounds simple: Dissect a 1-by-3 rectangle into three pieces that can be reassembled into a square.

We quickly realized that since the area of the rectangle was 3, that the length of each side of the square would need to be . We immediately went to 30-60-90 right triangles, but we couldn’t figure out a way to make the cuts. Finally, about 20 minutes before we were supposed to leave, Annie Perkins figured it out using Sketchpad. This is my re-interpretation of her solution:

I’ll probably write up a full reflection on my experience at TMC, but I wanted to get my morning session experiences written down before I forgot about them.

Volume and Surface Area

I’m trying to get back in the mode of sharing what I’m doing in my class. The worksheets that I use for volume and surface area are probably some of my favorites because of the way that I scaffolded them. I first saw this technique of using shapes to code what information goes where when I was paired up with a CTE (career and technology) teacher several years ago, and I adapted it for my sections on solid geometry.

Volume WS
Surface Area WS
Spheres WS

Still Head Over Heels (Part 2)

In this post, I want to describe some of the mechanics of how I run a flipped classroom. My class consists of four parts: the notes, the classwork, the quiz, and the test.

• The Notes

As I mentioned in my last post, I have students take their notes from a slideshow that I have created and posted on slideshare.net. Because we are a national AVID demonstration school, I require them to take their notes in Cornell notes fashion. One of the big tenets of C-notes is the idea of going back over your notes after 24 hours to highlight important text, add questions and a summary. In order to enforce this, I only give them a 50 for taking notes over my slideshow (the right-hand side of the page). The next class, I check to see if they have highlighted text, added questions, and written a summary. Questions and highlighting earns them an additional 25 points, and the summary adds the final 25 points. I have done this the last two years, and I really like the way the idea of the flipped class works with C-notes.

• The Classwork

At the beginning of each chapter (what our district, for some mysterious reason, calls “bundles”), I give them a packet containing every worksheet for that chapter. This has two major benefits: Since I try to post notes for the whole chapter when we start, students can work ahead if they want to; also, if a student is absent, he automatically knows what he missed, and he already has the work. The worksheets vary between Kuta worksheets, worksheets I’ve found or created over the years, and exploration/extention problems. For each worksheet, I post solutions to the odd-numbered problems, and since this is practice, I grade the worksheets on completion. This is the real strength of the flipped classroom, because they have most of the 80-minute class period to work problems. I have them seated in groups, so that they can ask for help from their fellow students or me. I check the work from the previous worksheet when I go around checking notes.

• The Quiz

When my district switched from Moodle to Canvas, I started setting up all of my quizzes there.


This is the really magic part of my class. Because I also do SBG, I allow students to retake quizzes to improve their grades. Canvas allows me to set up “question banks” for each quiz, so each time a student takes a quiz, it will be different. I calculated once that one quiz had more than 1,000,000 different possible versions. There are two ways that this works. The first is the multiple choices for each topic:


These can be either multiple-choice or free-response. The next type of question is my favorite: the formula question. I can set up a range of values, along with a formula for the answer, and let Canvas select the numbers:

As long as I can get a numeric answer, these work out great! There’s other cool stuff about Canvas — if you’re interested, let me know.

• The Test

The test is the summative assessment over the bundle. It’s made up of a common assessment part that all of the Geometry teachers at my school give (we use GradeCam to handle creating the scantrons and managing the data), and a Canvas part that is generally questions pulled from the quizzes.

This is the format that I have used the last couple of years, and I really like how it has shaken out. If you have any questions or comments, let me know!

Still Head Over Heels (Part 1)

I’m approaching the end of my third year of doing a flipped classroom in Geometry, and I’m still in love with the format. I was reading a post the other day (I’ve been trying to catch up on my Reader feed, so I can’t remember who said it) that was concerned that students’ watching 10-minute videos wouldn’t get the same teaching as a regular lecture or other type of in-class teaching. In a lot of ways, I would definitely agree with that, because I tell my students I don’t expect them to learn everything about a particular topic just from taking notes. I spend about 5-10 minutes at the beginning of class going over more examples before I turn them loose on their classwork for that topic.

For me, the flipped classroom model allows me to eliminate the most tedious part of teaching: taking notes. For example, below is a fairly typical PowerPoint that I would give over angle relationships in a circle:

Instead of my standing at the front of the class going through this PowerPoint while some students make very quick notes and others make meticulous drawings and copy everything exactly, I assign them the task of paging through this slideshow and taking as much (or as little) time as they need. Some students will “get” this topic just from the notes, because it’s fairly straightforward; others will need some more explanation in class, and that’s okay.

The students would then work on something like a Kuta worksheet (I got tired of waiting for my school to buy it, so I bought a single-user license myself). When they were ready, they would take a quiz over the topic on Canvas, our district’s LMS (learning management system). The only deviations I make from this routine are when I want the whole class to work on something such as a stations activity, a Geogebra exploration, or a Desmos activity (for example, we did a Polygraph: Polygons that went really well).

My Pre-AP kids generally like this format. Their parents also like that they don’t have to worry about trying to help their kids with their homework, because the homework consists of taking notes over a slideshow.

I ran into a student who was in my first year of flipped classes recently, and he told me that it was the best approach to a math class that he’d ever had, and he didn’t know why all of his teachers didn’t adopt the same format.

You Can Go Home Again (At Least to Visit)

I’m one of those alt-cert teachers who was in another career before I decided to become a teacher. Specifically, I spent 20+ years as a computer programmer and network administrator. When I started teaching, people would wonder why I didn’t want to teach computer programming, and I would tell them that I was just burned out on computers.

It’s been long enough now that I feel a little nostalgic about writing programs to do things, and when my principal “suggested” that we keep a log of students going to and coming from the bathroom I decided I’d rather try to write a program to keep track than have to keep track by using a clipboard (along with students’ not knowing how to tell time).

My background is in database programming using a program called Visual FoxPro. Visual FoxPro was discontinued by Microsoft around 2009, so I initially tried to write my program using Access. I gave it a good try, but I could tell that I was trying to make it do things that it wasn’t really designed to do. I honestly feel I made a good-faith effort to find some other RDBMS (relational database management system), but in the end, I knew FoxPro would do what I wanted to do.

The most frustrating part of writing my hall pass program was realizing that it was taking me hours to do tasks that I used to be able to do in minutes, just because I was rusty. As I worked on the program, a lot of things came back to me, and I’ve ended up with something that I’m pretty proud of. What’s more, my students have fallen into the new routine with nary a whimper.

The only really frustrating part of the implementation is that it has to run from a physical hard drive (since that’s all that was around when this version of FoxPro was written), and the only spare laptop I have is a little Dell NetBook that runs WindowsXP and is named “Baby”. I wanted to use DropBox so that I could run the program on Baby but also reference the data on either my school laptop or my personal laptop. Unfortunately, DropBox doesn’t run on WindowsXP. I’m currently running Google Drive, which is doing this pretty well, but it is often random on how it updates.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun to play with programming again, and it really makes me want to look around for other things that I could program as well as trying to find ways to integrate programming into my Geometry classes.

Tools: Planbook.com

I have mentioned it before, but I highly recommend planbook.com. For $1 per month, you get a very flexible planning calendar that you can automatically share on your teacher webpage. I also use it to make notes on particular lessons and reflect on how those lessons went.

I don’t know if you can tell from the picture, but I have notes from previous years as well as reflections from this year. When I set up next year’s classes, I will copy this year and edit/move the reflections to the notes tab.

Also, if several teachers from your school sign up, you get free months! We have 10 teachers using it at my school, so I get an additional 6 months free!

Hello, World

In preparation for #TMC17, I’ve been trying to catch up on my blog feed, and reading all those entries made me miss writing on my own blog. The main reason I had stopped was that I was using planbook.com as my reflection tool, so I didn’t need the blog to reflect on what I had done in class.

Reading what people have been writing in the last year made me realized how short-sighted that is. One of the beauties of the MTBoS world is the feedback that we share and receive from each other. There are also some things that I have considered blogging on that don’t have a direct link to a particular lesson plan.

Random Ideas for Next Year

I want to put this stuff in one place so I don’t lose it!

• Figure out the setup I want for Canvas
• Instead of math journals – have them make flip charts!

Been Away, But Now I’m Back — Reflections on 2014-2015

One of the reasons that I haven’t posted anything this year is directly related to one of my favorite tools this year: planbook.com. One of my main purposes for writing this blog is to allow me to reflect on lessons that I have taught, and with planbook, I set up a tab called “Reflection”, that allowed me to do that and have all of the lesson information right there. As far as a year-end overall reflection, I felt that a blogpost would be more helpful, so thus…

In almost every way, this school year was a lot of fun. I had four PAP Geometry classes and two Astronomy classes. My PAP kids were great (I also had about 16 8th graders who were generally adorable), and it was a blast finally being able to teach Astronomy. My schedule even worked out so that I did not have to have “Freshmen Lunch” (35 minutes). With that being the case, I will mention the few minor annoyances just to get them out of my system, and then go on to what I think worked, and what I’m changing for next year.

To summarize:

• Astronomy is great!
• Not just a flipped classroom, but a flipped-mastery learning classroom!
• Canvas is a really good tool for the aforementioned classroom.
• Having students make a Kahoot quiz for their presentations is a great way to ensure engagement.

{tl;dr}