Things to Come

Overall things have been hectic lately, good for the most part, but nevertheless hectic. Here’s a brief update with details to follow soon:

Despite my case of pre-parent conferences jitters, the evening went well - I have never been more honored to be a teacher.

The mathematical understanding of my pre-algebra students is coming along nicely. We still experience behavioral issues, but we’re getting there.

I love my freshman IMP classes. Apparently the students do too. A recent comment made in class was, “I love it when you do that.” Do what? I asked. “Make me think.”

There shouldn’t be crying in math. My heart was breaking.

Relationships with most of my students are developing well. I really wasn’t prepared for how emotionally exhausting this would be though.

I think I’ve become addicted to Twitter. The feedback and connections are amazing. Also, how can one not find these Halloween costumes amusing? I admit, it is not the best example of educational use, but come one, it is funny.*

Hopefully this weekend will provide time to finish at least a few of the half-written posts I’ve got in queue.

How did I think that starting a blog during my first year teaching while coaching math team, becoming the freshman class sponsor, and consulting was a good idea?

*Note: Apparently they weren’t funny to all parties involved, so I’m removing the link. Jackie 11/23/07

Any questions?

I try not to ask, “Are there any questions?” in my classes. First, I know my students have questions. Second, that is pretty open-ended and I often get questions that are unrelated to the matter at hand (continue reading for an example). I instead try to say, “What questions do you have about this example/problem/idea?”.

Saftey in Numbers

While I generally enjoy math team practice, I cherish math meet nights. When else can I spend six hours with some of the brightest and most interesting kids in the school?

Getting to the meets is always amusing. As I’m driving the school bus, I hear snippets of conversations: occasionally profound, more frequently bizarre. Random math facts are often shouted out the window to pedestrians - drive-by mathing.

The staggered competition times allow for a bit of down time in our team room, so some students bring laptops. What is a laptop without wi-fi though? A wireless router is tucked into a backpack, just in case.

My favorite is the time after competition and before the awards ceremony. All of us in one room and a plethora of activities. I was just watching for a minute and wanted to document what I was seeing. I started to write a tweet and was told by a student that I’d never get it all in 140 characters. As usual he was correct. So here is what I saw:

Tic-tac-toe with a twist. In each of the nine cells in the grid is another tic-tac-toe board. Thus to claim an “X” or an “O”, you must first win the game in that cell. This is my fourth year and they still aren’t tired of this game.

A student writing a blog post.

Another student setting up a proxy so I could read my RSS feed.

A discussion of u-substitution in integration.

Pictures being taken (they document everything, but I must say, we have some amazing slide-shows at the end of the year.)

Sample spaces being written - even though the competition was over, they still wanted to know how to do the problems they missed.

Sharing of an AP Psych project - an xkcd inspired comic-book.

Tonight on the way home, there was the math-team sing-along to “Bohemian Rhapsody“. It doesn’t get much better than that. Well, had we answered more problems correctly…

Spam, spam, spam, eggs, spam, spam, and …math?

The 19th Carnival of Mathematics is up over at Good Math, Bad Math. Apparently MarkCC has been inundated with spam along with carnival submissions. I hope there weren’t any Vikings.

This submission just reinforced my belief that we need a meaningful math curriculum.