Almost Normal

My school, being a charter, makes some creative decisions about, well, pretty much everything. Take, for example, our calendar. Like most schools, our academic year is broken up into two semesters. During that time kids take five classes (math, science, English, social studies, and Spanish) and a study hall. For the elective portion of their high school experience (art, music, things that they might look forward to) we have two month-long intersession periods at the end of each semester. Kids choose one elective to focus on, and then spend the whole month just doing that. For example, they might have dance class from 8:30-2:45 for 4 weeks. Our first academic semester ended in December, so we are now right in the middle of our first intersession.

You may be wondering (as am I), what do the teachers do during this time? Unfortunately it is not time off, nor is it time when we can teach elective classes. Instead, we spend time in "professional development," which means anything from traditional workshops about various teaching topics, to spending hours upon hours talking about and voting on proposals to improve the school, to community building. I am withholding judgment at this point.

What I will say is awesome about intersession is that I'm not teaching. Not that I don't love teaching (?), but it's really nice to arrive at school at 8:15, to leave before 6pm, to not plan lessons, to actually devote a reasonable amount of time to planning lessons, and to go to the bathroom whenever I need to. The best part, by far, is that when I leave school for the day, I'm actually leaving school. I'm not doing more work at home, I don't have to eat dinner while checking school email and typing a worksheet, I don't carry around a giant bag of grading. It reminds me of the good old days of office work when, at 5pm, I could stop whatever I was doing, go do things that normal people do, and not think about work until I returned the next morning to pick up where I left off. I don't even know what to do with all this time on my hands. The other day I went to the grocery store, we've finally watched and returned the Netflix DVDs we got last March, and I think I've been to the gym more in the past three weeks than in the past three months put together.

What will happen come February 1 when I have to actually teach a class again? The responsible person inside of me says that I should spend some time now preparing for the upcoming semester so that I won't have to spend quite so much time in quicksand mode. The realist says that there are many, many episodes of The Office that could use some re-watching.

The Pythagorean Leash

One of the most important things I think that I can train kids to do in geometry class is to draw pictures. Any time they come across a word problem, they need to be able to translate it into a picture because 90% of the time, word problems aren't that challenging if you can get the picture right. Furthermore, translating word situation into a mathematical model/equation is a skill that will be legitimately useful for them long after they've left school (just ask the history teacher who came to me the other day trying to figure out how many points his final exam should be worth).

I'm also a huge fan or word problems because I love writing ones that will elicit awesome drawings. I get a sad when I have to write ones like "Point A is the midpoint of BC and angle JKL is bisected by ray KM and WU is the perpendicular bisector of XY such that WU is the altitude of triangle WXY..." because those pictures just end up being shapes with a lot of letters on them. The good problems are ones like I put on a recent quiz. The gist is that Julian/Karla (obviously I always use student names and weirdly, the kids--even in high school--still LOVE it) is walking his/her pet spider/pig and I give dimensions about the height that Julian/Karla is holding the leash and how far the pet is in front of its owner. It's just a simple pythagorean theorem problem, but the pictures are the good part.

The pig in this first one looks so happy and carefree. Maybe because he is out for a lovely walk instead of taking a geometry quiz.

 

My favorite part of this one is that the pig is explaining all of the answer. I wonder whether the speech bubble was planned in advance or a last-minute add-on. Either way, brilliant.

 

Here, I can't figure out if this student named the pig because (1) she had too much time left and got bored, (2) she was killing time trying to figure out the problem, (3) she really needed to have a name for the pig in order to make the problem feel accessible, or (4) she knows more details about Karla's pets than the rest of us do (this student is one of Karla's good friends).

 

Not to judge students' artistic skills, but this is the least pig-like pig I saw on anyone's paper.

 

I think I have really gotten through to this student when I've stressed the importance of labeling everything you know about a picture. I'm so glad he labeled everything because I definitely would not have known which was the spider and which was Julian.

 

This is my favorite picture out of any of them. In case you can't tell (sorry, I took these with my camera phone as I was grading them), the spider-walker's t-shirt says, "Hi! I'm Julian."

 

And I'll conclude with a kid whose math skills are doing fine (he got the problem right, at least), but who could use a little work on his reading comprehension.

 

Math in the U. S. of A.

In an attempt to get kids focused on problem-solving strategies without getting caught up in the details of formulas and procedures, over the last two days I've given kids tricky area and perimeter problem with no numbers. Here's an example:



S., a student whose dry humor never fails to make me smile, was getting frustrated with one of the problems. In exasperation, he literally threw his hands up and asked, "Why can't we just use numbers--like Americans?"

Oh S., at age 14 you've already identified the key difference between American and other mathematics education systems. How did you figure it out so quickly when it's taken researchers years?

2-3 of my Favourites

If I were to make a list of things that I love, included on that list would be New Zealand, Google, and--depending on the day--kids. So what happens when three of my favourite things come together?

This.

So cute my heart almost stopped.

Finishing School

In my advisory last week we were did a lesson on the basics of college. I often forget how little ninth graders know about college beyond "It's more school after high school," so it was fun to hear things like their ideas about what a B.S. is. We got to talking about different degrees you can earn, which jobs require or indicate that you have what kind of degree, how long different degrees take, etc. For the most part I knew the answers (J.D. means Juris Doctor, right?) or was able to make up answers that sounded believable (med school is seven years, right?). But there was one question that left me stumped. Maybe you can help me out.

One student raised her hand and in complete earnest asked, "What kind of degree do you get if you go to finishing school?"

I tried to figure out exactly what she was asking. Was she asking if you get these degrees when you finish school? Was she talking about people who go on to get extra certifications after finishing their degree? Did she want to know if advanced degrees were different in Scandinavia? No, it seemed that she had heard of people going to "finishing school" for some type of legitimate education and she just wanted to know how that was different from, say, business school. Not wanting to embarrass her for trying to ask a genuine question about a quasi-educational institution designed to prepare women to play out subservient gender schema, I just pretended I didn't know what she was talking about and left it at that.

My question is what people this girl is hanging out with who talk about going to finishing school.

The Awkward Triangle

In our recent area unit, we've talked a lot about how "every shape is a rectangle" and if they can just find the rectangle, they can find the area. For example, a triangle is half of a rectangle, so because we can find area of a rectangle by base x height, we can find the triangle by dividing the rectangle's area in half. On the test there was a question that showed an oblique triangle, noting that the triangle does not look like 1/2 a rectangle, so why does bh/2 work?



Here is the best description I've ever gotten as to why this kind of triangle is tricky:
"The triangle is more pointy so it's confusing. This works because no matter what kind of triangle it is it will still have another rectangle that fits its awkwardness."

I do love awkward triangles. Almost as much as I love the awkward things kids write on tests.

Appreciation Friday

Dear Mrs. L,
You are officially the best math teacher ive ever had! Everything you have taught was explained thurroly (don't know how to spell), which I am so thankful for.
Becaus I appreciate you so much I've put a sticker of a ninja on my letter! Keep up the good work.
Sincearly, N.L.

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Dear Ms. L,
I am writing this letter because I appreciated when you helped me when I needed help. When I didn't get the formula (b1+b2)h/2=A you made it clear & now I got it. I didn't know where the 2 was coming from. So thank you Ms. L, I appreciate you lots lots lots.
<3, N.S.

PS. I also appreciate how you don't make us memorize formulas. We make our own formulas (that work).