Substitutes

I know that substitutes are necessary to keep the schools running, but what I don't understand is the lax requirements.  Case in point: our sub today wasn't sure how to evaluate -8 - (-4) because she hadn't done subtracting a negative number lately.  While I understand that is not something one does every day, she is a fully certified teacher for K-8, and she subs in preschool through high school.  How do we expect our 7th graders to learn the basics in math if their teachers aren't comfortable with the basics in math?  If I become a high school math teacher, I'm going to find a sub that I can trust - or else have a foolproof plan for when I get sick.  Egads.

Two-way communication

Today I saw another great stride for D.  Last week, after meeting with him and his mother, I had seen an improvement in work ethic.  When we assigned 3 figures to graph (testing for similarity), he chose to graph all 5 figures, which must have taken a bit of extra time because the coordinates needed to be calculated for each figure.  Today when we taught mental tricks to calculate 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%, 25%, and 50% of a number, I handed out a worksheet for the students to do.  Unfortunately, their skills were not as developed as I thought, and the problems were taking more time than I had planned for the students to complete.  I changed the requirement to finishing 3 multi-step problems, and then students could transition to Math Whizz, an online math program. D gave me his worksheet, and then asked if he could have it back to work on the additional problems.  He said "I want to do more of these."  This from someone who doesn't view himself as able to do math. I can't wait to email his mom and tell her what a terrific attitude her son has!

What's in your hip pocket?

Today I showed up at school and found out that my cooperating teacher was staying home sick and a substitute was taking her place.  Since I was more familiar with the material, I taught the classes today and the substitute helped with grading quizzes, etc.  My cooperating teacher had written the outline for today's classes on the board yesterday, and we had gone over the plans together yesterday, so I felt prepared for the classes.  Except for one detail: our 4th period class was supposed to start with a puzzle, and I didn't know what that puzzle was.  I searched her notebook where she keeps papers, looked through the folders on her table where she organizes the papers for the day, and still no puzzle appeared.  After searching for many minutes, I emailed her and asked where I could find the puzzle, and she responded by saying she didn't have anything specific, but planned to come up with something.  Oh, I can do that!  We did 2 quick puzzles out of Michael Serra's Mathercise, one on directions (N,S,E,W) and one on reading a sentence correctly.  I thought they would be too easy, but several students struggled with the ideas.  I think we need to do more of them!

Change in performance

I was thrilled today when D brought in his homework, and he had done above and beyond what we had asked of the class.  There were 5 figures to graph to evaluate for similarity, and we had divided the class into two groups: one group did the baseline and two distortions, the other group did the baseline and two different distortions.  Within each group, they should have found 2 similar figures and one impostor.  Most of the class had excuses about why they hadn't done it, and we ended up giving them class time this morning to finish their homework.  Imagine my surprise when D shows us all 5 figures completed.  I publicly acknowledged his hard work and my CT actually gave out candy for students who did the homework at home.  I hope this signals a new work ethic.  Perhaps last week's conference with D and his mom made a difference.  His attitude certainly made my day!

Two ideas that struck me

From chapter 9 in our methods book, I found two ideas that really struck me as worthwhile.  One pertaining to gender equity said that, in general, girls are less comfortable with calculators and technology than boys.  I remember during my freshman year of college when I started my engineering classes that all of the boys were eager to program on computers and I had no experience with any programming.  Not only did I feel intimidated by the boys already having the knowledge, but I felt that somehow I had missed something in high school that I was supposed to learn, and it made me reluctant to ask for help.  So this tidbit of information really struck home with me.  Today during a practice session with linear functions, I encouraged the students to use our graphing calculators.  Two girls chose to use them, so I felt like I made a step in the right direction.

The other idea I liked was to find mathematical problems from different cultures to share with my students. With our diverse student population ranging from Vietnamese to Ukrainian to Gabonese, I'm eager to search for useful math ideas that will shed light on their various cultures.  I think it will be healthy for all students to see the ways math is used in different situations.

Catching up is hard to do

Students who have realized that the end of the trimester is only a few days away are now bringing in missed assignments they think will bring their grade up.  However, our standards-based grading only counts tests and quizzes for grades, so showing us their homework doesn't affect their grades.  Other students are asking to retake tests, so we have set up times before and after school, as well as during lunch tutorial, for students to come and take a different version of their unit test.  It seems odd to me that students who go to the trouble of taking another test have not made an effort to study the questions they missed on the first test. In some cases, the students miss questions that are very similar to ones they got right the first time.  Or they'll get the same questions wrong that they missed the first time (not every question is different).  I wonder if it's due to parental motivation that the students are retaking tests; it hasn't brought up anyone's grade so far.  We had one student planning to retake the test tomorrow, but now school is cancelled due to snow.  There's always next trimester!

It doesn’t count if it doesn’t stick

I saw this comment today when we had snow predicted (and school got out two hours early), but when I first read it, I thought about how appropriate it is for teaching.  In teaching to the students, it doesn’t count as valid teaching if the concepts don’t stick with our students.  We are working on how to make similar figures in 7th grade math, and I’m stressing that similar figures need to have the same scale factor for each dimension.  I keep asking “what number do you need to multiply by to go from the old figure to the new figure?” and defining this as the scale factor.  We did multiple examples with both rectangles and triangles, and demonstrated the scale factor is bigger than 1 when we are going from a small shape to a large shape, and the reciprocal going from the big shape to the smaller.  At the end of the class, I gave the students an exit ticket with two sets of triangles: one set was similar shapes because each side was multiplied by 2 to get the other side, and the other set had triangles whose dimensions were changed by an addition of 1 to each side.  Five students out of 24 got it wrong, so at least the majority were following along.  But for those five, why did they think those triangles were similar?  The right idea didn’t stick.