Week 1 - "very much like being shot out of a cannon" #MTBoSBlaugust

Week 1 is in the can and I wanted to blog one of my best ideas from my first week back.

I should start out by saying that Week 1 was very much like being shot out of a cannon — much more so than usual. My classes this year are huge — 36, 37, or 38 students per class — but my room is the smallest in the school. So it took a lot of clever angling and arranging to ensure that we could have enough desks in the room and that everybody could more or less see from their given position in the room. I always mark on the floor with a Sharpie so that it's easier to put the desk clusters back into their optimal positions. Once upon a time, I would have considered this a form of vandalism, but now...? Hey, that's just common sense.

SEATING CHART MANAGEMENTI had a major conceptual breakthrough with seating charts this August. I always use OmniGraffle to set up my basic seating chart/management chart template that I use on my clipboard to take attendance and make notes. This year, it occurred to me: instead of using those stupid little name card tags with names to make a wall chart (which takes up an unreasonable amount of time), why not just make a board with a sheet of vinyl across to hold blank copies of the week's seating charts?

So now, I  can just print off two copies of my updated charts — one for my clipboard and one for the wall pockets. And voilá! Easy to change the seats around.

The stapled blob of paper charts makes it super-easy to make notes about collaboration or mathematical successes during group work. It also makes it easy to enter attendance on the computer each class because I just look for the 0s or 1s. My scribbled comments make it easy to enter "Professionalism" scores or comments, or to send e-mails to students or families. My working copy of charts gets stapled together and placed on my clipboard. When the week is over, I archive it in a big binder.

[visualize the dazzling photo of my wall chart that will be posted here on Monday]

There's a lot more to say about Week 1, but I'm still recuperating. More soon!

Hey, Megan, Here's my
handouts hanger in situ!

First thoughts on completing Exeter Math 1

I just finished doing the 2010 edition of Math 1 (91pages) today.  Now begins the synthesizing and summarizing, which I will put into blog posts.

Math 1 is an Algebra 1 course that includes an incredibly deep coverage of proportional reasoning, in addition to the usual linear, quadratic, and exponential function topics.

I did Math 1 because most of our incoming students are incredibly bright and hard-working but they were not the math monsters in their middle schools. They have many of the typical middle school gaps, but they are much more sophisticated than most 9th grade Algebra 1 students. So the fact that Math 1 is a REALLY TOUGH course that dives very deep into Algebra 1 material is a great thing because it will give my students the deep rich course they deserve, even though they are placed into Algebra 1 based on their current skill level.

My Algebra 1 learners find themselves stuck in a ZPD no-man's-land: their ZPD as math learners is nowhere near their ZPD as readers. 

This presents a huge problem in the classroom. The math in CPM Algebra 1, for example, is rich and interesting, but the text is written for reluctant readers, discouraged readers, and English Language Learners, which is a huge turn-off for the vast majority of my enthusiastic and highly capable readers.

They feel insulted by it, and they are not shy about expressing these feelings. So my student population tends to dismiss it and resist it, even if they really do need to learn the content. This raises the question of how best to serve a population of learners who need to be challenged with greater nuance in textual interpretation and presentation in an introductory high school math class.

For all of these reasons, Math 1 is going to form a terrific problem-based “spine” for my Algebra 1 classes. The problem sequences are rich and interesting and engaging with sophisticated contexts, though they start from first principles. They develop to a point where even a mathematically sophisticated adult will find them very challenging.

To get started, I printed all pages of the problem sets, answer keys, and commentaries and created a binder with the following sections:

1 - Problem Sets plus glossary at the end

2 - Commentaries

3 - My Worked Solutions (for each page of problems, I have one stapled cluster of my worked solution pages)

4 - Answer Keys

I did all of my work on three-hole binder paper, with each new page from the problem set being its own stapled packet (or "blob") in the Worked Solutions section. 

Whatever problem set I was working on I would take out of the binder along with the relevant answer key page. That way I could work on binder paper without having to carry the whole damn binder around all the time. Much of this work was done on a lap desk with my iPhone/Desmos for graphing, my TI-83-plus (sorry, Eli) for computation, and my monkey pencil case including my mechanical pencil, my ProRadian protractor, and my colored pencils.

A lot of people have asked me why I started at the end and worked from the end forwards, about 10 pages at a time. The answer has two parts: (1) whenever I started from the beginning, I bogged down or got sidetracked; and (2)  it enabled me to see where we were going and where students would end up. By seeing where they would land at the end of the course, I could better understand how things worked from the beginning.

More thoughts coming soon, but I wanted to capture these ideas right away. If you have specific questions you'd like to discuss, please put them into the comments section below.