Sunday, October 29, 2017

Post MathCon Musings

Coming back from CMC always makes me have long, hard conversations with myself.  It makes me question my practices and routines, what I value and what I'm looking for from my students, which in turn leads me to question what my students need out of me.

What do I value?  How do I measure that?  That question still haunts me.

How are we going to change the data if we don't change the way we teach?

You can only really expect someone to change 10% at a time.  That's 1 day every 2 weeks.

Visual patterns

Which one doesn't belong

Would you rather

Estimation 180

There's so much good stuff out there.  Not trying one of them would just be wrong.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

cut or fold

I've been arguing back and forth with my work-wife (my mathematical better half).  Do you fold or cut on dotted lines?  I'm on the fold on dotted, cut on solid camp.  She's on the other, and I think that's crazypants.

Saturday, July 22, 2017

New means new...

The anxiety is starting to sink in.  I'm not looking forward to coming back to work.  I've been enjoying my time off way too much.  But a purposeless life is...well...purposeless.

I'm toying with the ideas of interactive notebooks again.  I'm also contemplating seventh graders--they're a giant ball of hormone-fueled crazypants and I'm not sure if I want to be on this ship.  Too bad I love my teaching partners.  Can't have it all, amirite?

I used the personality inventories from Sarah Rubin at Everybody is a Genius with success in the past,  but last time, it didn't quite work out for me.  I'm blaming hormone-fueled crazypants.  I've been borrowing heavily from pinterest and other math bloggers out there, and I'm incredibly thankful to them, hence the need to post what I've been doing.

I'm going to start with these introductory pages from Karrie at Mrs. E Teaches Math, but I modified the first page a bit to suit my needs.  I've decided that I'll be grading their notebooks this year (marginally, it's just to increase buy-in), so I included a preview of what they'll be graded on and a signature line.  The facing page will be a table of contents for their units.  



The next pages will be my syllabus, whose formatting I took from Everybody is a Genius.  Then the math biography, that I borrowed from Math Equals Love, and an exercise in goal setting.  I'm hoping to focus a lot on the power of positive mindsets (yes, I'm on the Carol Dweck/Jo Boaler train). I'm finishing off the introductory pages with Mrs. E's Tips for Studying Math.


Each unit will have it's own table of contents and list of objectives.  I'm not quite sure how I feel about such a large tab sticking out of the notebook, but I think I'll live.

The seventh grade standards start off with a unit on Ratios and Proportions, including percents, but I think that's sillypants.  I'm going start the year off with Number Systems so integers will be first on deck, followed by fractions.  After I've figured out what I'm doing, there will be a post with foldables and stuff.








This is my notebook...
Smart Goals
Integer unit page
SaveSave