Summer Notebook

I said I’d post about my summer notebook weeks ago – I have no real excuse other than laziness for not doing it. But now that it’s time to really start thinking about the upcoming school year I find myself doing random things that probably should be priorities. So, here it is.

A few years ago I found myself engaging in numerous summer professional learning and reading; during these opportunities I would have countless “brainstorms” for my different classes and found myself taking notes all over the place. I had notebooks for each PD, post-it notes coming out of my ears, printed handouts with no real “home”…I’m sure you get the idea.

I decided I needed a way to get organized so that when the inevitable day came and it was time to consider how to put those brainstorms into practice, everything would be in one place, easy to locate and use. Now, I love technology just as much as the next person, maybe more than a few, but when it comes to professional learning, I really, really like paper and notes!

My solution is not earth shattering, but it helped me and a few others have implemented it and seem to appreciate it.

I took a basic notebook, and split it into sections, one for each of my preps. As I had a brainstorm, I simply jot it down in the appropriate section. Post-it note idea? Stick in in the section it relates to. Handouts from a PD session? Fold them in half and tape to a page in the notebook.

Sadly I don’t have any pictures from those first few years, and over time lots has changed – my teaching responsibilities are different, I have far fewer preps, and summer PD has virtually become non-existent – so the current version looks rather boring, but here are some pictures so you can get the idea.

As you can see, my preps are minimal, so the notebook doesn’t contain anywhere near the information it formerly did.

(I have not blogged in a LONG time. These new photo layout options are pretty cool!)

This gives me a place to jot down notes as I read, make lists as things come to mind, and just organize my summer thinking in general. I create pages for each unit in each prep, so I can be even more organized with my ideas. Some of the stuff in the notebook makes it to the classroom, some doesn’t.

Once school starts, I go through the notebook periodically, reminding myself of all the great ideas I had during the summer. I also use it to makes notes as the school year progresses – things that worked well, things that didn’t work well, great ideas I had the day *after* I taught the lesson…

At the end of the year, I go through each page of the notebook. If the information is no longer relevant, the pages gets thrown away. If it contains ideas I still want to implement, it gets moved to the new notebook.

I hope someone has found this useful, or at the very least used it to develop your own ideas. It really helped me stay organized in the summer so that more of the learning made its way to my students.

Now, I’m off to find something else to let me procrastinate planning for school. And to watch Hamilton for the upteenth billion time. I’m not throwing away my shot!

Happy 2020-2021 to all of you. I know it isn’t going to like anything we’ve ever done, but I hope and pray we all come out on the other side as better teachers, better communicators, and better people!

#teach180

Tags

teach180

The ole’ blog has been pretty quiet lately. I’ve got some ideas in the back of my  mind to write out, but until someone figures out how to add more hours to the day (and places them between 4 pm and 6 pm) there’s no telling how long it will take me to get them posted.

In the mean time, if you’re interested in what’s happening in my classroom, I’m doing a #teach180 challenge and posting the pictures on Instagram. Feel free to follow me (@racheltemplerosales) over there to see what’s happening in AP Stats and PreCalculus. I also post the information on twitter if you want to follow me there (@rachelrosales). If you search the hashtag you’ll see my posts, along with numerous other teachers who have taken up the challenge.

Not everyday is photo worthy–and you should always remember that I get to pick and choose the best highlights of the day to show you. It isn’t always roses and happiness, so don’t get the wrong idea. I have bad days, and worksheet days, and days that I just don’t feel up to being awesome. But committing to #teach180 makes me be a bit more intentional in my planning, and it does make me think more deeply about what good student engagement looks like.

I hope to see you all in the hashtags!

Peace,

Rachel

Daily scribe

Hey y’all. It must be a new school year because I’m actually writing a blog post.

Today I’m working on implementing an idea I had several years ago, but never took time to make it happen.

Problem: Students who are absent and come to me with the dreaded question, “What did we do in class yesterday?” Or worse, “I’ve been out for 12 days. What have I missed?” I am the worst about being able to recall every important detail they need to be told; inevitably something vital gets omitted and then I’m frustrated with both myself for forgetting and the student for being absent. Also, I want students who are present to learn the value of pausing to reflect on the day and summarize things into their own words.

Potential approach to this problem: Implement a “Daily scribe” for each class period. I toyed with the idea of just having one student copy his notes for the day but 1) that doesn’t involve ANY thinking on the part of the student. 2) Some students have terrible daily notes, or don’t take notes at all. So I created a standard form for each student to use. Here are the questions on it. There’s a link to the actual word doc, but it isn’t formatted or anything yet.

daily scribe

I think I will randomly select a student at the beginning of class each day to be the scribe and this will need to be returned to me no later than the beginning of the next class (I really want to say it’s due by a certain time on the same day as the lesson…still pondering that). I’ll also post the form on GoogleClassroom so they could complete it electronically. I’ll create a class binder of all the forms and place it in a place that all students can access any time they need to know what they missed, or need to see how someone else processed the information from class.

So, what do you think? Have I left out anything? Is any question too vague? Do you think high school students (mostly 11-12 grade) will be able to effectively complete this?

My hope is that 1) absent students will not be asking me those dreaded questions. 2) students will learn the value of reflecting and *maybe* start doing this for themselves on a daily basis.

 

HELP!!!!

Course: AP Statistics

Problem: NO ONE IS DOING THEIR &^$*(#!* HOMEWORK

Result: THEY CAN’T PASS THE QUIZZES AND HAVE NO CLUE WHAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT DURING CLASS DISCUSSIONS.

Sorry for yelling. I’m just really frustrated at this moment. In my AP Statistics classes, I am struggling with getting students to actually do their homework. I have small sections (one has 18, one has 13). Probably 3 students from each section legitimately do the problems, check their work, and ask genuine questions in class. I love those kids. All 6 of them.

Another couple might make a lame attempt at doing some of the problems, but never check to see if they are right and never ask about any problems.

A larger handful copy the answers from the back of the book. As though they would actually talk that way. I mean, who even writes “Ho versus Ha”. Not me.

And the rest just. Don’t. Do. Anything.

And I don’t know what to do. I’m looking for some suggestions before I start this class again in August.

Here is my homework approach currently:

I give them the homework for the section at the beginning of the discussion (I use TPS, 5th ed) and a due date of roughly 1-2 days after I expect to finish that section. When we start section 2, they get the HW for section 2, with another due date. Repeat until we finish the chapter; there is a designated place on my board, a “parking lot” on which they can write problem numbers they’d like me to discuss with them. Most of the time I only assign the odd problems so they can check their work as they go. On the day of the chapter assessment, I collect the HW notebooks to check for completion only and am disgusted almost every single time at the lack of effort.

I have never been a fan of having a strict HW policy–I mean, this is supposed to be the equivalent of a college course and my students are mostly juniors and seniors. They should know by the time they take stats if they need to complete the homework or if they understand the material and don’t need to do the problems. A few students that do not complete the homework do perform well on assessments, so I don’t want to penalize them and put them through extra, unnecessary work, but there are such a small number of those, that I’m feeling like I need to do something different.

But I don’t know what. Next year I am expecting my class sizes to be double what they are this year. I cannot grade homework every single day.  Also, I am on a 45 minute year-long schedule (if that matters at all).

So I ask for your help. What are your homework strategies? How do you grade it? What have you found that works for larger classes (mine will be about 25 each next year)?

Thanks for your help.

 

March Madness Comes to AP Stats

Help me think through this y’all.

I love, love, love March Madness and all that is tournament time; my dear friend and AP English teacher sets up a bracket every year and her students debate the merits of different pieces of literature until they have a winner. [I’ll try to upload a picture of her brilliance once she starts it this year.] I’ve been trying to figure out a way to incorporate that into math for years with no success. UNTIL NOW. I think. I hope. OH, I really, really hope.

Here’s my plan. Sorry for the brain-dump format–I’m still thinking through it.

1. Double elimination [I have 2 classes, total of 31 students, dispersed nicely so I can have 6 teams in one class, 4 in the other; however, all teams are competing in the same bracket.]
2. Students assigned randomly to a team. Day one: Come up with a team name.
3. I think  I will have about 12 matches with 10 teams. For each match, I am going to create a set of review problems (after all, that test is approaching quickly) some worth 1 point (easy, fill-in-the-blank or vocab, some worth 2 points (more “show your work” type questions, some worth 3 points (harder, more parts). I am trying to stay away from pure multiple choice so they can’t just “guess”. Given the time factor I have to work with in each period, they won’t have time to do full FRQ’s either.
4. Teams get 10 minutes to work problems.
5. After 10 minutes, teams trade papers. We grade. I have good kids–I think they can handle grading either other’s work. I thought about collecting them, but I need it to go fast. Super fast.
6. Team with most points in each match = the winner (duh).
7. Once a team is eliminated, they will still get the questions to work each day–after all, it is for test review–they will just check their own work and not be part of the tournament anymore.
8. Naturally, I need to find a super-cool, highly sought-after and coveted, not-found-at-your-local-Walmart prize for the winning team. I’m still working on that one.

Okay peeps and tweeps. What issues do you see when you read through this? What have I forgotten or not thought about?

I’ll holler back at ‘cha after we do it, with pictures and (hopefully) problem sets in case you want to give it a whirl in your classroom.

Give and Take Bulletin Board

So much Twitter love from my post about my walls this year. Y’all know how to make a girl feel good! I don’t have my lesson plans ready, and am not entirely sure what I’m doing on the first day (which is tomorrow) but hey, why not sit and write a blog.

So, for all who have asked, here are the pictures again, along with some files. Nothing is super-special, but it works for me, so maybe it will help you out too.

Be…not a new creation. It used to hang on the bulletin board on the wall on the way into my room. This year I moved it into the classroom into some “dead space” that isn’t good for much else–it’s too high to display student work and I don’t like to fill my walls with “helpful posters”. I added the Be You…But Be the Best Version of you to it this year. That is just adhesive vinyl I cut with my silhouette machine.  Sorry about the picture quality. I didn’t realize it was so bad.

Here is a pdf of the BE and adjectives. I just printed them onto white copy paper, trimmed the words down, and glued each one onto colored copy paper. Laminated, for durability and presto…a fancy little wall of inspiration.  BE

For the bulletin board in the hallway, I’ll be honest–I really was looking for something that I didn’t have to change. Ever. I strongly dislike making bulletin boards. So. Much. Work. So, I scoured Pinterest (don’t judge–there are some good ideas on there) and saw a picture of a bulletin board that said Take what you need…Give what you can. And had post-it notes all over it with positive traits or words of encouragement on them…stuff like “peace”, “patience”, “you’ve got this”, etc. The “Give what you can” side was for people to leave encouraging words for others. Last year, I did the “take” half and picked up post-its all year long. Every day. No kidding. They just didn’t stick. I really just did this on a whim, to get the board covered; I was quite surprised to see kids really take the words–I know some just did it to be cute, but several stopped me and said they really appreciated the extra encouragement.  I didn’t do the “give” half because, honestly, I wasn’t sure what kind of stuff the kids would leave behind and I didn’t want to have to police it.

So, this year I decided to “kick it up a notch”. Partly because a few kiddos really appreciated it and partly because I’m tired of picking up post-its.

 I selected a few traits that I thought the world could use more of and googled “quotes about…” each of those traits. I ended up at brainyquote.com and had tons to choose from. I picked some different quotes for each characteristic, copied them into a table, picked some fun fonts for each, and hit print. Cut those bad boys apart and stuck them in the appropriate envelope. So this year if you are in need of a little kindness you can just pick up a quote that will hopefully help you get through the day. If you want the quotes, here are links. Each word is a separate link. (Again, I used the silhouette and vinyl to make the purple letters).

confidence faith Hope humility kindness love patience peace self control

I really like the “Give what you can” idea, but again, am fearful of what some little darlings might want to leave behind so I combined that idea with another one I found–a Random Act of Kindness challenge.

It’s pretty basic, and certainly not my original idea. But I’m hoping it gets the point across. We need to be kind to others. The challenge is to take a task, do it, then post to twitter using our school hash tag or send a picture for me to add to the board. I only used tasks that are free, just to keep it simple for my students.

Here are the “steps” to the challenge: Random Acts of Kindness

Here are the tasks I came up with: Random Acts

7-18-18 ETA: editible version of  Random Acts of Kindness

It’s pretty simple stuff–sit with someone new at lunch, clean up after someone in the cafeteria, give a shout-out to a lunch worker or a maintenance person or a secretary, stuff like that. I’m also hoping that kids will come up with other acts they can do and add to my list. That’s what the suggestion envelope is for.

I figure if even just a couple of kids get the message and spread kindness, or find the encouragement they need, it’s worth it.

Hope you all have a great school year. We start tomorrow with students!  And now I better go do some lesson plans.

Is this thing still on?

Tags

Entrance Cards

Ahem. Mic check. One. Two. Three. Is anybody out there?

Holy cow—has it really been since 2015 since I blogged??? Oops. Time to dust off the ole wordpress and put some stuff out there.

I just returned from scoring AP Statistics exams and after re-connecting with some dear friends, have felt compelled to try and get back into the online math universe and post some stuff for other people to read. No promises for anything good–just stuff. I am going to *try* and blog once a week. We’ll see how long that lasts. Since we are in the midst of summer (glory, hallelujah) I am working on plans for the upcoming school year. I’ll be teaching AP Stats, Pre-calculus, and a new course called Financial Math. In addition, we are switching from trimesters to a hybrid block/regular schedule so, yay. I think.

Anyway…this post is about entrance cards.

Last year I taught precalculus for the first time and I knew (from talking to the calculus teacher) that one area which historically had been a problem for many students was that they didn’t truly know the values of the exact trig functions. They had been asked to “memorize” the unit circle but we all know what they did. I’m sure they took a couple of days to “build” it, either with paper plates and adding machine tape or with technology of some sort or with some other interesting method designed to help them see the values and understand where they come from. They were then told to memorize those values. The quiz to assess knowledge was probably a blank unit circle and they had to fill it in. Perhaps multiple times, perhaps only once. And BOOM. They “knew” the unit circle. And then class moved on to identities and perhaps referenced a unit circle value once in a while. I did not want my students leaving my class without at least making some attempt at doing it better than that. So…

I started with the fairly traditional “build-the-unit-circle” stuff; adding machine tape, paper plates, and lovely special right triangles to trace. We measured, labeled, discuss, identified patterns, all the good stuff. Then I said, “Now you have to memorize all of this.”  After all the moaning and groaning subsided, I shared a couple of memory tools that I knew or found on Pinterest and set them free to memorize. To help them practice as well as know that I really was serious about this, I decided to orally quiz them every day at the start of class. I created a set of flash cards (available below) and as students came to the door, I held one up. Initially I thought students would stand in line and wait their turn, but it ended up being a big cluster of people and the first person to get the question right got to go in. Everyone else had to wait for the next question. I cannot tell you how beautifully this worked. So much better than I had even imagined. Students knew it was coming. Every day. For almost two weeks. Some of them learned the values quickly, others took more time, but they all knew they needed to know this stuff. For those that were struggling, I was able to work with them one-on-one in the moment. Sometimes they just needed a little encouragement, sometimes we needed to revisit the memory technique they chose to use and see what misconceptions they had.

I did not use all of the flash cards–if you open the file you will see they include all the special angles around the entire unit circle. My goal was for students to know quadrant I and the axis angles, so I stuck with only those. The first few days, I only used cards with degrees/radians and had them practice converting the key angles back and forth. Then I added the trig values. Finally, I created some (sorry–just wrote on index cards) for inverse trig, prepping them to solve equations.

Trig Entrance Cards.Exact Unit Circle Values

Since I experienced such success with this topic, my first thought was, “How can I capitalize on this and use it more often, and in more classes, next year?” I realize this is only good for things that need to be available in “quick recall” format, but I’m thinking there are some skills precalculus kids need to be able to do that with. In stats, I’m thinking about quick vocabulary checks or basic formulas that need to be committed to memory. I know this won’t work for getting at deep understanding, but it gives students motivation to know at least something and I get to interact with each student individually EVERY time I use these. That’s a win in my book.

Here’s my current brain dump…I hope you’ll all add some ideas and suggestions.

PreCalculus:

Logarithms; Evaluating nth roots; Factoring quadratics and higher order polynomials;

AP Statistics:

Describing data (Shape, center, spread); Classifying data (categorical/quantitative); Estimating the center of a distribution; Which measures should you use for a given set of data (standard deviation and mean OR IQR and median); Interpreting slope, r, r^2, y-intercept; Choosing the right probability setting (and, or, conditional); which inference test; Should you reject/fail to reject the null (from p-value, from a critical value); Have a calculator available to check for basic skills (finding a 5 number summary, creating a histogram, finding mean and standard deviation, etc);

Thanks for reading. Maybe I’ll make it back next week.

Bellringer thoughts

I’ve been considering the use of bellringers in my classroom and have decided that I’m not a huge fan. I think the idea behind the practice is great (something for the kids to do to give me time to start class; a method for multiple choice practice; good review of prior content; a way to introduce new content), but implementing it effectively has not been a strength of mine in the past. I acknowledge that I need to be more intentional in ACT/AP practice, and have been pondering how I can use the first few minutes of class more effectively to meet the demands of multiple choice practice. [This is not a post to debate the pros and cons of standardized testing. It’s a plan to address the fact that they exist and that I live smack dab in the middle of them.]

Here’s what I think I am going to try out for the next 3 weeks (that’s how much time until the Christmas vacation).

My students are already arranged into groups of 4, 5 or  6, depending on the size of the class. I have no more than 6 groups in each section. I also teach Algebra 2 and AP Stats, so only 2 preps to consider.

As students enter the room, each one will get 3-5 multiple choice questions and I will have a timer running for 8-10 minutes. Students will work in their groups to agree on the solutions to each problem. Once agreement has been reached, they will submit their answers to me (either on an index card or using technology–I haven’t decided on that yet) and I will tell them how many they have right. They will have until the timer goes off to get as many right as they can. At the end of the time, they will get one “point” for each correct response. The team with the most points at the end of the 3 weeks will be declared the winner.

 

I’m hoping that the competitive aspect of it will motivate students to want to do well and that the group aspect of it will allow all students access to the questions and allow me use use some higher level questions that I might not normally attempt to incorporate into a bellringer. I am also hoping that the timer will keep me from letting this activity take over the class period.

I’ll give it three weeks and see how it goes!

#invertit-zero product property

I just returned from NCTM Nashville and wanted to put some things I’d learned into practice immediately before I forgot about them. One of those was from @k8nowak and the idea of inverting a lesson. Unfortunately (thanks to the lovely Nashville traffic) I didn’t make it to her session, but I was able to chat with a friend who was able to fill me in. The big idea, as I understand it, is to invert the order of a traditional lesson by giving students a “puzzle” then asking them to continue it or add to it. The generalizations or rules are saved for the end, after everyone is familiar with what is happening in the problems. Here is my version of it…

Our topic: the zero-product property

Students already know how to factor quadratics

What I did:

I started class by showing this this chart, and briefly explaining what it meant; namely, that everything on the slide was true, and that there were no problems for them to work out. Instead, I was giving them the problem, the answer, and what those two pieces of information told me about the graph of the function.

I asked them to study the chart silently for 1 minute, then turn and share their observations with their neighbor for 1 minute. Students then had a small white board on which I asked them to respond to questions similar to these:

Make up a new problem, solution, and graph that could be added to my list. [After viewing their responses, I selected 3 to add to the list above]

Make up a problem that would have 2 positive solutions. [Again, adding a couple selections to the list]

Make up a problem that would have a graph that opened downward. [Yep, add a couple more].

Make up a problem that would have one non-integer solution [Once we finally agreed on what-in-the-world I meant by that difficult vocabulary–insert sarcastic grimace- we had the opportunity to talk about why a factor of (x-1/2) is correct, but most likely would not present it self in that form. Students quickly figured out that it would be (2x-1) in most contexts]

After several questions and responses, and once I was fairly confident that the students knew what they were doing, we took some summarizing notes. Here’s the cool part: they didn’t really need me for this part. They knew what was going on and were able to put it in their own words. Rest assured math friends, I went over it, making sure we used good vocabulary and had solid examples to refer back to, but they had it.

So, from there, I asked them what they thought might be done to make the problems a bit more challenging. Because, let’s face it, that was pretty simple. It didn’t take more than 10 seconds for someone to say “put something besides zero on the right side of the equation” and about 25 seconds for someone else to say “give it to us un-multiplied” (we are still working on developing that vocabulary). Anyway, what a great natural sequence of events for me to give them more challenging problems. AND THEY WERE READY FOR IT!!

Just to complete everything properly, I gave them the following:

Circuit Training. ZPP

Thanks @k8nowak for sharing this approach and giving me a way to help my students “discover” mathematical concepts.

**Circuit training was a new term for a style of sequencing problems learned at NCTM from a session by Virginia Cornelius.

Preparations for a new year

It’s time to finalize preparations for the new school year. Sad that I am doing that and it is still July, but, oh well. That’s the way it goes.

Tonight I have been pondering my grading scheme and how to tweak it for class this year. I have done some hybrid versions of SBG in the past, but last year I felt like I drifted too far back into the world of traditional grading. Here are my thoughts for this year:

[I teach Algebra 2 on a trimester schedule. Algebra 2 is a 3 trimester course, but students move from teacher to teacher during the year. I may have a student for 1, 2, or all 3 terms.]

A student’s final grade will be portioned as follows:

5% ACT warm-up questions  M-Th students will get 5 questions to work on. Grades will not be taken. Friday students will have a “quiz” consisting of 10 questions similar (but not identical) to those completed during the week.

20% Cumulative Common Assessments  These tests will be given every 4 weeks (so there will be a total of 3 during each term); exams will last 2 days. I am either going to split the 2 days into multiple choice & free response OR calculator & no calculator. These exams are cumulative for the entire year and the grades are final. No reassessments are permitted. Obviously, this is the nonSBG portion of the course.

70% Learning Target Assessments  These will be given every Friday (?) and each LT will be assessed twice and reassessment will be encouraged (and required for scores below a 3 on a 4 point scale). I am struggling between whether or not I should average the two scores, count the highest score, or count the most recent. I know the reasons for using each method…averaging should make each assessment “count” so they actually study and prepare for it…counting the last score is a better indication of what they really know…counting the highest gives them credit for having learned the material at some point.

5% Soft Skills  This will incorporate tardiness, timely completion of assignments, classroom participation, etc.

Well, that’s the brain dump for now. I’m not sure I worked through anything, but at least I have a plan on paper and that’s a start. Sometimes that’s just what it takes to get the ball rolling.