My Slow Start

To my 4 followers, sorry for the slow start. I have finally set up a Wiki where I will be posting all of my worksheets, lessons, PowerPoints, and activity descriptions. The link is <http://hsmathcollaboration.wikispaces.com/>.

 I would love for it to become the collaborative location where anyone willing will also share their ideas. They will just need to request to join. If anyone has any better ideas due to the set up or navigation being confusing, let me know.

I want to emphasize that I would love to gain followers who are interested in the cause to help young people become interested and enthusiastic in learning. I have said this before, but my goal is to inspire students to be curious and in awe at all there is to know- lifelong learners. I want them to be confident in their ability to access whatever it is that they want learn. I want to give them the opportunity to be as hands-on with math as possible. On my blog, I will be posting the topics my students are learning. If there are any business people, engineers, researchers, doctors, physicists, economists, anyone! who has had hands-on experience with the topics I teach, please, teach my students and me.

Pre-Algebra:  This week, we will be wrapping up a fairly involved lesson on fractions then we will be moving into ratios and proportions. I went through the book at first. Basically, I did the typical drill the skill of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing fractions. We worked a lot of the book first. Then, I had them create a model of my bathroom scaled to be 1/8 of the actual size. I did post the worksheets and the rubric I used for this project on the wiki (http://hsmathcollaboration.wikispaces.com/Operations+of+Fractions).

Overall the project went well. I would like to do this project again next year. I will be changing a lot about it. For one, I will be making days strictly for working on the worksheets. I had a problem with getting my students to do the work that would result in accurate scaling. There was a lot of down-time which I would have to really prompt my students to multitask and do the paperwork that would prepare them for the next step. For example, while they were gluing sticks together to create the 2x4's, they would literally be watching glue dry before I would go over to them and push them to be working on measuring outlet boxes, or measuring and scaling the next object to me made/constructed.


Algebra: We are going to be moving into quadratic equations and factoring.


Precalculus: We are going to be learning the Law of Cosines this week. We will then be learning about vectors. I am excited to be presenting them with one activity this week. I am in the process of planning a plane vs. wind activity. Students will be working in pairs- one student will be a plane and the other student the wind. The wind will be applying a certain force on the plane with the desire to get the plane off course. The plane will be trying to get to a certain location by taking the wind into account. I will be posting that up shortly.

Calculus: We just got into integration and the antiderivative. We will start off this week by finding the area underneath a curve. This year, being the first year teaching calculus for me, I have not been happy with the pace I started out with at the beginning of the year. I started teaching with the book as a guide for my lessons. As a result, I dedicated too much time to the review of precalculus content. Next year, I know exactly which things we will focus on as review. Now that I have taught precalculus, I know exactly what the students have been exposed to in the precalculus class. I also know what my calculus students had difficulty remembering and thus what I will need to focus on as review.

 I will definitely be focusing on the rational root test and other concepts with graphing polynomial and rational functions.

Working on a Webpage

I have never been much of a person who journals. In fact, I will be frank and state that I dread thinking about the time I will be putting into writing these blogs. I will therefore do a forewarning and promise to myself that I will not over think these sessions of blogging. I accept I will be most un-entertaining. I am going to try to keep these short and sweet, and I may be all over the place with my line of topics. 

As my first blog suggested, I have a mission in blogging and I will keep to it:

~ I want to keep documentation and grow from my experiences
~  Mostly, I want to develop my teaching by collaborating with other teachers
~ I will pursue finding, collecting, and creating the math lessons that will stick with my students, get them excited and confident with problem-solving, and help them see the power of learning.

Today, I had a hold up in starting this "place" of collaboration. First, I am still trying to decide whether it will be a webpage or a wiki. I am more familiar with wikis, so I think I will be going with that. If anyone has any suggestions I will gladly take them. 

Second, my launch of the ultimate lesson sharing location was annoyingly held up because I was having issues with finding a space that would allow me to freely write equations in if I needed. I think I have found a solution: http://rogercortesi.com/eqn/index.php   Thank you Roger. I apparently just need to master LateX...

At this point, I really need to sink my heart into the idea of using a wiki to create this project. I will be posting soon, hopefully, about the wiki I have created.

Look what I can do:

Believe it, or not, putting this equation on was really hard for me to do. It actually disappeared overnight too. I just found out I have to go to Roger's site, type in the LateX code, get the site to convert it as an image file, save it on my desktop, and then upload/insert it as in image here. Whew! There she is.

Math Revelations and Genesis

I seek the ultimate group of collaboration that will build and share the ultimate lessons with one another. To go ahead and loosely give definition to “ultimate lessons”:  they are the lessons that make students understand the concepts they are learning by making them wonder enough that they think, they work, and they succeed in solving a problem. When students take their books home to practice concept skills, they should be able to hope for an eventual enlightening, interesting activity that will showcase and force those skills out of them.  We all know formative tests do not always make that cut of what the students are hoping for. We all know formative tests do not always make those concepts stick.

 I am a first year teacher, and I may sound naïve, but I know I am very small right now in a very big picture. I feel like for every one awesome lesson or activity that comes through to my classrooms, I should have had three more. But every night, I find myself struggling to gear myself with the expertise of applications and ability to create real life activities.  I feel like my life consists of searching and creating. I search for the jackpot resource that has the ultimate lessons. In reality, I search and search to find bits and pieces. Then I find myself building and creating the activities that I hope will become the ultimate lessons.  Am I just not looking in the right places? 

I have this burn to make something happen because I had heartbreak in my classroom. I teach a freshmen pre-algebra class at a high school. We are doing a unit on operations of fractions. I decided to do an activity that dealt with taking a coloring book picture, cutting it onto equal rectangle pieces and having each student enlarge this piece by a scale factor of 3. To sum up the cause of heartbreak, I found out my students could not measure and cut out a rectangle that had the dimensions 4.5 inches x 8.24 inches. It came down mostly to not being able to use the ruler. Blank stares were the response of the task. I asked a student to just point out 3 ½ to me. Her response was she did not know what all the lines meant.

THIS CANNOT HAPPEN. I need to know that all of these standards that we are teaching and being guided by are actually being reached. I look around my trig class some days and just know they are not receiving what I am teaching. I can sound excited about my content. I can selectively call on students to get them more involved and "engaged". But, I feel the only way to know they are receiving these skills is if my students are truly engaged on their own terms. Thus, I seek the ultimate lessons.

I am on Twitter and I am making this blog in the hope of building collaboration. I will be making a website, maybe a wiki, in order to create a spot of collaboration and ultimate lesson sharing. I am desperate to follow other teachers like me, and I am desperate to share my lessons with followers. 

I just want to improve, and I know I am improving and developing at a much slower rate than what is possible. I always tell my students that they have no excuse not to find what they are looking for when technology has put everything at the tip of their fingertips. I am looking for the ultimate group of collaboration. Please, help me!