Daily Archives: January 17, 2008

For this week in the faculty periodic professional development meeting, I was asked to present a problem, observation, case study (basically anything) to a set of 10 new teachers. (We switch off presenters each time we meet.) I chose to do mine on the relationship between teaching, presenting, and smartboard — and the evolution of my understanding of this relationship since I’ve started teaching.

Unlike animal and plant evolution which can take hundreds of years for permanent changes to become stable (I guess bacterial evolution can happen in a matter of hours), I’ve evolved a lot in my teaching style and I wanted to share that with others. So instead of bringing up problem and talking it to death without any resolution or actionable steps — which is the norm — I decided that my group would learn something.

And so I presented. I only had 1 hour to create the ten minute presentation, which is why it is on the bland side, but I think I inspired a few of the teachers. Especially one of the music teachers, for whom I see this to be a huge timesaver.

One of the lower school teachers who had heard about my presentation randomly stopped me and said that we should talk, because she too has been using smartboard a lot and we could trade observations and ideas.

But honestly, I’m not here to change anyone’s mind about anything. I’m here to do my stuff in the classroom. Whatever else comes out of it, great.

I don’t know why I’m posting this, because it has nothing to do with math or teaching, but I love love love this song and video!

Run to Your Grave from the mae shi on Vimeo.

I’m snug in a bug in a rug now. It’s cold. So cold, in fact, that I’ve plugged in my electric blanket and I’m tucking myself in my big fluffy down comforter. And better than that, I found out today that I came in second place in the Annual Report design contest I wrote about earlier.

I was so elated that I sent an email with the good news to my school’s “faculty folderol” course conference (basically, a place where faculty can post about anything from an apartment they are subletting to finding good restaurant recommendations)!

You can view the winners and read the judges analyses, the other entrants, and the initial competition description.

The two best things about this competition is that (1) I got a chance to reflect on the year, on the information we save and the information we discard and the information that we discarded that we wished we had saved, and on how my life has differed from January to December. (2) I learned to use a program like photoshop (but without 99% of the bells and whistles). It’s an opensource program called Seashore; you have to do your work on “layers.” A lot more work, but very easy to play around and edit in. The learning curve is steep. I made one slide a night; the first night’s work took about 3 hours, but the next three nights’ work took about 1 hour each.

So congrats to me. I’m proud.