Month: April 2012

Let’s do a solid for @cheesemonkey

Dear you,

Yeah you, my super awesome teacher friend!

I am about to start composing a letter of recommendation for @cheesemonkey [blog, twitter], and I wanted your help. For me, her constant upbeat spirit and cheerleading of every one of us  in everything we do has been glorious. Heck, in my opinion, she’s a lynchpin to our online math math community. Full stop. The activities that she posts about are constantly on my list of things to steal. And just as importantly, the thoughtfulness that she writes about in all her interactions with students — whether it be in her zillion recommendation letters to her conscientious work to build up each student’s math confidence — is an inspiration.

I want to write a collective recommendation, one where the reader can see that @cheesemonkey has a broad impact on the math teaching world.

So let’s do a solid for @cheesemonkey. If she’s done something large or small, inspired you, helped you, given you something to use in her classes, keeps you engaged in teaching, pay back the favor. Throw your mini-recommendation in the submission box below (it will be emailed to me) and show her how much you care! A few sentences to a few paragraphs, just share. We’re a community that helps each other out all the time, and I need your help!

It is a bit time sensitive, so if you could do it soon (translation: in the next day or two), I would be ever grateful.

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Thank you for your response. ✨

Thank you, all!

Always,
Sam

Comment Time Is Over!

This is a post of celebration.

This past weekend and this week, I’ve been consumed with writing narrative comments on all my students. In the past two years of teaching, I have been trying to be more thoughtful about what I’m writing. To put all the cards on the table, I don’t think that comments themselves really effect change in students. However, I do think there is a powerful thing that comments can do: it is a way to tell students I see you and I care about you and I am thinking about you and your learning. Not literally, but a comment can send that message implicitly.

So even though I have serious doubts about the efficacy about what I write in helping students to change their practices, I hold firm to the belief that the implicit message is worth it. So I write, and hope that for a few kids, it matters.

It’s almost 9pm. I’m at a coffeeshop now, and I just finished my last (my 49th) comment of the year. 58 pages later, I am breathing a sigh of relief that I’m done.

I’m totally drained.

I’m so tired of writing that I don’t have it in me to talk about how my comments have evolved in the past two years, or how standards based grading has made writing comments so much easier. Or list the places I know I could still improve on. And maybe I will at some later point.

For now, I just wanted to write a post now sharing the good news with everyone:

I am done!

(If  you want to see the type of comments I wrote in my first three years of teaching, I’ve archived that here.)