Author: samjshah

Finally! A (not lame) use for blogs in schools.

I volunteered to do something in my school. (Uh oh.) I’m an adviser for tenth graders — and all tenth graders are required to do this “big” community service project. One of the observations that we advisers made this year is that the kids aren’t getting ramped up for it — that they see it as a chore.

So I thought — hey, let’s loosen this whole thing up and show the students that even though it’s required, they’re going to be doing something important, even if it’s only for 3 days. And they should think about the issues they’re going to be dealing with (hunger, illiteracy, etc.).

And they should have fun with it.

Right now we as educators are looking at this activity as a learning activity. But as soon as you put the veneer of “lesson plans” and ask students to write responses to “prompts,” community service goes from being something potentially rewarding and becomes something that is a chore. At least, that’s how I think this is all playing out.

So in our last meeting, I offered the idea we make a blog that all the students in the grade could post to, for all the other members of the grade to view. The way I presented it was:

1. There should be 2 “group posts” (where each group doing a particular project posts something they all wrote together) — one before and one after the community service project.

2. There should be 3 required “individual posts” where each student can write about anything they want relating to their project. The kids could post pictures, videos, interview someone, write about a particular moment, chronicle their days, do whatever.

And then there should be a contest for the “best group blog post,” “best individual blog post,” and “best picture/video blog post.”

I might be heading this up, and I’m happy to, but I’m afraid that there will be a lot of talking and not a lot of doing. I think if we treat this as something exciting, make the blog an “event” and into something that isn’t a chore, then we’ll get a good response.

Here’s a sample document that I made which I’d love to give to the kids explaining the blog and what we’re going to be doing. (It is good design, by the way, and I’m darn proud of that.)

I’ll keep you updated on what happens with this project.

Presentation on Presenting

Recently — when making my daily pilgrimage to my favorite teacher blog dy/dan — I was directed to a presentation on presenting created by Scott Elias. I was blown away. [1] It’s not that it “said ” anything that I hadn’t read before (especially since getting sucked into dy/dan’s obsession with good design), but it reinspired me to do what I strove to do at the beginning of the year:

Pay attention to presentation, because presentation, content, and understanding are so damn intertwined its not even funny.

I used to think that math was the exception for all the design advice that abounds about PowerPoint/SmartBoard. (If you don’t know what SmartBoard is, play the video in this post.) How do you teach someone to do math by using very little text — text that usually explains some complicated math concept, problem, or formula?

Recently I’ve come to believe that one has to be more careful, but that it truly is possible to actually teach (not just gloss over) mathematics with the same advice that those design folk give to those lecturing about History or Literature.This year I’ve made a few presentations I’m proud of, but they don’t have that “wow factor” that I’m going for. I’ve realized that it’s for a few reasons:

1. My SmartBoard presentations serve a dual purpose, both acting as the driving motor to my lesson and to provide a resource for students at home to download and look at if they are confused. So I tend to write everything down, using entirely too much text. I do this because I think students will need it at home. I also do it because it is a crutch for me. I know exactly where I’m going and what I have to say if I have it on the screen.

2. I don’t use any pictures — save for the occasional graph.

3. I don’t have a way to indicate to students “take notes on this!” and “don’t take notes on this!”

4. I don’t emphasize the “big” points well.

But I’m working on addressing of these. And I think I have made some pretty good slides for Monday. We’ll see…

[1] I liked the presentation so much that I sent it to this one particular email list (“course conference”) at my school for other teachers to check out if they wanted, and one of the computer teachers wrote Scott Elias the following (and copied me on the email):

Good Morning Scott,I am fortunate to work with a teacher named Sam Shah, who shared your blog post on presenting.

With more than 20 years of being a classroom student and 10 as an educator, this presentation is one of the top three most engaging I have ever seen, and the most useful in my teaching career so far.

I am attaching your pdf here to share with the Middle School Skills Team, Upper School Director and Technology Director.

Thanks so much.

I hope that a dialogue is sparked about how to make presentations and use SmartBoard effectively in the classroom. I find it crazy that we all have this tool and yet it appears to me that no one uses it to be anything more than a whiteboard with capability to save.

Honing intuition is hard work (but worth it)

I thought I’d kill birds with stones and (1) try using LaTeX equations while (2) explaining how I honed my calculus classes intuition. Granted, the idea is simple and I think most teachers teach it this way, but I didn’t and my students got confused. So on Day 2 of the chain rule, I had them come in and do the following right away:

Find the derivatives:

A1:
B1:
C1:

A2:
B2:
C2:

A3:
B3:
C3:

Bonus Problems:

D1: Find the derivative of .

D2: Find the derivative of .

And in fact, they were very successful. Instead of showing them a big equation and how to break it down, I instead started small and built it up. And showed them each part of what was going on. And by the end, my students were pretty capable chain-rule-appliers.

There are three things to say about this:

1. It is important to first introduce as because it makes the composition of functions easier to see. (Plus, really surprisingly and disappointingly, some of my students didn’t realize they were the same thing!)

2. There is something really exhilerating about writing really long answers to problems. They love it. I love it. It makes us feel important and like we’re doing something extraordinarily complex. Which we are (to some extent).

3. I think it’s important to polish off this whole chain rule business with something that shows the students that all these things that they’re doing works. Physically worsk. And are just like what we’ve been doing. So what I did after we worked on this worksheet is we went back to a derivative we had initially solved with the chain rule: . I asked them what the equation of the tangent line to this function was at a particular value of . And then I showed them that what we found for the tangent line worked graphically. They saw the tangent line hit the curve in front of them. At this point, there weren’t many gasps (they knew it was going to work), but I think it drove home that (a) hell yeah, it works! and i’m. not. lying. to. you. and (b) this is no different than everything else we’ve been doing. (We’ve been finding tangent lines to tons of functions. These functions are just longer and more gross looking.)

Happy hour. Let’s be honest: happy hours. many happy hours.

There’s a tradition at my school: teachers grab a drink after work on Fridays. I think it’s been happening for years, but it’s a tradition that has really come into it’s own recently. And normally on Friday five to fifteen of us go to a local watering hole and unwind. Stories are shared, annoyances are vented, and we get to actually enjoy each other’s company for longer than the frequent “how’s it going?” as we pass through the hallways of the school like ships in the night.

Each Friday around 1pm an email gets sent out by the “leaders” of happy hour which pokes fun at the school and the goings on of that week. This week, I accepted an invitation to be a guest writer:

Dear thirsty compatriots,Sam Shah, guest writer extrodinarie here. I thought in light of the school’s committment to self-reflection and goal-setting, that I would share with you one of my SMARTgoals.

Currently, as a first year math teacher, there are a number of areas in which I can improve: namely bring in more cupcakes. But that goal doesn’t quit fit any tenets of teaching. (But it is a tenet of being a good person.) Our plane would still fly whether there were cupcakes on the fold-down trays or not.

What would make the plane crash, literally and metaphorically, is if there was no fuel. And addressing that is my SMARTgoal. Keep yourself well-fueled. As the new school nurse said to the US this week, hydrate yourself. It wards off the colds that cause 2.2million days of school lost, and keeps you focused and attentive to help students out. (And bake cupcakes.) So my SMARTgoal is:

Be healthy. Drink copious amounts of beverages of all kinds in equal measure frequently. That means… well… you know where this is going…

[Bar Name Here]

Today. 4pm.

AND LET THE NEW HEALTH REGIMEN BEGIN!

Recently I’ve been going to happy hour and I have a better and better time each week. The bartender (she works every Friday) has gotten to know me well enough that she asked “hey is your crew coming today?” and then she gave me 2 free Guinesses! And afterwards, I went to dinner with three teachers.

The best part about all of this is that this is exactly the place where I feel like I’m becoming part of the community. It’s where we talk about things and (best of all) I hear gossip.

Gosh I love gossip.

First Year Faculty Class Observation

Sitting in my mailbox this afternoon was a big white envelope. Inside was my “First Year Faculty Class Observation.” The head of the upper school observed me in late October and this was the fruits of that labor.

Part I of the document was a brief description of the lesson or class.

Part II of the document were commendations and areas of strength.

Part III of the document were recommendations and areas of growth.

I won’t bore you with Part I. And honestly, Part III is interesting only to a certain degree. It does have some very helpful suggestions (e.g. have a good method to close up class to tie everything together) but most were things like “you had students use the calculator in class… how were you making sure they could use it at home without you there” (the implication is that I didn’t have a way to do this, but in fact, I post very explicit instructions for them online so they can refer to them).

So I’m posting Part II below. It doesn’t really scream “you’re wonderful,” but hey, I’ll take the good in whatever form I can get it.

Part II: Commendations/Areas of Strength

Throughout the class you maintained a positive tone that encouraged students to participate in the work you had laid out.

Your carefully planned PowerPoint reinforced different learning styles and helped the students remain focused as new material and tools were being introduced.

You comfortably moved around the room to monitor student progress as they began to work with the graphing calculator and you offered helpful feedback along the way.

You used simple hand gestures to tell a student to hold her question as you finished giving instructions to the whole class and then you returned to listen to the question once the class had begun to work independently.

You demonstrated your understanding of the material and supported your students in their own burgeoning understanding by reinforcing prior learning and connecting it to the new topic. For example, asking students to describe what they had already learned about [the] zero and then making the connection to [the] zero as a function, or drawing a graph and asking “what would be the zero of this function?” When [student name redacted] was unable to answer the question, you reminded her about what she already knew, so she could regain her confidence and telling her “don’t apologize” [for not remembering].

You have already taken time to meet with [the US Learning Specialist] in the learning skills deparment to review the educational testing and instructional needs of various students. Your interest in reviewing this important information is an excellent habit to develop in what I hope will be a long and successful teaching career.

A life of whining

I know, I know, teachers are always complaining.

But what’s even more terrible is that we teachers don’t tend to share our success with each other. We do have successes, I swear– even though they tend to come in small numbers and sporadically. Still, we keep them to ourselves.

So in this post, I’m going to brag.

In my calculus class yesterday, my students struggled hardcore with the chain rule. They didn’t quite get substitution for the more involved problems, and I’ve been trying to hone their intuition explicitly — saying I don’t want them to do problems formally. I want them to practice “seeing” the solutions.

Let’s level here: getting an assortment of calculus students to “see” anything is hard. They like rules, procedures, things they know will always work. Telling them to “hone their intuition” frightens them. There’s less certainty. But the reward of finally getting it is so much greater — because you can suddenly attack incredibly complicated problems.

So I waltzed into my classroom filled with students fretting about not “seeing” the solutions, and said: “Screw the homework for now. We’re going to get this!” And I gave them this sheet with 9 problems on it — I worked hard to come up with the idea the night before — specifically designed to “hone their intuition.” And all I can say is that: it worked fabulously. They were doing really complicated chain rule problems in their heads!

The rest of the class was spent capitalizing on this new understanding. At the end of class, one of my students said that calculus class is the first time she’s enjoyed math since 7th grade when she first learned to solve for x. Which means I must be doing something right.

I left glowing.

Tabula Rasa, or how I wanted to start the second quarter.

With the start of the second quarter, I vow…

to be more creative, to start a project, to put more effort into making each lesson plan clear. Basically, to bring the enthusiasm back to the classroom that I had on the first day. I made a really great first day presentation where I made a pact with the kids: they put forth their full effort and they get me at my full effort.

I told my students its the start of a new quarter. We have a blank slate to work from. Thanksgiving break just happened. I think I will repeat the sentiment on Monday: a blank slate and a new vista of territory to cover. And I hopefully will repeat that sentiment to myself too!

With the start of the second quarter, I’m (by definition) over 1/4 done with the year. Champagne all around! Seriously, though, that opened my eyes. Everyone says first year teaching is really hard, a lot of work. It was, in the beginning, but I’ve learned where I can streamline. (I can’t imagine this is true in the sciences, history, or English… but math is incredibly easy to prepare for. Smartboard makes it time consuming, but it is still easy.) The hardest part so far is becoming emotionally uninvested. And even doing that, I think, helps me out. It isn’t that I don’t care about my students, but I need to have a hard edge to show my students I mean business. So it’s going well.

Also at the end of the quarter, I had to write comments on each of my students. This too went well. What struck me about the comment writing process is how easy it is to write comments for the students who aren’t doing so hot.