Author: samjshah

Math Teacher Portfolio

UPDATE: My new portfolio is at samjshahportfolio.wordpress.com.

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Inspired by Kate Nowak’s new portfolio, I am going to be making a new teaching portfolio this summer. I wanted to solicit advice.

Three questions:

  1. What would you want to see in a portfolio if you were checking out a math candidate to teach in your school?
  2. What are any math teachers portfolios that you have seen that you’ve enjoyed looking at?
  3. What place do you think would be a good place to host it?

I’d love for you to put any advice in the comments.

More about my thoughts below, if you care to see them.

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AskMetafilter helps with Classroom Management

An interesting thread/question on AskMetafilter:

Hi there,

I have a student who for whatever reason has very recently gotten a serious case of silliness/defiance. What concerns me is that when he is kept in for detention he finds the whole thing to be a big joke and giggles constantly. Even within detention he is defiant by getting up and walking around, etc. Clearly, he would be a candidate for a suspension or office referral, but for various reasons I’d like to avoid that route for the time being if possible. Obviously I’ve spoken with his parents.

I would like to reel him in mainly because normally he works pretty well, but also because he is capable of distracting the whole class. I worry that he’s actually trying to see if he can get sent to the office for some reason. At the same time, it could be a physiological thing (13–14 years old) or a genuine desire to get under my skin. The last option seems very bizarre as up until this point in the year I’ve had a great rapport with him in class.

To be specific, I don’t think that he gets the teacher – student distinction very well (almost all students when spoken to one on one have enough respect to discuss the issue if they are spoken to politely and openly – with him he just laughs right in my face).

So, any suggestions on other things I can do to get him to be respectful again? His parents have agreed to have him do extra homework, but I’m keen to know if there are other ideas. I really don’t think detention is the right fit for him and besides which, I have to supervise it and if he’s giggling the whole time it’ll really undermine the authority. The other thing I’ve done is isolate him from the class and have him do his work individually for the time being.

Thanks for any suggestions!

The responses (35 as of now) are varied and interesting. Some are, imho, awful, and some are heading in the right direction. Of course, without more context, it’s all shooting in the dark. But it was such a well-responded to thread with a lot of different perspectives… Blog posts — except for the most popular ones — don’t generate this kind of “hive response.” I wonder if there is a site out there that teachers use for this sort of discussion/advice? Where anyone can throw out a question or offer advice to other questions? Or are a thousand disparate and not-super-popular blogs enough?

Student Created Final Exam Study Guides

The math finals are given next Monday. And I’m really curious about how my Algebra II students will do, especially as the year comes to a close.

But I will say this: I predict that the average score on the final exam will be 85%. Why? Because according to my new grading program this year (EasyGradePro), the average EVERY QUARTER was  85%. Crazy. And at least for the first three quarters, there were exactly 4 (of 15) students in the A range. (I’m not done calculating the fourth quarter grades yet.) I bet it’s mostly coincidence, but it also suggests that I’m keeping the course pretty consistent in terms of difficulty level.

Back to final exams.

My biggest concern this year was that we didn’t have a midterm (because of the school tragedy). And I didn’t do much time throughout the year reviewing topics from the first semester  [1]. To battle this, I assigned each student a semester 1 topic, and told them to make a study guide of that topic for their classmates.

The other teacher of the course and I thought this was a good idea for a number of reasons.

  1. We wanted to have one more assignment which focused on student communication. (That’s something we’ve been emphasizing this year, but we need to ramp it up next year.)
  2. Our students are 10th and 11th graders, and we think that now they are ready to take ownership of their own studying. We didn’t want to provide them with a study guide or packet of problems. We wanted them to figure things out. (I would, to put things in context, probably not do this in 9th grade.)
  3. We thought that students would desire to do a more thorough job on their study guides if they knew they were for their classmates too.

I taught students how to use Equation Editor in MS Word and I asked them to use either www.graphsketch.com or their virtual TIs for graphing. And then they went at it.

Now I have a confession. I had talked with the other Algebra II teacher about doing this, but we both sat on our hands until the last possible moment. And since I didn’t want laziness to get in the way of our students’ success, I banged out the instructions and rubric in an hour. But I’m so glad I did. The project needs a lot of work for next year, but I think we’ve got ourselves a winner.

My instructions/rubric: Final Exam Review Project (PDF)

I put all the study guides on a website for students to access. Since the guides have the students’ full names, I’ve password protected the site. But you can see what it looks like here (Image of Algebra Two Website). Students can download and print out the individual guides from that site.

The good (what worked well):

  • Students seemed to get into this project. One said, after working in class on the study guide, “wow, this is actually pretty fun.” I think part of the fun was using Equation Editor (they liked that), and part was creating something collectively.
  • Most students did actually work really hard.
  • Most students were actually really good at explaining their concepts clearly. The ones which were more didactic (e.g. “Now let’s make things a little bit harder…”) and sounded like someone speaking/teaching were the best!
  • Students seem to be actually using them. During the review days, many were using them. There are 15 students in my class. As of now, the site with the study guides has been accessed 261 times. The site has only been up for four or five days. So students are coming to the site and looking at a guide or two, and then coming back and looking at more guides later.

The problems (what to fix for next year):

  • I didn’t get to have a good discussion on what makes an effective study guide and what makes  a poor study guide. I should have talked about tone, layout, clarity, etc. Also, I could have students make these guides earlier in the fourth quarter, and have them exchange them with a partner for critical suggestions for improvement.
  • I should have shown an excellent study guide, an okay study guide, and a bad study guide. Luckily for me, if I do this next year, I can use examples from this year!
  • Many guides were turned in with mistakes. Almost all had mistakes, in fact. I read through each one of them carefully, and noted all the mistakes, and returned them. I hadn’t anticipated this many errors, so I gave students 1 day to fix the errors and turn them in again, to raise their grade by up to 5 points or if they didn’t make any changes, to lower their grade by up to 5 points. Most errors were fixed. But next year, I must insist upon a comprehensive draft.
  • I insisted in students typing everything — because some have terrible handwriting and I also wanted them to get familiar with Equation Editor. (I was horrified by the fact that my seniors in Multivariable Calculus didn’t know how to use Equation Editor; I want to make sure all my students know they can write math on a computer!) However sometimes that requirement got in the way of clarity. There were some guides that had parts that would have been much better if there were some things that were handdrawn in. So, for example, if there was a tricky step in a series of algebraic manipulations, putting a handdrawn arrow to that tricky part and saying “CAUTION! Be sure to flip the sign of the inequality when * or / by a negative number!” would be more effective than typing it out after all the equations are worked out.
  • I need to come up with a better way to talk about the number of practice problems required in each study guide, and talk about how these questions should be representative of the types of problems that we did in homework or got on assessments.

But yeah, although I haven’t yet had a chance to talk with my students about if they are finding these guides useful, I have to say that it so far appears like they are somewhat successful. At the very least, I know each of my kids have mastered at least one topic from first semester and are able to articulate that topic pretty darn well. And I can say that at least in terms of students using other students’ work, this is much more successful than the video project I did last year, that I was too busy to repeat this year. (See the videos here.) [2]

[1] Next year, I have to remember to build review into the course more formally. I planned on doing it this year, and then it got lost by the wayside. But I’ll tell students that a previous topic not from the current unit will be tested each assessment (and I’ll tell them the topic). That way they’ll be forced to periodically review topics so it won’t all be a shock at the end of the year.

[2] Argh! I can’t believe I didn’t show my students some of the good videos from last year! ARGH!

The MV Calculus Final Projects

Last week my multivariable calculus class turned in their final projects, and made presentations. Of all my classes this year, by any metric, this course was my most successful. I loved seeing their final projects, and the amount of work and dedication they devoted to them. The best part: they were super proud of their projects too.

I made a post about coming up a list of fourth quarter final projects a while back. My big fear with these projects was senioritis. The projects are designed to be largely self-directed, and if a student got lazy, well, …, that would spell disaster. Luckily, none of the students in the class fell prey to that dreaded disease. My kids are great kids, so that helped. But also I let them pretty much have free reign on their projects and kept emphasizing they should pick something they WANTED to have FUN with. Lastly I met with them weekly to help them out and keep tabs on their progress — prodding them a bit here and there.

Without further ado, the four projects:

1. One student actually created a harmonograph (a device which draws damped Lissajous curves).

Yes, that is his video of his harmonograph.

2. One student researched Maxwell’s Equations and read A Student’s Guide to Maxwell’s Equations (Fleisch). He produced a written paper explaining the integral and differential forms of Maxwell’s equations.

3. One student created a giant wooden and wire sculpture (titled “The Visualizer”) which illustrated a lot of what we’ve learned about curves in 3-space. Namely, he illustrated arc length, vector equations for curves, curvature, and the tangent, normal, and binormal vector with his sculpture. He also wrote an associated paper which is to be used with the sculpture to examine these ideas in more detail.

4. One student took foam board and cut a whole bunch of figures (from the simple square to weird and complex shapes). He then calculated the center of gravity of these figures theoretically, and tested to see if the figures would balance at that point. Then he extended this by making figures with non-homogeneous density, calculated the center of gravity of these figures theoretically, and tested to see if the figures would balance at that point.

I mean, seriously, look at that. Amazing. These kids got into it, because it was their own thing. Because they weren’t really worried about their final grades. (I let them grade themselves.) I am going to miss these miscreants a lot next year.

Senior Classes Over; Letters Distributed

My internet at home hasn’t been functional, so I have been negligent about putting posts up. There’s a ton to tell you about (the balloon caper, birthdays, reviewing for finals, the multivariable calculus final projects, etc.) and just no internet to do it with. But I’m staying late at school to at least get this post up.

Today was my last day of classes with my seniors. My calculus students took a test yesterday so it was time to party. This was going to be their last math class of high school! Some were sentimental and had a hard time coming into the room — if they came it, it would mean the end of an era for them. My class of seven met first period and we started out having a rousing chorus of L’Hopital (I have Calculus in the Heart). Then we played a lot of “Apples to Apples.” (Best. Game. Ever.) There was a mountain of junk food we devoured. At the end of class, I gave them each a letter (see below) and let them go. I was feeling pretty sentimental. The other class 0f seventeen met last period (their last class of high school ever!) and minus being able to rouse everyone into a chorus of L’Hopital, the same happened.

And like that, it was over. The seniors are not under my charge anymore. My sentimentality is waxing.

My senior letter this year (I also included the poem/prose from my senior letter last year, put up here):

Shadowing a Student

It all stemmed from one of the weekly meetings that we 10th grade homeroom advisers have. We were talking about how little we actually knew about what it was like to be a 10th grader — and the ups and downs of going to school everyday as a 10th grader. One idea we had was inviting a panel of students to come in to talk to us frankly about their experiences. We did that. Listening to these kids — it was incredible. They were kids from all across the personality and academic spectrum, but they all were so articulate and honest and thoughtful. Their maturity, the way they think about teachers and about school and about learning, the way they handle their frustrations… let’s just say that although I usually think our student population is great overall, I don’t always get to see or remember how great they are.

I said it all got started with this 10th grade meeting. Well someone, I don’t think it was me, came up with the idea of shadowing a 10th grade student for a day. To see what it was like to run from class to class, to experience all the daily things that a 10th grader might go through.

If you know me, and probably by now you’re getting a sense of me, I jumped at the chance. I asked to be paired with a student I had never met and knew nothing about. And last Wednesday, I became her shadow. We did separate once. My student had to change for gym in the girl’s locker room.

What I expected:

  • The day would be hectic, and I would end the day at 3:10 exhausted.
  • I would be jolted as I bounced from class to class with different teachers with different expectations.
  • I would enjoy learning.

That’s it. I didn’t go in with a ton of preconceptions.

What I discovered:

  • The day was strenuous, but not overly so. Even though the student I shadowed didn’t have a lunch period on the day I shadowed her, I wasn’t dead at the end of the day.
  • It was easy to go from classroom to classroom, teacher to teacher, and deal with the changing expectations.
  • Doing any strenuous thinking (reading, answering tricky multiple choice questions, etc.) before 9:30am was tough. I had to read and re-read the passages assigned in the AP US History course multiple times.
  • I need to be given instructions twice. Because even though I try to listen, focus, and take everything in, I sometimes missed what I was supposed to be doing. Having instructions written on the board, or repeated, would have helped me out in those cases.
  • It is not a good feeling to be answering multiple choice questions and think that the rest of the class is ahead of you and that you don’t have enough time to finish them all. I resented it when I was told “Even if you aren’t done, stop. We’re going to go over these.” [1]
  • It is hard to take good notes in most teachers’ classrooms. Many don’t design their classes with notetaking in mind, or give students the time to write down notes.
  • Dodgeball isn’t as scary as when I was in high school. They don’t use the tough rubber red balls anymore.
  • Students do a lot of running around, and don’t have a lot of down time. (At least not on this day, where my student had no free periods.)
  • Taking tests is scary. I took the last-period chemistry exam on the Ideal Gas Law. Finishing it in time was scary, as well as that moment of panic when I was still on question 7 of the multiple choice and a student raised his hand and asked the teacher about the 5th short answer question. (In case you were wondering, I got a 67% on this test, which highly impressed the teacher. I would have definitely broken into the C range if I had remembered the conversion from Celsius to Kelvin.)
  • Teachers in general aren’t good at handling class discussions, or synthesizing the information from these discussions into a digestible format useful for everyone.
  • I like being lectured to. I learn a lot in a short amount of time.
  • Some classes (e.g. chorus) are like vacations from the stresses of the day. Not that work doesn’t happen there, but chorus was really enjoyable and relaxing to be an environment where everyone loved what they were doing.
  • At least on this day, there wasn’t a lot of group work. Actually, in none of the academic classes except math were students asked to talk with anyone but the teacher. Conversations were mainly between teacher and student.

It was worth doing. If you can convince your school to get you a sub so you can do this, I highly recommend it. Plus, the other kids in my shadow’s classes thought I was so cool for trying to learn what it was like to be in their shoes. Okay, not so cool. But they definitely respected me for it.

(And the best part: my shadowee and I got to invent our own special handshake.)

[1] That was especially painful, because I know as a math teacher I do that a lot. I’ll put up 3 problems for students to work on — the last one being the hardest. When I’m sure everyone has gotten the first two, and I’m running low on time, I’ll stop everyone and we’ll go over all the problems together.