Math Photos!

It’s cold outside, and I’m bored inside.

I decided to spend some time making an image archive of math things for my SmartBoard presentations. Using Flickr, I found some choice images which I culled together[1]:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/92124730@N00/favorites

Also, I had a thought. What if we used a ; instead of a ‘? Typographically, wouldn;t that look so much more appealing? I;ve been thinking about this, and at least in serif fonts, this holds true. It might become my “thing.”

[1] dy/dan would say that I’m doing things backwards. First we need content, and then the image should be there to engage, not just entertain. But you know what? I think pictures and vibrant colors which show some prettiness will be damn good enough for now.

The Privileges of Childhood

When browsing the blogs today, I came across this post about childhood privileges on a blog about the politics of access. I definitely recommend clicking on the link below and seeing what he has to say.

All the popular blogs are doing it.From: What Privileges Do You Have? – based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. (If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.) [Jose Vilson]

1. Father went to college.
2. Father finished college.
3. Mother went to college.
4. Mother finished college.
 5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
 8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.
9. Were read children’s books by a parent.
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18 assuming that sport counts.
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18 assuming that sport counts.
 12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively.
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs.
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
 16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels.
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18.
 22. There was original art in your house when you were a child.
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house.
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home.
25. You had your own room as a child.
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
 27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course.
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school.
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college.
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16.
 31. Went on a cruise with your family.
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

Teaching Detritus

It’s midnight and I’m still wired, so I’m going to type this quick post and get to bed. Super-productivity characterized today. I pretty much finished dotting the last i and crossing the last t (jot and tittle!) for my Algebra II video project. More information has been posted to my online porfolio:

http://www.virb.com/samjshah

Just scroll down to the section called “Teaching Detritus” and look at the “Algebra II Video Project” subsection. While you’re there, you might as well check out the myriad of smartboard presentations I posted under “Teaching Detritus.”

I guess today was a tech happy day. That’s not always the case. Last week, if you recall, was a week of SmartBoard terror, where it didn’t work in 3 different classes! Those were tech sad days.

The more I’m thinking about it, the more I realize that I could be a technology facilitator/integrator for a school. I’m talking a possible long-term goal… but a very doable one…

Tech Post

This four day weekend I did a lot of relaxing and movie watching. I also have been working on three tech things, in addition to updating my slowly burgeoning online portfolio. Note: I store documents and host the banner picture on this great free site called boxstr. I highly recommend it.

1. I learned that my mac has iMovie, which I learned how to use in the most basic ways. But it’s simple, easy to use, and has a lot of things that makes me think that I could make a really funny short vignette for the classroom — setting up a math problem/puzzle for my kiddos. And the fact that it ties in so easily with iTunes, iPhoto, and the built in camera is just heaven.

(I already made a sample 3 minute video which consists of pictures of me and my friend Henny. It took about 40 minutes to learn how to do it, pick the song, and get all the photos to show up at the right time.)

2. I spent about 90 minutes researching rss aggregators. I want to have a place to put my math teacher blogs, and lets me read them all at once. My two criteria: (a) it must be web based so I can access my feeds anywhere, and (b) it must be pretty to look at. I’m so sick of rss aggregators looking like Outlook Express. My conclusion: netvibes wins. It’s not designed to be exclusively an rss aggregator, but it certainly does that, and does it well.

It’s customizable in all the right ways, too. So I’ve made it look pretty with no effort. Right now it only has 6 blogs, but when I have time, more!

3. I have been working on a project for my Algebra II kids. They are going to be making Smartboard videos of how to do certain problems, or addressing certain topics, from this year. The other Algebra II teacher and I are starting this now, and hopefully by Spring Break, each student will have created one video. Then hopefully students will be able to use these videos when studying for the final exam, to either refresh their memory on old topics, or in some cases, to learn them for the first time.

There are lots of logistical things which are going to be crazy about this, so I hope it goes smoothly.

Sometimes I think I love you more than you love me

Can a school day last 18 hours?, because that’s what today felt like. Every so often at my school, Tuesdays get cut short for the kids (each class is 5 minutes shorter, and homeroom is nixed) who get to scurry home at 2pm. Of course, what’s good for the goose is not always good for the gander. On days like today, all teachers have to go to their professional development groups from 2:30-5pm. Mine is a group for new faculty.

But yeah, the day seemed really, really, really, really long, because of that. The kids were off schedule, I was off schedule, and each subsequent period I felt like I was just trying to catch up from the period before.

One of the worst things happened during my first two classes, which put a really horrid spin on the day: the smartboard didn’t work. The projector had overheated. I know I should be able to cope without the smartboard, but I had such a good lesson on logs for one class, and I was teaching hard new material to the other class.

And I failed miserably in the second class. I should have just scrapped my lesson plan and taught the material off the top of my head. But instead, I emailed my students a pdf of my smartboard presentation and we tried to work off of that.

Worst. Idea. Ever.

I should have just taught the material off the cuff. It would have been less discombobulated, less forced, less confusing. Basically, I am scrapping the lesson to the bin of failed lessons, and reteaching it our next class.

Technology, sometimes I think I love you more than you love me.

The Origin of Life on Earth and Logarithms

Today in Algebra II I went off the beaten track. I wanted to make logarithms useful to them. Yeah, I could talk about the Richter Scale, or pH scale, or decibels, but when it comes down to it, logarithms really only become intuitive, natural, and beautiful once you reach calculus. Plus, these examples seem like such cop outs. If the are only good for weird measuring systems, then they aren’t really worth teaching in math class (not that I would be opposed in, say, a chemistry or physics class).

When I was in North Carolina for a math teacher conference, I went to a talk on logarithms, and the speaker reminded me that one great use of logarithms is for displaying data (either on a log scale, or a semi-log plot).

So today, I talked about my students being science journalists and representing data (confession: I cribbed this idea from the NC conference too): namely, I wanted them to create a timeline of major events in the evolution of life, from the existence of prokaryotes (3,000,000,000 years ago) to the emergence of homo sapiens, to the advent of writing (6,000 years ago).

Plotting all the relevant moments on a standard timeline yields a major problem: the events that happened closer to now (e.g. emergence of homo sapiens, taming of fire, writing) all overlap on the timeline — because the scale (of now to 3,000,000,000) is so large. The difference between something happening 6,000 years ago and 15,000 years ago on a scale this large is negligible.

So I taught them how to plot on a logarithmic scale: the events all become spread out, but you lose the ease of pulling off the data immediately from the graph. It’s harder to interpret the data, but it all becomes visible.

I think they learned something from this activity. If I had planned it better, I would have asked them to each find their own set of data to plot on a log scale.

Teaching Portfolio

My math department is losing it’s department head, and two long-term members to retirement. And since the hiring season has now gotten underway, I’ve been looking at the resumes and personal statements of potential candidates. One of them had an online portfolio, with student quotations, sample tests and quizzes, videos of him teaching, and lots of other useful pieces of flotsam and jetsam.

Of course, my critical eye went first to the terrible website design.

But the idea, and the content, were good. And so, in the spirit of picking projects to focus my mind on so I don’t get depressed, I have decided to make my own portfolio.

http://www.virb.com/samjshah

It’s only in the beginning stages, but the idea behind it is go beyond creating something that will be useful when job hunting; it is going to be the place where I document my success, and show off who I am as a person and as a teacher (the two are inseparable). It’s going to archive the little things that just don’t fit or belong on a resume. (Small two day conferences I attended, quotations from students, good smartboards I’ve created, writings from grad school, etc.)

Which means that lots of flotsam and jetsam are going to be carefully placed in there. I want to put on this page all the things I would want to see/read if I were looking into hiring someone.