EMERGENCY! (lesson plans)

I spent some of today (say, maybe 5 hours) working on finishing up my high school first day of class presentations (by the way, I found this amazing first-day-get-to-know-you sheet on dy/dan which I’m definitely stealing), as well as writing up emergency lesson plans for all my classes. These plans are what the school has on file for the substitute in case I am ever (gasp! God forbid!) out sick.

For my middle school class, I am going to have them play “24” if I’m absent. (Unfortunately, I don’t own the game, so I am going to have to construct my own game cards this weekend.) It seems perfect because it has to be related to what they’re studying, and yet not be tied to the curriculum, because I could be sick the 2st week or the 30th week. And 24 tests something that gets retaught in the first week (order of operations — PEDMAS) so it can work if I’m sick early on, but still is fun if I’m sick later in the year.

Instead of giving my high school students busywork worksheets, I decided to give them genuine math-dork-approved-stamped math puzzles. When looking for a few accessible, non-stupid, non-IMO level puzzle sites, I came across this gem, from which I stole all my puzzles from in one fell swoop. Who’d’ve thunk thank I wouldn’t have to steal bits and pieces from a thousand different sites? This was a great find.

I am pretty confident that the puzzles I chose for the two classes (Algebra IIand Calculus — click to see lesson plans) are age and level appropriate. But maybe not? I used to be a huge math puzzle freak [1], so when it comes to puzzles, I know I have a distorted sense of “easy” and “hard.”

The reason I really like them is because the solutions to these problems can each lead to a wonderful extended discussion of “proofs,” “combinatorics,” and “graph theory” among others. Plus, I think these are the types of problems that kids can really work together on. I’m slightly afraid that the inability to get a solution in a minute or less (how long most students take per homework problem) will lead to great frustration.

Maybe I should give the substitute a hint for each problem, for when the kids get stuck?

(As an aside: I really want my kids — especially my calculus kids — to leave class knowing what a “proof” is and why it’s important. Yeah, I will introduce the epsilon-delta proofs, and I’ll derive some things for them, but I want them to know what makes a proof watertight — not just accept a proof because “the teacher said so.” And the best way for them to know is to do.)

[1] Not only did I attend Mathcamp (more than once), but I also completely of my own volition found and started writing solutions to the USAMTS competition problems when I was in high school.

Welcome, smartboard style.

Since this is going to be a blog about practice, I might end up posting some or all of my lesson plans online. Here’s a working draft of my first day smartboard presentation for my calculus class. I am pretty satisfied with it, so far, but there are things that could (and might) be improved.

First, many of the slides — especially those dealing with assessment — are text heavy. I hate text heavy slides. On the other hand, the thing that kept ringing in my ear when I was about to press the delete key was “be clear.” Students are desperate for clear and well-defined expectations. (At least I was.) How can you expect a student to know how to act, know what to do, unless you spell it out?

Second, the slides aren’t visual enough. Which comes right out of point one.

Third, I tried a number of background colors, and this one worked best. But the red text and royal blue text are arresting, and hence distracting. But I played around with other standard colors, and couldn’t get things better. If I have time, maybe I’ll finesse things until they look less jarring and more appealing.

Fourth, I haven’t written a conclusion yet.

Fifth, and most important, I don’t see a direct connection between my syllabus and this presentation. I don’t want to be reading the syllabus, but the “we are on a harrowing mathematical adventure together” aspect of the syllabus is totally absent in the presentation. Even the feeling of us embarking on an intellectual mystery cruise or taking a journey or anything. I will definitely change that this weekend.

Course Titles

Below is a working draft of the syllabus I’m writing for my high school classes. It’s not easy for the same reason that teaching isn’t easy — it’s a delicate balance between being serious and light-hearted, and between putting the onus on the student and on the teacher. Comments and fresh ideas are greatly appreciated.

UPDATE: I’ve decided to post a pdf version that can be downloaded here.

"This Place Is A Prison" by The Postal Service

Today at dinner with some friends, we got to talking about the Filipino prisoners dancing videos, followed by rousing round of the the “would you rather go to prison or X” game. It was during this time that it dawned upon me:

perhaps the first day of teaching is akin the first day of being in prison.

If you’re soft, you’ll be eaten alive; if you’re hard, you’ll be respected. But what an awful analogy! Who wants to compare school to prison? [1] What we need is an analogy that somehow incorporates cloyingly cute and wonderful things, like puppies and sneezing pandas.

[1] I guess besides all teenagers, that is. (And Michel Foucault.)

Conferences, Smartboards, and Russian, oh my!

Computer training today went better — although all my criticisms of the email/conferencing/messaging system remain, and perhaps have grown even stronger.

Most importantly, I learned about course conferences. These are required for every teacher in the school to create and use for each course they teach. And when I say “use,” for example, I mean that each day teachers are required to post that night’s homework by 3:30pm; if a teacher forgets, technically the students are officially absolved of the responsibility of doing it. (I don’t think it works that way unofficially.) So my school takes this technology really seriously.

I finally did get a sense of what a “conference” for a course is, and if you’re wondering, it’s basically a place to archive emails you’ve sent to a class with their homework assignments or additional information, and also a place for students to submit their homework electronically. That’s it. And there’s nothing special about it. So if a student needs to see what the assignment was on any given day, they open the course conference message whose subject reads “HOMEWORK: 2007 Aug 21.” Although there is a steep learning curve for managing these conferences, it seems like it won’t take much to get a grasp on it. And an added benefit is that if a student joins the class late — or if a teacher takes over a class mid-stream or wants to reference what a previous teacher emailed out — you have that information to give them. It’s institutional memory. And as a former historian, I know how important these sorts of archiving practices are. [1]

Still, when push comes to shove, I would much rather there be a requirement for a course webpage for each course instead of this list of emails that get stored. First, the page has the exact same content the conference does (you can even design it so there is a place to drop assignments electronically on it). Second, it is better than the conference because information is presented in a visually pleasing and visually organized way. You can put text, images, files, and links grouped by project/chapter/assignment rather than have them all in a list by date. (If you saw the way our software looks, you would see why I keep on harping on the visual. You might even cry. It is truly terrible.) Third, there are ways to make website creation a total piece of cake for teachers to create — where teachers can have as much control or as little control as they want. (At UCLA, as TAs, we had the ability to create our own course webpages, and although it wasn’t perfect, we had the ability to customize it and upload documents and files for students to download, display links, email the entire class or select sections, etc.)

With that being said, the more I think about it, the more the need for at least some sort of system that does what our system does becomes at least plausible, possibly even beneficial. The world is becoming more electronic, less paper based. Students need to learn to collaborate — and this appears to be a long-term goal of the technologists in my school. (They push teachers to come up with innovative uses of wikis and blogs.) It also teaches organizational skills and creates a complete online community, one that wouldn’t exist if we just emailed.

For now, I’m going to take this software with a grain of salt, learn it to the best of my ability, and see what I can do to make it useful for me, or if that doesn’t happen, figure out how to use it so it is at least the least of all evils.

On a much brighter note, and I mean much brighter note, I learned how to use smartboards today. And these, my friends, are amazing. I was inspired by dy/dan’s keynote presentations (example here) and I think that I could possibly design smartboard lessons to work similarly.

That’s all for today folks. Let’s see what wiki and blog dreams tomorrow brings us.

[1] I think that some of the information on the system only lasts 6 months, however, so if that includes the course conferences, then this benefit isn’t much a benefit.

Stupid computer system, or Hal, why do you hate me?

Yesterday I went to the first day of technology and computer training, the first of three 5 hour sessions. I was (and am, actually) really thrilled by the prospect of learning different pieces of software and hardware. Mainly I was hoping to get inspired for some grand project I could come up with that wasn’t using blogs or wikis just for the sake of using them (e.g. I want to avoid the “everyone write a short report on a famous mathematician, post it on a blog, and comment on three reports by other students” syndrome).

Perhaps we’ll get introduced to some cool things today. But yesterday was the day for basics — logging into the computers, backing up our computers, and worst of all: email.

The email system is part of this larger comprehensive system that the school uses which does email, instant messaging, a calendar, an address book, and a still ambiguous concept of “conferences” which are (I think, but truly I have no idea what the heck they are) akin to a web 2.0 email listserve. The whole system is poorly designed from: an aesthetic standpoint (terrible design elements, the important things aren’t easily findable) and a functional standpoing (too many choices all the time, not very customizable, lots of small annoying quirks). And I’m certainly not technologically slow; sometimes I’d even call myself tech savvy.

However…

I spent a long time yesterday being frustrated with learning the system — and just not “getting it.” There are two things I took from this episode. First, and this was pointed out by the girl sitting next to me, who I think was incredibly insightful: this is what happens to students when they don’t get something. They get frustrated, agitated, angry, and start acting out. Second, I absolutely have to master this system before the first day of school. It is going to be such a time sink in my life if I’m struggling over every email, trying to figure out how to plan a “conference” (a what?), trying to remember to not accidentally send an email to the whole school.

I really do want to go through my litany of complaints about the system — especially before I get too used to it and all the quirks and bad features are naturalized — but since this is something that I can’t change (I can’t re-code it, and I certainly can’t … at least not yet … have the entire student and faculty population switch to something better), I don’t think it’s worth going into detail about. It is worth dealing with proactively and positively by spending a lot of time trying like Sisyphus to make it over the steep learning curve.

There is one feature of this system in particular that causes consternation: you can view an email’s “history.” In other words, if I send an email to three students informing them about tomorrow’s assignment because they were (gasp!) absent, I can see if and when each one read the email. Sounds useful (if not a bit Big Brother-y). But the reverse is true: students can find out when I’ve read an email. Which means I have to revise my email checking and answering practices, or at the very least, come up with explicit guidelines about email. Let me tell you what I’m afraid of. A student emails a question at 3am the night before a test, or similarly, a student asks for a meeting after school the next day. I tend to wake up and check my email in the middle of the night. They will know I’ve read it and start whining that I didn’t respond, that I don’t care.

Of course I can stop this by coming up with a policy that I’m not required to respond to any emails received after 6pm. Or something to that effect. But as you can see, now I’m forced to think of a policy.

I swear I’m not a technophobe, and I’m not generally scared of new things. I am just cautious before jumping on the technology bandwagon without thinking it through.

Initial Reflections

It’s less than two weeks before teacher training and orientation, and my nervousness is increasing tenfold with each day that passes. To combat the onset of anxiety attacks, I went to a local coffeeshop yesterday afternoon and started pouring through my textbooks. For hours.

And the unfortunate truth dawned on me — only reinforced when burning the midnight oil catching up on my favorite teacher blog dy/dan — is that I only learned how to teach to the book. I saw the lesson plans emerge in my head for each section of the textbook I was reading, and they were all regurgitating the text. My lesson planning as a student teacher consisted of doing all the problems at the end of each section beforehand to know what classes of problems my students needed to learn how to solve, and then coming up with lesson plans filled with variations on the examples given in the texts.

It provides the structure and consistency that I desire in a classroom, but it also, it hit, completely limits me as a teacher and as a creative person.

I sighed a lot last night, because I knew I used my textbooks as a crutch: to provide the skeletal backbone for each lesson plan. And even though that worked fine as a student teacher, it’s time to step up to the plate and take a more active role.

Giving up the central place that the textbook has for me as a teacher will be hard because:

1. I myself was always taught to the book. So it’s unclear in my mind’s eye exactly how an alternatively designed class might go.

2. I am teaching classes that other teachers have sections of. Which means that no matter how much creativity I can muster, my students still have to learn the same content as my fellow teachers’ sections. So I have to teach the same content — my students have to learn the textbook and engage with it’s problems — without falling into the lazy trap of teaching the book. [1]

3. I have three preps (three different classes to prepare for), and at the moment, the at-home-lesson-planning work already seems daunting enough even if I structured my lesson plans around the book. [2]

4. Backing away from the book means needing to be conscious of re-evaluating what exactly I’m teaching them, and what I want to teach them, and what they need to know. Relying on the textbooks makes those questions moot.

Nevertheless, at the very least, it seems to me at the moment one thing that needs to be done is to design clear, relevant, at-least-somewhat-investigatory problems which we spend class time on each week. At the same time, I have to be wary of doing something radical just for the sake of doing something different. My focus has to be on student understanding, and the question that needs to keep buzzing in my head as I go through this process is: why am I making this particular choice?

I think it’s time to question assumptions.

[1] This is no excuse, however, to reverting back to old ways. I signed up to teach at a private school so I would have more autonomy than in a public school. Batter up.

[2] Again, not meant to be an excuse or a rationalization, just a hard reality I know I will have to countenance, day after day.