Come share in the internet bounty!

Here are some things I’ve seen on the internet that I thought might pique others’ interests.

  1. This video on learning styles — and how we as teachers can ignore all that we’ve heard about them.

    Both Casting Out Nines and Catching Sparrows have posted it too. Read the latter’s post for some solid analysis.
  2. A much needed middle finger directed towards Wong’s First Days of School book is on Stop Trying to Inspire Me.
  3. A must-read multi-page New York Times article on teacher David Campbell’s experiences teaching evolution in a classroom where a large proportion of the students are taught to question the teacher by their parents and churches.
  4. I Want To Teach Forever links to a edubabble random jargon creator. Some words I’ve created:
    >revolutionize research-based relationships
    >synergize metacognitive experiences
    >synthesize developmentally appropriate alignment
    > harness site-based goals
    Pure delicious, vague cant, that’s all it is.
  5. A great science teacher blog — trust me on this. I found it through another blog, but I can’t remember which one to give it credit. By the way, I totally thought that the title of the latest post — “Terminal Velocity of Mussels” — was such a random idea that I was sure that only at most 10 sites on google would come up when searching for that. I was proved wrong. Searching [Terminal velocity of mussels] yielded 18,300 sites. Searching [“Terminal velocity” of mussels] yielded only 431. Not to be too meta, but with this post that number will increase to 432. Rock on.
  6. Catching Sparrows goes on a screed about the problem with group work. The only thing is, even though I call it a screed, I agree.
  7. Sustainably Digital analyzes a commercial which is a metaphor for our educational system. I’m not sure I buy the metaphor. Maybe I’m linking to this because I like the commercial a lot. Because I do.
  8. I Want To Teach Forever gives a really great list of “am I ready for school to start?” which I will be going through. Probably next Tuesday evening, as I lie in bed, eyes shut, mind whirring about all the things I still have to do. (I will not, however, re-read Wong, as instructed by this otherwise unblemished list.)
  9. dy/dan’s videos about teaching are great and two of them in particular need to be seen by you, now.
Fin.

Neat TI-Calculator Trick #1

Inspired by Math Teacher Mambo’s “that super awesome functionality been on my calculator for YEARS and I never knew about it” post, I decided to post something that I learned this year which had a similar effect on me.

(You probably already know this if you teach statistics. Maybe everyone knows this.)

ENTERING REGRESSION EQUATIONS AUTOMATICALLY IN THE EQUATION LINE OF A TI-83/4

The short version: when doing any form of regression, you end up getting the coefficients displayed like this (below left). However if you wanted to graph that cubic, I had my students manually write down every coefficient on a piece of scrap paper, and then type it into the equation screen (bottom right). To make matters worse, you had to write down a good number of digits so you wouldn’t lose too much accuracy. I couldn’t find a way around it. What a pain, and students would make mistakes with all the copying, followed by typing the equation in Y1.

Of course you all knew that the “duh” moment came. The other Algebra II teacher taught me this simpler, foolproof way. It automatically enters the regression equation into Y1:

When you do the CubicReg command, you need to add the Y1 argument (above left). (You can get Y1 by following key sequence: VARS, Y-VARS, FUNCTION, Y1). Then it’s automatically entered in Y1 (above right).

I can’t believe no one ever told me that. I can’t believe I made my students write down the coefficients by hand.

I made a jing video of how to do this. Sorry about my voice. I hate hearing myself recorded. One of the many things that terrify me.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “2008-08-21_1928“, posted with vodpod

The blog that will never be

Oh there are times when I want to share things with you, my (very) few loyal readers. Through my yearlong courtship with the independent school system, I’ve come to absolutely love what it has to offer, but there are also individual moments of supreme surrealism. Where you are confronted with something — be it an email, a conversation, a policy — that makes you do a double take and go “whaaa?”

Today I had just one such moment, that made me take up a variation of the old man’s trope: “When I was in public high school, it would have been unthinkable for…”

And I have this blog, and I desperately want to share these moments with you, because… well, they’re really, really funny. Actually they’re usually a mixture of being comical and somewhat upsetting simultaneously. Because they reveal a world so different, full of people so different, that you sometimes wonder if you’ve wandered onto the wrong set, and you’re waiting for someone to say “cut. WHAT THE HECK IS THAT GUY DOING HERE?”

But unfortunately, a post on this blog beginning with “Even if you tried, with the help of a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters, you wouldn’t be able to predict what just happened today…” can never be. I vowed to myself to never write about specific students or specific situations — no matter how much the emotional side of me wants to. The reasonings are many and sound (I followed this story closely), and I’ve outlined them briefly before:

I think a lot of value can be had by sharing these stories, getting advice from others, and just commiserating about the difficult moments that come up in the day-to-day. But doing so publicly makes it harder, because specifics have to be pitched out the window. (I don’t want a student coming across my blog, knowing a post is about him or her, and feeling uncomfortable.)

It’s not fair to those you want to write about, because when push comes to shove, you don’t want them doing the same to you. I hate ratemyteacher.com. It’s the most malicious form of this.

But I’m sad about my self-imposed policy, especially with school ramping up, just days away. Because I love to vent. (I think venting is cathartic and healthy and absolutely necessary in teaching.) Because I love reading good teaching tales. (Some of my most favorite blogs are all about spinning good student yarns.) Because I think we can learn a lot about other schools, other teachers, and how to deal with our own situations, by hearing these stories.

And because yet another absurdity happened today.

On this blog, the farthest I’ll go on this is to make generalities about the performance of my classes as a whole, and consequently, I’ll be forced to take my own teaching tales to the local watering hole.

So yes, this post is a proxy of the one that I can’t write, but so desperately want to. In other words, I’m just giving myself a little reminder to stay true to the original purpose of this blog — a personal archive of my professional growth as a teacher, a form of communication with other teachers, and a place to reflect upon teaching practice.

Organizing!

Today I spent a few hours organizing for next year — creating the appropriate folders and creating/updating mailing lists. The process is interesting, because I think that the way one organizes their desktop, or their mail folders, or anything, reveals a lot about the person. How they view their world, how they compartmentalize it.

For the following year, this is my email directory structure:

Clearly you can see that I save a lot of emails; I’m a packrat in the electronic world as well as the material world. I’m definitely a natural archiver, because I have no memory and I need things written down to refer to. But there’s another reason why archiving email is important: you have written proof that certain things got done.

“You never told us X,” a student or parent or dean or someone might say.
“Actually, I told you that! See this here?” I will respond.

(This actually happened last year, when a parent said they were never informed of their child’s poor performance; I had two archived emails that specifically were sent to inform the parents of that fact.)

Maybe this should be a meme. If you care too, share on your blog how you organize your school-related email? What do you save? Why do you save?

*This is a new addition! I read about it on some blog and thought it was a great idea.
**I did this last year, and it was super useful. Every email to and from a particular student gets put in their individual subfolder. Also every email about these students (communication with other teachers, with deans, with parents, with the SFJC) gets put in these folders. Then, when I need to pull up information on a student, I have not only my gradebook, but in this folder, a lot of other information about them. Sometimes, when writing my narrative comments on students, I would quote them if they said something relevant. (As my school is a laptop school, you can see that we get a lot of email to/from/about students.)

Open Math Problem: Bloxorz

Wow! I am totally on a blog posting roll. I think the end of the summer has me going out less, which has me putzing around the apartment more, which has me thinking about school and math more. (It doesn’t help that I don’t really get reception on my TV and I don’t have cable.)

In any case, MathTeacherMambo pointed me to this (warning: VERY ADDICTIVE) game:

BLOXORZ

For those who are starting their pre-start-of-classes meetings, I warn you that you might not ever make it to those meetings. Your principal will knock on your door, but you’ll be drooling and staring vacantly at your computer screen, cursing the day you ever reached level 11, 12, or n.

For those who are wisely taking my advice and holding off playing the game, here are a few examples:

As you can see, the goal is to get the block in the hole.

I think this is a great open math problem ready to be attacked and solved by a high school student. Fundamentally, I think with a lot of work, a student should be able to answer the following question:

Given a particular floorplan and starting block position, can you decide whether the floorplan is solvable? Can you tell, without playing the game, whether there is a way to get the block in the hole? 

To illustrate, two simple examples of floorplans — the first one is obviously not solvable, the second one obviously is.

What about this third one?

The first two are easy to solve by inspection. Even the plan above is easy to solve by inspection — but you’ll notice it gets slightly harder. I want to know — even in the most crazy floorplan — is there a solution? If not, I want proof that there is no solution.

The game itself has a bunch of complicating elements — like transporters, and ways to get more floor to appear by having the block roll over a button. (See the second video above.) But I think the base case is hard enough — with none of that nonsense.

Once the initial problem has been solved, I think a great follow up question would be: what is the fewest number of moves you can solve a particular floorplan in? 

I have a student who approached me about doing an independent study of linear algebra or differential equations this year. I know I’m going to be overwhelmed, so I had to decline. However, I suggested that instead of having a formal course, we could work on an investigative problem together. I just emailed him this idea — but I don’t know if he’ll want to.

PS. I’m guessing a good starting place for this problem is looking at the work that has been done on the Lights Out game. (I’ve never played it, but it seems like it’s similar enough in nature that that solution can inform our approach.)

Anne of Green Gables: Story of a Green Teacher

Draw whatever conclusions you may, but my favorite movie growing up was Anne of Green Gables, the series with Megan Follows broadcast on PBS. My sister and I taped it from TV and watched them over and over and over again. With the recent $10 windfall that befell me (and another $40) I bought the DVD collection.

Tonight, while watching the second DVD, I came across this gem, which I encourage you to watch the first six and a half minutes of:


Argh! Embedding on that video is disabled. If it doesn’t show up, watch it here. Trust me, it’s definitely worth watching. [The transcript of the scene is below the fold.]

Let’s lay the basics out here. Anne Shirley has been a teacher for the past two years at her hometown’s public school. She enters a private school where the cards are stacked against her. And this is the first day of classes.

What we see here is something we teachers fear, something we cringe when we watch. An entire class turning against us. We know this deep down: in a battle with students, students always ultimately have the upper hand. And in this clip, we see that laid bare.

Anne and the student ringleader escalate their conflict — each egging each other on. Anne offers a punishment, sees it isn’t viewed seriously by the rest of the class, and raises the stakes. The student says, simply, no. (The student can always say no.) In frustration, Anne raises the stakes again: administering the strap. In a voice of defiance, the student accepts the punishment. The battle of wills is over. The punishment wasn’t a punishment at all, because even though it might have hurt, the student won the battle of wills. Anne lost.

If you care to answer, I ask you: A majority of students in your class are rallying against you, the ringleader lets out a snake and admitted it, and then refuses your punishment of staying after school for a week. Your school does NOT have any formal school-wide system of punishment (such a detention, suspension, expulsion). You have to handle this on your own. What would you do at that moment in class, in front of your students? How would you have diffused the situation and gotten the class into your corner?

Transcript of the scene below the fold.

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