Ms. Cookie at Math Teacher Mambo recently posted about random acts of kindness that she promotes at her school:

I ask my students to write a thank you note (on paper I provide, with markers I provide) to a teacher in school which I then put in the appropriate mailboxes.

I fell in love with this idea. It really struck me, especially after having an especially rough week emotionally. On Thursday I talked with students, trying to gauge if this week was hard for everyone — not just me. If teachers were piling on the assessments, if there was some sort of Zeitgeisty stressful crunch that was driving everyone crazy. Almost every student said this week was the hardest since the beginning of the year. (I don’t know what about this week is so exceptional; we’re mid-quarter… maybe it is just coming off of Thanksgiving break that made this jolt especially traumatic for everyone.) Teachers agreed too.

So thinking we all needed a bit of a pick me up, and just being excited about thinking positively again, on Friday morning I stopped off at the Duane Reade and bought thank you cards. In 3 of my 4 classes, my lesson plans included doing “lecturing” work for 25 minutes, and then individual/partner work for the remaining 25 minutes. When setting the kids free to work on the chain rule (calculus) or max-min-increasing-decreasing/how-do-you-use-your-calculator work (algebra II), I gave a 2 minute talk about Ms. Cookies post, and about how we often forget to think of all the good that people do for us.

I then said that I would love it if they took 5 minutes out of their work time to write these cards, but that it was optional. And that they can go to teachers, or to fellow students, or maintenance staff, or to college counselors, or anyone. I also said that if they thought someone might find a random “thank you” to be creepy or sycophantic, they could preface their card with “Mr. Shah is doing this thing with random acts of kindness…”

Most kids took the cards (some two or three!) and wrote them for teachers. I delivered them to the mailboxes later in the day. Some took the cards and wanted to hand deliver it. Two students in the same class wrote cards for each other!

Honestly, I did feel a bit uncomfortable about doing this during class time. I’m really particular about spending class time focused on learning, and in general, I don’t like to do “fluffy” things — especially things that don’t directly relate to math content. I’m very particular about being that teacher that focuses on content at all times — every minute. However, I think that in this case — for both me and my students — it was worth the trade-off. It rejuvinated me, because it reminded me all the good I have around me. I really saw the students get into it.

One thoughtful student who was working hard on his card sent me an email saying:

Today you prompted your classes to do good deeds and make someone else’s day a bit better, but I wanted to make sure that you recieved thanks as well. I really appreciated the gesture–not only did you give us a much needed break from work, but you allowed us to feel good about making someone else feel important. I hope you feel great about what you did…

Just wanted to let you know that you made a positive impact on me and on someone that is very important to me.

That email justified it for me. Not that I will be doing things like this frequently, but I see so much value in it. Not only does it promote random acts of kindness, but things like this can help shape a school culture. It can make people appreciate those around them.

It also reminds me of the immense value that I find in blogging, and reading blogs. My bad week was turned around by reading this one post. Something great that Ms. Cookie does at her school now affects — positively — what’s going on at my school. The blogs I read are informative, primarily, but they inspire me, start me thinking, lead me to question what I do, and keep me interested in blogging myself. The extent to which we bloggers — and our stories and ideas — affect each other often goes unmentioned.

In the vein of doing random acts of kindness, Mr. K at Math Stories recently wrote about “underrecognized blogs” — in light of the recent nominations for Edublog Awards — “some that aren’t nominated, but that will stay in my reader even if they go dead and cold, just on the off chance that they may have one last post left in them.” And, with his own random act of kindness, he wrote of my blog: “Infectious love of math, and an earnest quest for self improvement. Not the same level of math that I teach at all, but somehow I end up caring anyway.” I don’t have a lot of readers. It seems that most of the hits to my blog are Harvard students looking for information on Math 55 or someone looking for some information on the Richter Scale — I’ve written posts on both. But I’m okay with not having a large readership and being unrecognized. I blog for me. An archive of my journey, a repository of ideas, random neat math things that I get obsessed with. But with that one line for Mr. K, I swelled up. Even though I’m okay being unrecognized, it’s nice to be pointed out.

I’m now all about the small, sincere acts.

It’s rare to come across math documentaries, so I thought I’d post a link to NOVAs new one on fractals:

NOVA: Hunting the Hidden Dimension

You can watch it entirely online. I watched it on PBS while lesson planning. It was pretty good. I’m not sure how much I buy the importance of fractals, or the arguments about fractals in nature, but other than that, I’m a fan.

Even though I was sick — aching and tired — I survived our Parent’s Night last week. I think it was pretty successful, even though I was foiled a few times by parents who tricked me into talking about their children. (I keep a general policy not to talk about individual kids at these events; it’s a time to share what we do in the classroom, introduce myself to parents, and to tell parents what their kids can do to be successful — and how they can help their kids be successful).  I’m still baffled on how they tricked me. I totally blame my weak immune system for my inability to steer conversation away from talking about little Jane or little Jake.

The night had one tragedy — when SmartBoard didn’t work for one of my classes. I knew this would happen; the same thing happened last year. I even told everyone I knew it would happen again. However, luckily, it happened when talking to the parents of my four student multivariable class. The parents all knew each other — these kids had been in the same classes for gosh knows how long — and so we just gathered ’round my laptop and I showed them what sorts of things go on in our class.

Some observations:

(1) Parents tend to start off the night stoic. Their faces won’t let anything through. Cracking jokes or smiling doesn’t phase them. As the night progresses, however, the parents get more laid back, and by our last class, parents have let their guard down. I swear I heard a few of them laugh in my last presentation. I’ve asked other teachers in my school if they have noticed this phenomenon, and it seems pretty universal.

(2) Parents like to introduce themselves (great). Parents like to follow that up by asking “how’s my kid doing?” (not great). First of all, as I said, I don’t like to talk about individual students. Second of all, who is your kid again? Believe me, unless you say “we’re the parents of Joe Schmo,” every time you meet me, I’m not going to know who you are.

(3) I realized I go into these nights actually expecting some gratitude from parents. And when I didn’t get it from more than a handful of parents, I felt a little slighted. Am I a bad teacher for needing those bits of affirmation? I don’t know. But I can’t help how I feel, and that’s what I felt.

(4) One point I made to almost all my parents is the basis for how I approach designing any class: I try to get them to do work which I think is just beyond the level that they think they can do. Of course, I’m not always successful with this, but I do try to push my students just past their perceived limits. Gauging their limits is tough though. I’m doing a really good job with this in Multivariable Calculus this year, but at the moment, I don’t think I’m pushing my Algebra II or Calculus classes enough.

With that, I’m going to eat an apple, and get me to bed, and hope to be ready tomorrow to embark on yet another week.

My least favorite days in the classroom are test days. I hate seeing students all jittery. I hate sitting around and doing nothing. I get anxious too. (A test for my students is a test of me!)

But what comes a close second in terms of badness is the day before a test. Students are freaked out, and prone to asking the most annoying question: “is this going to be on the test?” I always cringe.

The hardship comes from having a gaggle of students each wanting to cover different topics. Each with their own individual questions, many of which are nuanced.

Today, I actually had a great time doing my reviews. I think all my students got something out of it. I considered doing a game, I considered having presentations, I considered just going through problems. Instead, I did the most simple thing: handed out a set of 10 problems. [1]

My instructions were simple. Do NOT work in order. Pick the problem that you are most scared of, that you don’t understand well, that you least want to see on the test. Then use today to learn how to do it. Look at your notes, ask your neighbors, ask me. Once you’ve mastered that, move to the next most difficult problem.

I wrote the complete solutions to each of the problems on index cards and placed them at the front of the room. When students wanted to check their answers, they just walked up. I circulated, and spent most of my time giving one-on-one help to students. Or telling students who wanted help to ask the person next to them.

And then I posted all the solutions (scanned on) online, for students to reference at home. (Most of them couldn’t finish all the problems in class.)

I didn’t catch anyone — in all three classes — off task. The students were earnestly engaged. And that made me feel awesome. My kids rock.

[1] My favorite question from my calculus review was a concept question: “Explain in words (and if you want, using a diagram), why doesn’t make any sense mathematically.”

So I have started asking my students — Algebra II and Calculus — how they remember things. If they have mnemonics, or if they have funny methods, or what? I don’t know why I didn’t ask this before. It seems so obvious.

How they remember which graph is a sine graph and which is a cosine graph? How they remember certain formulas? How they remember know how to solve absolute value inequalities?

I’ve gotten some pretty interesting answers, things I wouldn’t have come up with on my own.

For example, when doing absolute value inequalities, you might have . Well, you can actually rewrite that as AND . Similarly, if you have , you can rewrite that as OR .

How do you know which is an AND statement, and which is an OR statement. Well, one student (who probably got it from a tutor, or another student), said: “You can remember that because the absolute value is less thAND a number, or the absolute value is greatOR than a number.” Love it!

So when you’re doing something particularly new and challenging, remember that students come up with seemingly inscrutible methods all the time. It helps to ask them what they’re thinking. Not only to see if they’re on track, but also because their thoughts might be super valuable to others.

I noticed that in my Algebra II classes and my Calculus classes, students don’t take good notes. Some don’t take notes at all, some take really sporadic notes, some use scrap paper to do the “check yo’self” problems I put up after teaching a concept — to test to see if they get the concept and can do a simple and a somewhat more complicated problem. Then there are the few that take really amazing notes.

My first reaction was: what the heck are you thinkIng?

In both classes, I’m starting off the year not using the book heavily, so their notes are their primary source of material.

But then I had three subsequent thoughts, which tempered how I thought about and approached the situation:

(1) Students learn differently, and they know how they learn best better than I do.

(2) Students might not be used to having a teacher use SmartBoard exclusively, and having the ability to download the class notes each day changes things dramatically. Now the students have the ability to listen, think, and absorb instead of having to listen, think, and absorb all while frantically writing.

(3) No one has probably taught students how to take effective notes in math class, which explains why most of them just write down equations.

Instead of giving my “I’m disappointed in you” talk to students — admittedly, my first reaction — I decided to take a different course.

I decided to deal with my calculus students first. On Thursday, I went about teaching function transformations, and ten minutes into class, I stopped the class mid-sentence and told everyone to exchange their class notes with their desk partner. I asked each person to assign a grade to the notes for the day.

Unsurprisingly, some students had absolutely nothing written down, some had absolutely gorgeous notes, and most had some chicken scratch or just a series of equations written down.

I had students whisper the grade they assigned to the notebooks to the owner of the notebooks. I made some jokes, they made some jokes, and we diffused the atmosphere, which was tense. Initially a lot of people felt like they were caught with their pants down. They thought it was a pop quiz and the grade was important. I told them I wouldn’t ever hear the grade.

We used this to launch into a discussion of notetaking. I prompted three questions:

1. How do you take notes?

2. How does my using Smartboard everyday and uploading it change how you take notes?

3. Why do we take notes?

Different people had different strategies they shared when answering 1 and 2. The four things I emphasized/brought out in the discussion:

1. Different people learn differently and hence take notes differently, and until I see you start slipping, I’m not going to get on your case. But learning how to take good notes in math classes is an important skill so you might want to get on it now.

2. Keeping your notes organized (by date!) and neat can help you a lot.

3. You don’t need to take notes on everything. But when we’re first learning a concept, you want to really put a lot of attention into how you’re taking notes.

4. WORDS! WORDS! WORDS! A math notebook needs WORDS to explain each step, each tricky point, each concept. If you try to study from a series of equations without any words, you’re going to forgot why we were studying those equations or doing each step or technique. You need to understand the concepts we’re learning and words are key.

My two calculus classes meet either first or last period most days (we have a weird daily alternating schedule, but for some reason, my calculus classes always end up first period when everyone is dog tired and still waking up or last period when everyone is beat from the day and ready to go home.

I didn’t really let students answer “Why do we take notes?” even though I put it out there. They were going to come up with obvious. I wanted to say the slightly less obvious.

The number one reason: TAKING NOTES KEEPS YOU AWAKE.

The number two reason: TAKING NOTES KEEPS YOU ACTIVELY ENGAGED WITH THE LESSON.

I presented these with some humor, too. We talked about these ideas, and then moved back to the lesson. From start to finish, this aside took only 10 minutes. I noticed, at least for that day, students were being a lot of conscientious about what they were writing down and how they were writing it.

(I am probably going to have this “stop what you’re doing and exchange your notes with your partner” moment every so often.)

I’m going to deal with my Algebra II students’s notes next week, and slightly differently. They are younger, and me preaching to them won’t be as effective. So I asked the help of one of my students from last year, who took the most beautiful notes, wrote the most beautiful homework (with words and answered word problems with complete sentences!), and was always engaged in class. I’m having him come to my class and talk with them about his strategies for succeeding in my Algebra II class last year. How he studied from the book, how he took notes, how he did his homework, etc.

He met with the learning specialist last Friday to just hash out his ideas and get them in order, but these are his words. I didn’t tell him what to say, how to say it, anything. He has 5-10 minutes of time to say whatever he wants.

I don’t know how it’ll work. But I’m hoping that it’ll be an early wake up call to my class.

With that, I’m out.

UPDATE:

So my former Algebra II student said this is what worked for him:

1. Read the section BEFORE going to class, so it at least looks familiar
2. Take notes on the bolded terms in the book (e.g. “leading term”) — the math terminology
3. Try every problem to the furthest, even if it seems like it’s going nowhere. Because it might go someplace good, and if not, it’s fun to see how far you can get.
4. Write the entire solution to problems done in class, even if you know the process. Writing things down helps.
5. Ask questions, but wait until the teacher (me!) finishes his thought; the question may be answered if you give the teacher a chance.
6. Make a formula page, with all the formula we learn.
7. Study 2 days before the quiz, not the night before.