#MTBoSBlaugust Day 5: Student Unit Organizers

Happy Day 5! We've made it through an entire work week of MTBoSBlaugust! 

I've been really digging into my unit plans and am now getting down to some day to day planning for the beginning of the year. In year 1 of teaching any class, there is always some element of day to day planning. But this year is round 2 of AB Calculus for me, so I'm pushing myself to use everything I've learned to get a bit more organized. I still struggle with creating plans that are too solid, as I always want to be flexible enough to work with whatever my kiddos need. However, here is my new (tentative) approach for some organizational changes this year. I plan to hand out a paper/packet to the kids on the first day of the unit with:

1. Daily Unit Overview

These are, of course, subject to change. However, these will give kids a good idea of what's coming or what they miss if they are out. For longer units, I will probably just go week by week, but this particular unit is a short one, so I'm going all in here for Unit 0. 

2. Unit Reminders

For other units, I'm sure this will get more content and date specific. However, for the first unit I wanted the "big expectations" somewhere accessible daily. In addition, that AP Exam date gets talked about from Day 1- eyes on the prize! 

3. Homework and Extra Help Tracker

I'm thinking of using this like a stamp/signature sheet where kids can keep track of their homework submissions and extra help. I have made the mistake of "trusting" honors classes too much at first in the past and seeing kids fall behind until I start holding them more accountable for homework. I will collect this on the last day of the unit for a homework grade. I can also use extra help as an incentive here since it's tracked via teacher signature. Obviously I'll need to go somewhere exotic to get stamps so they aren't easily forged. Still a work in progress. 

4.  Review Sheets

I'm working on attaching the review sheets for each unit to the Unit Organizer so students have them from the beginning and can see to what level they will be assessed. The challenge here is going to be amping up my review sheet game, as I had 1 review sheet per unit last year. I'll have to write a few more for each unit before the start. I think it's a task that is worth it though- UBD and backwards design in action. Also, kids can work around their busy schedules to get work done and not be cramming review in just the night before the test. 

Sooooo, has anyone used a system like this before with their kids? Pros? Cons? It's new for me, but I feel like it's a worthwhile tool to help keep students and families organized, build some accountability, and give students confidence going into assessments. Feel free to share your experiences! 

#MTBoSBlaugust Day 4: Home Office!

Quick post today as I am ACTUALLY digging deep into lesson planning for next month! 

Today I finally finished setting up my home office space, which has been a work in progress since moving in last month! I love how it turned out (hence why I'm actually getting some work done today).

One of the perks of not having my own classroom this year is that some of my favorite decorations can be at home. Thankfully, I married a science teacher who isn't opposed to having unit circles decorating our apartment. 

"You'll be able to do this in your sleep!" was always once of my catch phrases during unit circle time. One of my amazing kids took this literally and made me this unit circle dream catcher! 

Another amazing unit circle from a former student....she made it from blow drying crayons on a canvas. 

The "CC" was an award passed from teacher to teacher at my old school each month and the STM dish was a 6th grader's version of a "pi" plate- my favorite gift when I left my first ever teaching job! 

 And the very best part of all?

This room doubles as our guest room, so I have the very best PLC member ever when I'm working....

#MTBOSBlaugust Day 3: Celebrating Summer

I tend to think that it's less that teachers get summers off, they just control their own hours.  Sure, I'm not working 40 (60....80....) hours a week in the summer and fighting rush hour traffic home, but there is rarely a day that goes by without my doing something school related and often entire weeks are spent in professional developments or conferences.  Last summer I only had 2 weeks "off" and they were the week of my wedding and the week of my honeymoon. But in the summer, my life is definitely not controlled by bells and for that I'm thankful. Choosing when to snack, when to use the bathroom, when to check my emails- it's liberating. This summer, for the first time in my teaching career, I've not gotten a paycheck or worked in a supervisory role of kiddos in any way. I've taken the time to do a whole lot of things that I haven't in summers past and I am feeling completely reenergized! Now that the end is in sight, my school-related work time is amping up and my control of my own hours are winding down. Just as my body (and my dog) re-learns how to sleep past 6 am, I have start slowly reconditioning it to 4:30 am alarms.

So in celebration of my first non-teacher teacher summer, here are my favorite highlights of the summer. I have....

• Slept on an air mattress for almost 3 weeks
• Moved 778 miles (into an apartment sight unseen....it turned out awesome thankfully)
• Eaten my way through my new town at amazing new places
• Learn to navigate said new town without a GPS
• Introduced my dog to squirrels (our neighborhood in NC didn't have them) and watched her mind explode with possibilities. She has tried to climb multiple trees. 

  

  First sniffs above the Mason Dixon

• Actually gotten close to having all my paperwork in my married name, if that's possible
• Bought real grown up furniture from somewhere without "-kea" or "-arget" anywhere in their names
• Learned to apply false eyelashes
• Learned to properly fill in my eyebrows
• Finally watched Game of Thrones. All of it. In 3 weeks. 
• Developed a (somewhat regular) gym routine
• Visited my alma mater with the hubs and immediately took on personalities of nerdy old couple that asked undergrads to take pictures of us, marveled how everything changed

  

  My house for a glorious 12 months of college

• Discovered spiralizing zucchini was a thing
• Read for leisure
• Watched an entire season of The Bachelorette. Knew it was stupid. Loved it anyway. 
• Almost mastered making homemade ravioli
  
• Celebrated our first wedding anniversary 
• Bought a huge floppy summer hat, even though my head is too big for almost any women's hat
  
• Donated my last article of clothing left over from high school....finally.
• Lived close enough to family to actually have a family barbecue, just because it's Sunday. 
• Been able to call a barbecue a barbecue without being told it's a cookout (Sorry, NC)
• Actually got to go to my niece's 2nd birthday party
  
• Got my niece to voluntarily say my name, even if it's "tait-yn" right now
• Eaten way too much NY pizza and bagels (hence previously mentioned gym routine)

It's nice to take some time to rejuvenate and do things you love during such a big, exciting summer. Ready to jump into a new and challenging school year at a new school, but definitely going to miss such a life-changing summer.

#MTBOSBlaugust Day 2: Communicating with Home

I am one of those people with a never-ending to-do list. I put items on my list that I know I've already completed just for the pleasure of crossing them off. It's sick, but it's how I've always been. During the summer, I enjoy leisurely checking off things on my to-do list between random adventures and Bravo marathons. However, during the school year, my lists get out of control. Pages and pages long. And some of the most important tasks on that list are making sure that I'm connecting my classroom with my students' families and life outside my walls. 

Last year, in an effort to both involve families more in our classroom and cut down on having to repeat myself constantly to both kids and parents, I started sending out a weekly newsletter to my class community. I know, not groundbreaking. I did this as a first year teacher, working with middle schoolers. However, it's something that is almost never done in my experience with high school classes.

Here's why it made a big change in my classroom:

• Families felt more informed about the routines and expectations of our classroom.  Parents often didn't know how to access all the resources or information I had available to kids, especially if their busy work schedules prevented them from coming to meet the teacher night or they didn't have regular internet access at home. I was able to include helpful parent tips that cut down on the repetitive questions I'd often get via email. 
• Math-phobic families had a lifeline. The number of parent phone calls I've had over the years that started with the parent calling themselves stupid or helpless is truly astounding to me. The sentiment was always the same...."I never took (Pre-calculus/AP Calculus/insert any other upper level, scary sounding math here) and I'm just no help to them." To combat this, I often included content-specific information for families if they wanted to access it and include links to my own personal library of instructional videos. This way, if a parent didn't know quite how to help they at least knew where to send the students to get help. And let's be honest....it let me nerd out and share math with a wider audience.  
  
• Families of the "sometimes overlooked student" still felt included. I was able to include news, updates, and photos to make every feel like they were involved. It wasn't just the families with a student in danger of failing who heard from me, it was everyone. 
  
• My classroom truly became global. It was amazing to track the views on the newsletter and see how it was spreading. Some parents told me they had forwarded it to someone who was babysitting their kids for the week so they'd be in the loop. Others were able to share it with parents who might live in another state or country so they felt involved. I was able to share it with administrators and pull from it if I needed artifacts about our classroom. And it made all of these people feel like they had a relationship with me....one they wouldn't have been able to have it I was trying to scratch off a to-do list of emailing each one individually. 

As I begin my year at a new school, this is definitely something I intend on continuing. I use the website Smore, which is free and extremely user friendly. In addition, it provides analytics and is easily integrated with social media. Set an alarm on my phone for a Sunday reminder, write my message quickly, and BCC it out to a parent email list I create during the first week of school! 

Want to see a basic weekly newsletter from my classroom?

PRE-CALCULUS WEEK 10 NEWSLETTER 

#MTBOSBlaugust Day 1: The Blame Game

I am lucky enough to be the aunt of the sweetest toddler in the whole world and one of the biggest blessings of our big summer move has been living close to her for the first time. I spent my Saturday galavanting around town with her (and her parents) and I was entertaining her while my sister-in-law browsed some clothes. We went from shirt to shirt in the store, identifying every color along the way, and she soon spotted a baby across the store. She walked near the carrier and said "Baby!" and waved at her and then walked away. It was adorable...everyone nearby swooned.  A few minutes later, we made our way back towards the baby and before I could swoop down and pick her up, she had grabbed a toy attached to the baby's carrier. The baby's mom didn't take this well and I apologized and removed the now screaming toddler from the situation. 

Not a huge deal, right? The mom reacted strongly to a curious toddler when the baby was in no danger and the toddler was promptly corrected and removed. But after saying goodbye to my brother and sister-in-law, giving my niece a million kisses, and watching them drive away, I spent about 30 minutes walking around the mall trying to calm myself from a panic that had been stirred up. 

That same panic came back to me later that evening when my (calm, gentle, "everyone is my best friend") dog tried to jump on someone on a walk. I've walked this pup every day for 3 years and this has never happened. Again, I apologized to the man and he was very understanding. I went home and stress ate about a week's worth of Goldfish crackers and drowned my sorrows in Real Housewives. The dog and the man were both no worse for the wear. 

So why the panic? For me, it was disappointment in myself. In both situations, I was charged with overseeing someone who didn't always have the knowledge to succeed.  They each behaved inappropriately and I placed no blame on either of them. Instead, I was beating myself up for not anticipating where they might not meet expectations and setting them up for success. If I'd only shortened her leash more or walked a little further off the sidewalk, she wouldn't have had the opportunity to jump on him. And if I'd just anticipated that a mom would be super-protective of her baby and a toddler might grab the nearest toy she saw, I wouldn't have been carrying a screaming toddler out of a store or getting death stares from a woman I'd never met.  It was on me. I was the facilitator for people who were trusting me in this situation. I placed the blame on myself.

Summer is always a time of reflection and re-focusing for me both personally and professionally. The longer I teach, the more I am learning to embrace the "messiness" of it all and it's reshaping the way I approach my pedagogy and my kiddos.  In certain circles of teachers (especially ones that are burned out and tired of change), you start hearing blame getting put on a lot of things. Kids these days, parents, technology, economic circumstances, apathy, etc. I understand where it comes from- so many expectations are placed upon teachers today and conveying content through all the "noise" can be an overwhelming challenge. But that's literally my job- to cut through the noise and give those kids the best opportunity to succeed. 

As I'd been thinking of some of my goals for the upcoming school year, having time to reflect on my Saturday stress-fest provided me with some clarity. On Saturday, the only thing I could control was my own choices to anticipate where someone who depended on me might falter and try to make the best choices to facilitate their success. My classroom is no different. As a more experienced teacher, I have the time and the knowledge to anticipate these struggles more than I ever have before. 

So that's my big idea. More posts coming this #MTBoSBlaugust on how. 

Rewriting Mathematical Mindsets

This idea has been swimming around my mind for a while and I wanted to get it out there into the world and see if anyone might be able to shoot some holes in it or make it better. I had no plans on doing this with my students unless I see a dire need for it (especially in the very unpolished state it currently exists), but it's the kind of conversation I feel like we don't have with our kids enough. 

This all started when I read this article, The Myth of 'I'm Bad at Math'. My experience with students who have developed a negative mathematical mindset is often that there is some advantage they find in thinking the way they do. If they "just aren't a math person" or "can't do math," it can grant them permission to accept defeat instead of confronting their struggle directly. Often, with time and patience, these kids discover they can do math and (shhhh, don't tell anyone) they might even like some aspects of it.  This is the "self-help"-y conversation I've had with a friend or parent or therapist as I've gotten older....when a mindset I've taken on provides some advantage to me that might be hurting me overall. It's not intentional; it's survival. And ain't no way I ever would have been able to come up with that on my own at age 15. 

I've chosen a few of the phrases that make me saddest as a math teacher and want to take a more critical view of them:

In my ideal little hypothetical classroom, I would assign these out to different groups (and maybe have the kids generate some of their own, since my words aren't always theirs). I would have each group answer these questions:

What advantage does this mindset provide to someone?

What problems do you see with this mindset?

How can we "re-write" this mindset?

It can be something as simple as adding the word "yet" to totally change a perspective. It would also give us the opportunity to talk about the fluidity of learning and bridge perfectly into a growth mindset discussion. If kids would buy into the convo, I feel like it could be beneficial for them. 

I feel like this extends to honors and AP classes too, where the mindsets might be different but the survival instincts are still the same. Those mindsets might look more like this:

http://www.quotesvalley.com/images/49/
no-one-can-make-you-feel-inferior-without-your-consent.jpg

So all you amazing educators, feel free to shoot holes or make suggestions or give feedback. I feel like if we truly want kids to buy into growth mindset, we should be helping them examine their current mindsets and why they might not be the most beneficial for them. Too often kids in math only own their failures. If they learn to own their mindsets, maybe they can learn to own their progress and their successes too. 

And of course, it immediately made me think of good old Eleanor. 

First Day of School: Setting the Tone & Common Mistakes

I'm in the midst of what might be the longest summer of my life- moving from a southern school that gets out early to a northern school that goes back late. I've already had almost 7 weeks to get moved, get settled, actually get my driver's license, insurance, addresses, etc transferred over, and spend time exploring my new town. I still have almost 7 weeks left to enjoy time with family, learn more about my school community, catch Pokemon while my husband drives so he "doesn't miss any", and start to think about building my reputation at a new school with a new group of kids and administration. 

One of the most important parts of the first day for me is the act of setting the tone with my kiddos. I have very different expectations than what some students have experienced previously in a math class....expectations that students see themselves as members of a team and be ready to both give and receive help from others, that students communicate their learning each day in a variety of ways, and that understanding is a fluid thing that can ebb and flow based on content and work ethic. And while I knew every minute is precious in an AP Calc class and the focus is content, you don't ever get another first day of school. 

Establish Class Norms & Expectations
The first thing I love to do is get the students talking about what is important to them in a class. I've done it two different ways in the past and I'm still debating with which method I like best- or if some beautiful, perfect hybrid of them exists. I'd love to hear some thoughts from you guys! Below are the questions I've used in the past and few I'm thinking of adding this year. This is more than I'd use with a class. I'm going to narrow from these options:

• I expect my teacher to...
• I expect my classmates to...
• I expect myself to....
• I learn best when...
• When I don't understand something in class, I want....
• I get distracted in class when...
• I'm excited about this class because......
• I'm nervous about this class because.....
• When I hear "Calculus," I think....
• Other? 

_______________________________________________________

Method #1: Gallery Walk

Write questions on big paper and post around the room. Have students complete a gallery walk, putting a post it with their individual answer under each respective question. 

I like: elicits every student's response, gets students up and moving, consider all questions (not just their assigned one)

I wonder: will students start to feel it's repetitive when they already see their answers up on the wall, if kids can focus on a teacher-led discussion about a ton of questions they've already considered and a whole class worth of answers

_______________________________________________________

Method #2: Mini Group Presentations

Assign each group a specific question to answer with the expectation that they present their responses to the class. Ask the class to add any additional ideas after the group presents. 

I like: students get to become "experts" on their question, focusses on student presentation with teacher facilitation to guide, kids listening to kids (not just me)

I wonder: will quieter kids be willing to share their thoughts on questions to which they aren't assigned

Whichever method I wind up choosing, I always conclude by trying to establish a maximum of 4 expectations (I don't love the word "rules" and I don't love a long list of them) that cover the ideas we've addressed. Looking for those "big ideas," as usual. 

Common Mistakes Sort
I want to get my students engaged in some mathematics on day 1. I totally overwhelmed my kiddos last year in my honors calculus class by doing what I thought was a super awesome problem based activity, but just wound up being overwhelming for them after having not done math all summer. We were examining why cups roll in different sized circles ( Mathematics Assessment Project does a great examination of this as does the oh-so-wise Dan Meyer) and I stand by that it's a great activity that can be extended up through limits and more. It definitely got my kids thinking , postulating, and testing, but it didn't have the mathematical benefit it could have if I'd saved it until a little later in the unit. 

Instead, I'm going to get them engaged with some common algebraic mistakes (the biggest calculus pitfall) and start practicing their communication skills- both oral and written. I adapted this from Errors and the Algebra of Calculus from Cengage. 

Common Mistakes Sort

I plan to have these cut out for each group and have partners match the incorrect algebra with its correct counterpart. Then, they need to work together to explain the error in the "wrong" one. I can move around the room and do some informal assessing of my new students. This can segue directly into all sorts of necessary algebra skills- factoring, simplifying rational expressions, working with exponents and radicals, and more. I know a lot of AP Calculus teachers don't believe in review at the beginning of the year, but with the offering of both AB and BC Calculus at my school, I know my AB sections will have students who could use the time focussed on background skills. Of course, targeted review of prerequisite skills throughout the year will be key, but trying to head off some common mistakes and let the students see something with which they are familiar may help build some confidence at on Day 1.