Last year I learned that this job doesn’t love you…no matter how much you love it. I vowed to keep things strictly business at that point and to never again make it personal. After today I may need to rethink that philosophy. Today was my last day at Ivy Prep Academy. I decided to move on for personal reasosns but the love my former students showed me this week was overwhelming. They reminded me why teachers work weekends, late nights, and early mornings…we do it for them and they’re worth it.

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My students ( who are incredibly tech savvy) have found my website, youtube page, and facebook fan page so I figured I would say hello to them!

Now, go do some homework!

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Basically…I’ve grown bored with blogging…or at least the type of blogging I’ve been doing up until this point.

My entire M.O. was all about post quantity over quality and I got pretty burned out with that model. I found myself writing about things that I half cared about…or were vaguely interested in…and that became a massive time suck.

So I took about 2 weeks off.

I’ve been working on, what I think, is an awesome manuscript based on some action research I conducted. I’ve been digging through data collected by other individuals that shows the results of work I’ve done…and the numbers are insane!

Now, I know that just because I was a major variable involved w/ a group of students…and certain under-served populations within those groups of students have shown insane increases in student performance…that doesn’t necessarily mean that I was the cause of those numbers ( Correlation doesn’t always imply causation ).

Anyway, I’ll post snippets of the manuscript here as I get closer to wrapping it up and moving on to some other exciting projects in 2010.

Shout out to KT, RD, and anyone else who doubted what I was able to do.

#NoShots

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Deloreans
Planets w/ faces
Bright colors
Anthropomorphism
Awesome

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Be Less Helpful – CMC North 2009 – Dan Meyer from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

Dan is one of my personal sources of professional development. In the video above he demonstrates a number of things, most notably for me, is how he illustrates “being less helpful” and using this idea to engage students who are normally remiss to enter mathematical conversations in class.

I strongly encourage anyone who is not familiar with his work to visit his blog here.

Enjoy!

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I’m thankful for those of you who occasionally, regularly, or even rarely read what I have to say here. It means more than you can ever know.

I’ve launched several iterations of this blog over the years. It started off as a classroom portal for my students. However, the digital divide is/was very real for that particular population of kids and most of them couldn’t check the site after school. Next, the site just became a sounding board for whatever crazy ideas/thoughts were floating around my head. During the second iteration I wrote with the sole purpose of trying to gain readership…until I came across a quote by Cyril Connolly;

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

I finally got it…and began writing about the things I cared about…regardless of who did, or did not, come…and I couldn’t be happier with the results. Through this blog I’ve made professional contacts all over the country that I otherwise would never have met. My professional practice has been sharpened and refined by opening myself up to criticism and discourse with anyone who happens to stumble across my URL.

During 2010 I hope to nurture existing relationships while cultivating new ones. Happy new year to everyone out there. Keep writing and I’ll keep doing the same.

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All too often developing mathematics students view mathematics as a series of sometimes, but not often, interconnected procedures to be memorized and later reproduced in the form of answers on some form of formal assessment. They rarely see mathematics as a language that seeks to formally describe the processes of the natural world…because math just isn’t taught that way…to anyone.

Rather, mathematics courses typically follow this structure:

1. Introduce a topic through lecture or some form of media…this may include vocabulary, real world applications, etc.
2. Model as many possible examples of the mathematics being employed as possible. Typically, operations are taught followed by applications.
3. Assess the learning either formally or informally.
4. Repeat.

Our culture of large scale testing is part of the reason. The main culprit, however, is time and scope. Broad learning is valued more than deep learning. The result of such a culture is that students learn a little about a lot and a lot about a little. The consequences of which are as follows:

1. Students matriculate from grade to grade with cursory knowledge of everything they are supposed to learn in each grade level.
2. Once they get to high school/college they rarely posses the requisite skills needed to be successful in their courses.

Personally, I would prefer to see the middle grades structured differently to create deeper knowledge for mathematics students. 4th, 5th,and 6th grade students should focus solely on mastering the number system including exponents, the order of operations, fractions, decimals, percents, squares and square roots, rational and irrational numbers, sequences, and the various applications of these topics to the natural world.

7th and 8th grade students would focus on pre algebra skills including linearity, patterns, proportionality, solving equations, etc and their applications in the natural world.

Doing so would better prepare students for full courses in algebra and geometry in high school by ensuring that students have mastered the required skills to be successful in the later grades.

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Whenever I read about how the web is changing education, I read about how cool young teachers are using twitter in the classroom or how classes are connecting on skype…or whatever. When I read about these things taking place I often wonder…what problem is the new technology solving for the students? Twitter is great, but what value does it add to the classroom experience that email, message boards, or chat-rooms didn’t/don’t? I can’t figure out the answer to that question. This being the case, I’m very hesitant to advocate for how much the web has changed teaching/learning for students. However, I am quick to point out and appreciate how it has changed teaching/learning for the teacher.

I’ve worked in giant school districts where professional development came in the form of a canned presentation from one of several interest groups; textbook company reps, curriculum in a box school reform reps, or district reps interested in pushing the agenda of the leadership by advocating some new sexy trend in K12 that they didn’t (or still don’t) fully understand themselves (differentiation of instruction, centers, etc.). Professional development delivered in this manner is boring, time consuming, and doesn’t meet my individual needs or interests.

My personal professional development comes in the form of my google reader feed, my twitter stream, and the various ning sites I’m a member of. I’m able to streamline my learning to focus on specific topics of interest ( curriculum design, integration of technology and multimedia in the classroom, and school leadership ) in a way that fits into my own schedule and doesn’t cost me any money. I become an expert in the things I care about for free…and my students, colleagues, and school ultimately benefit from all of my personal/professional learning.

Shouldn’t this be what professional development is all about?

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I’m in the middle of teaching my girls how to conceptualize proportions. They can solve them with no problem, but they don’t really understand what they mean…and that all lies in their (in)ability to truly understand fractions.

Typically, fractions literacy begins in grade 3 ( according to the online version of NCTM’s Principles and Standards ) and continues to develop until grade 6. However, as any middle grades ( or high school or college ) math teacher can tell you, students never fully grasp the concept of fractions as comparing a part of something to a whole ( or in the case of rates/ratios comparing a part to a part, part to a whole, etc ).

I discovered just how bad off my students were in this regard when I tried ( unsuccessfully ) to show them the visual representation of proportional relationships.

I was using an activity involving scaling down recipes to illustrate the physical aspects of proportional reasoning….and fractions. The activity required us to take 3 cups of flour (required for the original recipe) and divide them each in half, thus leaving us with 6 piles of flour, each measuring a half of a cup. The questions that followed included:

How many 1/2 cup piles have you created ? ( 6 )
How many of the 1/2 cup piles are need for the scaled down recipe? (3)
How many scaled down versions of the original recipe can you make? (2)

I thought the process would be much smoother than it actually was, but the students had trouble understanding the visual representation of each pile being divided in half. Even more difficult, was understanding that the concept of half is relative to what is considered a whole. Essentially, we couldn’t get though the discussion of dividing the piles of flour into 6 halves and that the 6 half cup piles are equivalent to the 3 whole cup piles….or that the 3 half cup piles of flour is the same as 1 and 1/2 cups of flour.

But…they could do all of the above with numbers…and I was stumped, frustrated, and slightly annoyed.

How do you teach students who have internalized a process to understand a concept rooted in physical reality ?

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In recent years textbook publishers have been offering digital and online supplements to justify the exorbitant prices they charge for physical books. As long as print is the primary means of communication in primary, secondary, and higher education the major publishers will continue to monopolize the market. Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers are making it possible for smaller publishers to get their content into the hands of students. However, the processing and display limitations of e-readers is preventing their use from becoming widespread. Also, learning is becoming increasingly student centered, interactive, and media driven. As such, single display e-readers without color are becoming antiques before they even hit the market. The best possible solution would be a netbook sized device with dual displays and some sort of stylus input. One display would be a dedicated e-reader and the other would be dedicated to traditional computing…all of it opensource of course!

I wonder how soon we can get something like that to market.

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