I’m closing out year 5 of my teaching career and I’m on the precipice of a great adventure. I’m closing out one chapter of my life and ready to start the next and there are so many options available to me right now.

I love what I do and am extremely passionate about teaching and learning and growing…and I want to be able to do this for another 25 years. I’m finding myself in a position, professionally, where I can decide what I will and will not accept…and that is a scary and yet strangely liberating feeling. I guess freedom…true freedom is like that.

So…

A. will I write that charter and pursue true independence ?
B. Will I stay on the path that I’m currently on and seek employment as a local school leader ?
C. Will I leave it all behind and leverage my experience as a professional educator and become a capitalist…selling my ideas…and experience to the highest bidder ?
D. None of the above.

Either way, I’m on to the next

….adventure that is.

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I started work at another single gender school. Instead of all middle class girls I nowwork with all inner city boys. For now, let’s just say that things are definitely different. Boys at this age and with this particular background are more playful, more aggressive, and much more in neeed of strong, positive, male guidance. I enjoy the work though. Working with students like these keep my instructional practices sharp as it is often much more difficult to engage these boys than it is to engage my former all girl student population. I’ll keep updates coming as interesting things occur.

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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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