One of the things that caught me a little bit by surprise when we moved to Vegas is how dark the desert night is, even when you live in the Neon Capital Of The World. The city sits in a valley, and the mountains are pretty much invisible against the night sky. It always amazed me that pilots could drop a 747 over the mountains and on a runway at McCarran.
Flying by instruments, I guess is what they call it.
I used to use that as an analogy to solving equations in Algebra I. If I give you something like x + 5 = 9, yeah of course you know x=4 because your third grade teacher made you memorize those fact families. But if the solution is like -11/7, or 0.38, you can’t just guess that, or solve by observation. You need a procedure.
Now that I’m teaching 6 hours a day of synchronous distance learning over Google Meet, I get it. We agreed as a staff and building leadership that we wouldn’t and couldn’t force our kids to turn on their webcams. It was the right move.
But I feel a little bit like I’m shouting into that deep desert sky sometimes. I have no idea who’s out there. Or if they are listening. I can’t read their faces for feedback. Or signs of interest.
I need a plan. On purpose. As Wikipedia says about Instrument Flight Rules: “Instrument pilots must meticulously evaluate weather, create a detailed flight plan based around specific instrument departure, en route, and arrival procedures, and dispatch the flight.”
I need a way to know if my kids are engaged with what we’re doing. Or if they are even in the same room. This is what that looked like in Algebra II today.
In Algebra II Honors we started with a Would You Rather in a Google Form, followed up with a Brain Dump on solving equations in a shared Google Doc, then after several students expressed a need for a refresher on Inverse Operations and the Properties of Equality, live notes.
Then a quick Desmos activity when we used some snapshots to play “Spot The Mistake” (introducing my kids to the concept of Math Fights and the idea that no one was going to laugh or yell over a wrong answer).
I also introduced my kids to Iron Chef last week. It was kind of a poor man’s breakout room, once my kids figured out they could chat in their shared slide deck, and I could eavesdrop on the conversation.
(Lots of my online teacher connects are doing really cool stuff with breakout rooms using Google Slides. I really should carve out some time to play around and see if I can duplicate their process).
Right now my main goal with lesson design is teaching and learning. But if that’s 1A, then 1B is making sure I have a way to know if teaching and learning is happening.
I stepped out and took a chance last Friday that Three Act Math could work in a remote environment. I’ll count it as a partial success.
One way I realized too late I could have really made that an engaging activity for my kids was to use Desmos Activity Builder as the format. Of course, someone thought of that long ago. Wish I would have done the search while I was planning instead of when I was doing a post mortem. But, new school, Google Classroom rather than Canvas, building the plane as I fly it. One of a million things that slipped through the cracks on me.
All I want right now is a way to “see” what I’m doing with my kids. And to “see” what they are doing with our math.
I consider myself an experienced pilot. Even in unfamiliar terrain. Just got to keep working on using the right instruments the right way.
Tweaking For No Reason 
4 thoughts on “IFR”