Month: November 2020

Collisions

Woke up to some stunning news on Saturday morning.

We’ve been following him for a while and Mrs. Dull benchmarks his philosophy in her role as a corporate recruiter and trainer. But he’s got just a really great story. Go ahead a take a minute to scroll through this thread:

Of course she has that Vegas connection with him as well. Famously Hsieh poured an immense amount of cash into revitalizing downtown Las Vegas.

One of his passions is the idea of “accidental meetings” which he calls collisions.

Shorter version: magic happens during random meetings of colleagues, creating much more productive minutes than scheduled sit-downs. Anything that brings smart, creative, curious people together informally is good.

That’s been in my head ever since I first heard it. How does that apply in school? Those random chats in the hall during passing time, or a quick drop-by during plan period (“how do you teach ‘x’? I do it this way but…”). I learned more from fellow teachers in random five-minute conversations than in most scheduled meetings with colleagues.

When my wife worked at Olive Garden back in our “two jobs each” days, they used to call that an “alley rally”.

Maybe post-pandemic we’ll be able to teach together in actual buildings again, and I can learn some more.

I feel like Twitter has been that source of “collisions” for me. There are definitely folks who feel like Twitter has passed its expiration date in terms of usefulness to rank-and-file teachers. But just in the last nine months of remote teaching I’ve learned from:

  • Jenn White (absolute queen of self-checking Desmos activities)
  • Julie Reulbach (also excels at connecting folks who are trying to up their Desmos AB game)
  • Ed Campos (this guest shot on the Kyle Pearce/Jon Orr podcast is him in a nutshell. Plus: #flattenthecurveflattenthebelly)
  • Dan Meyer (kind of full circle, right? His was one of the first blogs I started reading and learning from, now he’s part of the braintrust behind Desmos and hosting webinars and connecting people (Hsieh-like) on Twitter)
  • And countless others who I didn’t necessarily seek out, but they (or their brilliance) showed up in my TL. #connectedTL and all.

Twitter chats? Coincidentally I’ve got the #NVEdChat up on another tab while I’m writing/polishing this post. So they aren’t dead. And they still tend to bring surprise convos and learning. But the absolute high-water mark on chatting on here belongs to Michelle Green. One #INeLearn chat long ago she advised me (paraphrasing here, it was a while ago): “don’t look past the support you have in your own building”. In other words, don’t get so caught up in your online PLN that you miss the powerhouse colleagues in flesh & blood down the hall from you. The ones you chat with between classes or eat lunch with every day. Or who drop you an email or a DM with something you might be able to use (you know who you are).

I think Tony Hsieh would nod and smile at that advice.

Use Less Garlic, If You Want

Its the biggest trope in blogging – the backstory.

You know the bit: you googled around for a recipe, found a hit that sounds exactly like what you want to make, click, and find yourself knee-deep in tales of a month in Paris, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling… ah, here we go. Finally. Let’s make that pulled pork then, huh?

I have no idea what kind of person would format their blog this way. A long, rambling story before getting to the point of the post? Never.

Edu-Twitter has undergone some changes the last couple of years. There’s serious blowback to the “you must do this/use this/be this” style of post. Which, to be honest, I mean, I appreciate the advice, and your experience, and your enthusiasm, but, let me think thru if it will work for me first.

I mean, I know you taught English for 12 years, but, I’ve taught math for 17 so maybe trust that I know what I’m doing too, OK?

(Scars are souvenirs you never lose, right?)

I really appreciate all the tricks and tools I’ve picked up from my online PLN over the years, from folks who have maybe learned from someone else and tweaked their stuff until it worked. That taught me to do the same. Keep what works, play around with what might work, throw out the rest. I thought of this the other day while reading my favorite food writer sharing his recipe for tomato soup.

You will also need some basic aromatics. Two large yellow onions, plus, oh, I don’t know, some number of cloves of garlic. I like a lot of garlic. If you will scroll back up to that photo of the can of tomatoes, you will see a bulb of garlic. I used all of that bulb’s very large outermost cloves. It came to a lot of garlic. Maybe you don’t like garlic as much as all that. You can use less garlic than that if you want.

“Let’s Cook Some Tomato Soup”, https://defector.com/lets-cook-some-tomato-soup/

“Maybe you don’t like garlic as much as all that. You can use less garlic than that if you want.”

For real. Not, “You must use 40 cloves of garlic in this dish or what are you, some kind of weenie?”

Or this:

Oh hey, speaking of stock, you will also need, oh, let’s say a quart of chicken stock. If you are a vegetarian or vegan or you just don’t have easy access to chicken stock, it will be fine to use water. I guess that means it’s not really a thing you “need.” It’s too late to go back and reword that sentence! We’re only moving forward in this blog!

This is a dude with some pretty strong opinions. He wrote for Deadspin, for God’s sake. But he’s OK with you tweaking his recipe to taste. I can dig that.

Also: Burneko is probably never gonna have a show on Food Network:

Now, for the violence! With your accursed hand, reach into the giant can of tomatoes, and extract a tomato. Hold the tomato down in the pot, near the surface of the stuff in there, in your loosely closed fist. Say something like “I’ll see you in hell, you sonofabitch” to the tomato. And then crush the damn tomato in your fist, as though it is the still-beating heart of your hated foe, and drop its ragged crushed remains into the bottom of the pot!!! Hell yeah!!! Now also do this with every other tomato in however many cans of tomatoes you are using. Whatever liquid remains in the cans also goes into the pot.

We all kind of have issues, I think.

Anyway, in the spirit of Burneko: Most of us have been trying to figure out how to teach effectively through a computer screen for the last eight months or so, with varying degrees of success. One of the things that has clicked for me is using the Desmos Activity Builder to make assessments. There’s a ton of resources out there on how to do it, including an epic webinar from Julie Reulbach.

It helps to use somebody else’s first (literally a google search away), get the sense of how you can use AB to help your students show you what they know, then start making your own custom activities. (Learn by doing, for real). Find a teacher friend to log in as a student and try it out and give you feedback. I guarantee you the very best teachers I know ask to get another set of eyes on their stuff.

If you are on twitter, share them with the #ImproveMyAB tag.

If you are interested in some that you can use right now, or copy and make better, or just giggle and softly shake your head at, my collection is here. I’m kind of proud of some of them. Others can definitely use revision. I haven’t made the time to learn computation layer yet, so I can’t make the cool self-checking kind, but fortunately it’s possible to copy someone else’s page (code included) and dump it into your own.

Also, you can still include the “fun question” (inspired by Jonathan Claydon) that my students used to look forward to back in the Before Times when we had class together in school and we needed a way to break the tension of test day and remind each other we are human beings.

Baby Dinosaur Hatching is pretty sweet. They got mad drawing skills.

So if you like garlic, chop it up and dump it in. Anchovies? Go for it. Or not. Make that card sort. Have your kids use the sketch tool to create a system of linear equations with a solution of (-1, 4), then write the equations for the lines they drew, then have them do the substitution or elimination work to prove (-1, 4) is the solution. Use the ordering feature to have kids put a set of steps to solve an equation from first to last.

The mind boggles. The limits are your taste and your teaching style and your kids’ needs.

Don’t take my word for it. What do I know anyway? Take a stab at making a powerful tool work in your classroom. You can always go back to the old way if it doesn’t work for you.

And if you make something awesome, share it, OK? I really don’t even mind if you share the backstory first.