Month: April 2022

Little Things

Is there an Algebra 1 teacher who doesn’t love teaching quadratics? No.

Is there an Algebra 1 student who enjoys learning quadratics? Also, no.

I’ve always thought it’s an odd quirk of the curriculum map that we start teaching the toughest math exactly at the point of the year when our students are very likely to have already checked out mentally.

Replace “desk” with “phone” and yeah, probably pretty accurate.

The analog in geometry I guess is trig ratios. We’re a bit behind where the map says we should be, but I’ve got 30 school days (15 blocks) left and we just returned from a four-day holiday weekend and my kids are toast.

So, perfect time to try to learn a brand-new thing with really weird numbers that you can really only do on your calculator. And oh yeah, you have to learn the keystrokes for your individual calculator or it will all turn out wrong.

After 18 months of remote learning we’ve all kind of made our peace with some “holes” in our students’ math foundation. Call it “learning loss” or don’t. It’s real. Can’t go back and change the past. Pandemic teaching sucked. All that’s left is the now: Meet them where they are at, take them as far as we can. So the mindset is there. Now: execution.

Reflecting back on the week, I’m pretty happy with how a couple of things have turned out. Feedback from a couple of my classes yesterday helped lay down the pathway. One group of students told me they felt comfortable writing an equation, like sin 34 = x/14. But they were really unsure of when to use sin, when to use cos, when to use tan.

That’s some actionable feedback. We can work with that. My first thought was “Make a card sort in Desmos. Have kids match the image of the triangle with the correct ratio”. Of course I’m like the 11,235th teacher to have that thought, and in a year when I’m gonna take any time-saving option I can, a quick google search brought me to this activity from Jay Lane. I loved that Screen Four led right into the inverse ratios which was the topic for today. Did a “copy/edit” to tweak it a bit for my classes and away we go. Bellringer. Done.

The second piece was finding a way to help my students see that “sin 34″ is just a number. A weird-looking number, but just a number. So during the notes presentation I grabbed up a textbook and started looking for the trig table in the back. (Note to self: next year go dig out like a 2005 edition). Good thing the Internet exists.

“You know kids, a million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth and your teachers were in school, if we wanted to solve a trig equation we had to look up the ratio in a book.”

Coincidentally enough this old-school process roughly equates to the keystrokes needed to do trig problems on an iPhone calculator (find the sin of 34 degrees, then multiply that by 14). So that cleared up two questions. I told them they don’t need to go find that decimal, that it’s already programmed into their phone, but seeing the number instead of “sin 34″ made it make sense. Now we’re cookin’ with gas.

Alright, third thing. Read this in one of Rafe Esquith’s books long ago, knew it would make sense to my kids, and it’s been a go-to ever since.

He puts a simple addition problem on the board: 63 plus 28 equals ? Below the problem he writes the standard A., B., C. and D., leaving the possible answers blank for the moment.

“Rafe: All right, everybody. Let’s pretend this is a question on your Stanford 9 test, which as we all know will determine your future happiness, success, and the amount of money you will have in the bank. (Giggling from the kids) Who can tell me the answer?

All: 91.

Rafe: Very good. Let’s place that 91 by the letter C. Would someone like to tell me what will go by the letter A?

Isel: 35.

Rafe: Fantastic! Why 35, Isel?

Isel: That’s for the kid who subtracts instead of adds.

Rafe: Exactly. Who has a wrong answer for B?

Kevin: 81. That’s for the kids who forgets to carry the 1.

Rafe: Right again. Do I have a very sharp detective who can come up with an answer for D?

Paul: How about 811? That’s for the kid who adds everything but doesn’t carry anything.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/technology/2007/01/16/americas-best-classroom-teacher/bf939d95-91f0-414e-822a-c0998b0ba2f6/

(And yeah, I know Esquith had a fall from grace. I’m still using some of the classroom moves I picked up from him).

So we’ve had the conversation in class about how the distractors on a standardized test question get built. I even do an activity where I have my kids make an entire Quizizz review, questions, distractors, the whole schmeer. They identify the common mistakes students would make on a particular problem, then work out the problem making those mistakes intentionally, then fill out a form that becomes the Quizizz review.

So today we’re doing the notes for finding angles in a right triangle given two sides. After they do the work, I ask them, “where did I get the wrong answers from?”

And they were all over it. “So the first two you used the wrong ratio. Inverse sin and inverse cos. Then for the last one, your tan was right, but you flipped the fraction. You did adjacent over opposite.”

Nailed it.

I had to stop and point out how friggin’ awesome that moment was, how much they progressed in understanding from three blocks ago when we started working with trig ratios. I might have even swooned a little bit.

None of this was earth-shattering breakthrough stuff. I’m not writing a teacher book anytime soon. But each step was a response to a stated or perceived need of my students. It represented that I’m not going to quit on them in the classroom, even with the days beginning to dwindle and the interest level in free-fall.

The little things matter. They definitely matter.

Looking Ahead

Hi August Me, It’s April Me.

Hope this post finds you well.

I really won’t shed a tear if I never read that phrase again.

By now you are on the downside of summer, which I know was restful and peaceful and full of dog walks and sleeping in and cold drinks out in the back and good books and homemade guac and sunsets on the beach.

And maybe some school planning. I hear you will have two preps next year, adding algebra II back into the mix with geometry. Good thing you kept a really good planning document (force copy link if folks who stumble on this blog want it) for geometry, and of course you’ve got that course archived in Google Classroom so you only have to build one course from scratch. Because that algebra II course you built in Canvas over three years in a different district is gone like the wind.

Because that’s how school works now.

But there’s some things I’ll want you to know. It took you a minute to wrap your head around planning on an A/B schedule, and once you did there was that issue where every Monday holiday cost you a red day, and it seemed like every snow day and every e-day for testing was a red day. I mean, you got to do some really cool one-off activity days with your grey day students but it felt like your red day kids missed out a lot.

How many red vs grey days were there really? How many e-days did you have? Do you really want to count them up? Maybe you should. OK, I just did. With seven weeks of school left (five more Mondays but who’s counting?) we’ve had 69 red days and 72 grey days in-person.

So we really only have as many “days” as the fewer of red or grey. I don’t need my grey day classes to be a week ahead of my red day kids.

What’s the plan for next year? An A/B schedule means five meetings every two weeks, that should be 90 blocks per class, 45 per semester. There’s 52 sections in the curriculum map, so that sounds promising, right?

Just keep telling myself that.

We take the first week-and-a-half each year for “suspended curriculum” which is the rules & regs and SEL topics that we want to front-load our students with to open the school year. So let’s say that’s 4 blocks. Two weeks of review and final exams times two semesters, so that’s 10 blocks. We will have covered 9 units by the end of the year, figure two quizzes each unit (we take half the 80 minute block for review and half for the quiz to avoid that case where one block gets a review and a quiz the next day and the other block goes five days in between) so that’s 18 more blocks. Two “Amnesty Days” each quarter is another 8. Quick back of the envelope calculation, 40 blocks out of the 90. So that leaves 50. So right from jump, we don’t quite fit, right?

And that doesn’t even count the “Honors only” sections. If we want Amnesty Days and projects and activities and everything that makes a class my students actually want to come to every day, something’s got to give.

There’s some x-factors, for sure. Snow days are a given around here. Testing’s not going away. But we lost three weeks (~7 blocks) to remote/hybrid weeks due to Covid and safety issues this year. We get those days back (fingers crossed) we’re right back in the game.

So, August Me, I hope you gave this some thought over the summer. Power standards? A better way to do quiz retakes/corrections that doesn’t require a whole class period? More PBL/Three-Act Math so we do a bit more learning by doing? (We’re a New Tech school now, one grade level at a time, so projects are going to be an expectation soon. Which is good for my kind of teacher).

And if all this hurts your brain right now, remember that April Me took a minute as many days as I could while my lunch was being irradiated in the microwave to sneak a peek out the teacher lounge windows into the courtyard. It’s not actually touching grass, but as close as I could get during the school day.

You should do that too, August Me. And keep doing that thing from advisory during remote teaching and your math connects where you sit in the dark with your coffee while everyone else in the house is still asleep and just breathe for a minute or five before you get out of bed and have breakfast. Self-care takes a lot of different forms. That’s a couple of them. So is taking what you learned and planning ahead for a new year, however far away it might be.

Good luck on your 20th year of teaching. You’ll need it.