Month: January 2024

Just Chillin’

I’ve known for a while that the day was coming when I’d be too old to battle a raging snowstorm on my drive in to work. I am a safe driver (if somewhat of a leadfoot) and have decades of experience driving in bad weather, including 15 years of commuting to work 185 days a year on the notorious Borman Expressway (the portion of I-80/94 in Lake County).

Until that day arrives I know that in winter I need to be prepared ahead of time for an e-learning day that may be called on short notice. Sometimes that is an assignment from our online math tool provided by our textbook publisher, other times a digital activity that may not necessarily involve computation.

Back in the embryonic days of e-learning in my area I created a Desmos activity for just that purpose, and it came in handy earlier this week when a snow day and a day off for bitterly cold temperatures bookended Martin Luther King weekend.

Rather than virtually teaching a topic I’d have to re-teach the folllowing day in person, on Tuesday I reached for Just Chillin’, a Desmos activity where my students investigate how temperature and wind speed affect the wind chill figure reported by forecasters.

The activity includes mathematical modeling, interpreting graphs, and using a model to make predictions, all kind of evergreen topics in algebra and beyond. After I set the scene with a couple of beach photos (one summer/one winter), students read an article outlining how Antarctic scientists tested their hypothesis that an increase in wind speed increased the rate of heat transfer.

Next I show them three points on a coordinate plane representing wind chill at three different air temperatures with a wind speed of 15 mph and ask them to determine the type of function suggested by the points:

The next screens ask them what temperature would combine with a 15 mph wind to create a minus-30 wind chill, or a minus-25 wind chill.

This is a skill I spiral back to often in activities, because it is a really good life skill in addition to being a state standard and a staple of testing. Also because it is an area where my students have historically struggled.

Then, a twist:

That point isn’t on the graph, which only contained temperature and wind chill data with a 15 mph wind. They have to take into account the relationship they saw from now five points on the graph, and determine how to estimate the conditions with a stronger wind. (Translate? Something else?)

That was a tougher challenge. They were pretty much guessing at this point. Although honestly, closer to correct than their responses to the questions where they were using a graph or equation.

I showed them the actual formula for wind chill, which involves two variables and is more complex that I needed the first part of this activity to be. So, kids, which variable (temperature or wind speed) has a greater effect on the wind chill, just from looking at the equation?

We haven’t quite reached rational exponents yet (next week) so I knew that 0.16 power was going to be about as clear as mud. So let’s look at the data a different way:

I was hoping they would zero in on rate of change given just the one row and column. The change in wind chill at 35 mph is pretty consistent per 5 degree change in temperature while the change slows rapidly as wind speed increases in the 5 degree column. Almost no one picked up on that. It may have been a factor of remote learning, it may be that they transposed the temperature and wind speed axis, but I didn’t get the traction I thought I would from this question.

So we closed with a couple questions putting the students in charge of “school”:

I appreciate that they are upfront and real with their responses. The last slide is the entire wind chill chart I excerpted earlier, with the “dangerous” level wind chills highlighted in a darker shade of blue. Those are the readings below minus-25, which not coincidentally is the traditional cutoff in many districts for calling off school.

That led to a quality conversation, which kind of rescued the day for me. In my experience, “what would you do if you were in charge?” is a winning question in a high school classroom. Probably something there about student voice and agency, if I had to guess.

All told, I was pleased with how the day went. My students stayed engaged on a Google Meet with me for pretty much an hour, which as my veterans of the remote teaching game know, is saying something. We did some math, I learned about their strengths and weaknesses with some foundational algebra skills, and the topic was obviously timely.

This class came to me at the semester from a teacher who left our building, so I also got to slowly introduce them to Desmos activities, problem-based learning, and “how we do math” in Room 130. Which is also a plus. Pretty positive e-learning day as I see it.

As an epilogue to the first graf way up there: parts of northwest Indiana got slammed with lake effect snow overnight. The band set up over communities a little bit to my east and they got literally two feet of snow today. Some roads won’t re-open for 24-36 hours according to reports I saw. I was right on the edge of the plume so right around the time I was starting the shower this morning and system snow moved out, the lake effect flakes started falling. And one by one, my local districts started calling for e-learning today. The roads were terrible. Meanwhile, my district was well outside the band and got about an inch of snow, if that.

Decision time.

A quick look at Google Maps and INDOT’s live web cams, and a swing around my socials told me the road conditions were lousy for most of my commute. What to do? My class was well set up for a sub if needed. I was in touch with a couple of my math colleagues who also drive in from a distance and we could see this was going to be a challenging drive, if not outright dangerous.

So I made the call.

Not gonna lie, the district’s attempt to cap sick days over a career factored into the decision. A sick day is basically Halloween candy under the proposed contract, like a timeout near the end of a half in football. Can’t take it with you. Might as well use it. Especially when weighing a sick day against a possible injury and car repair from an accident on snowy, slick expressways.

Easiest call I’ve made in a while. No regrets.

Just Your Garden Variety Five-Day Weekend

I live where we get winter. The kind of winter that has a tendency to wreak havoc on school schedules. As I write, I’m waiting on my district leadership to make the call and join the growing number of Region districts that are going to an e-day (or cancelling outright) due to frigid temperatures and brutal wind chills.

Sunday morning in the Region.

Five-day weekends are exceedingly rare but that’s what’s on tap after a snow day Friday and Martin Luther King Day today. And that great cheer you heard from a distance is school kids everywhere (and let’s not kid ourselves, teachers, too) rejoicing over a mid-January break. And yes, I know we just had legit two weeks off between Christmas and Epiphany. But still.

That probably tells up something about where we’re all at from the neck up when it comes to school and life in general in the coldest, darkest month of the year.

Want your own? Amazon link here and no I don’t get a commission but I just ordered one.

A favorite parlor game (in my house anyway) is watching which districts resist any kind of closure, and how districts phrase their closing announcements. One local district is kind of famous for a superiority complex (“Town X Community Schools are open in-person and on-time today” or “We live in northwest Indiana where we have winter, be sure to leave early and drive safely on your way to school today”.)

Which, fine, you’ve got a brand to maintain, do you, but sometimes it’s OK to just take the day and keep everybody safe. You can make it up next month and the kids are still gonna learn. You go all-out, 90 mph all day every day and something’s going to break.

Even marathon runners build in cut-back weeks to their schedule to avoid injury.

With that in mind, this weekend I tapped out of an online course I’ve been working on since October.

My district is backing a couple of very large shifts in practice right now, The New Tech Network for problem-based learning, and Modern Classroom Project (self-paced learning similar to an in-class flip model.)

We have an instructional coach over PBL and another of our coaches is trained in MCP. I felt strongly that in order to best support the math and science teachers I work with as an IC that I needed to be personally familiar with all the systems we’re asking them to put in place.

So the first big project in my class rolled out in December. And one of our ICs convinced me to take the plunge and do the online MCP training with her (strength in numbers, right?)

I want to walk my talk. Which is good. And hey, my dad worked 40 years in a steel mill so blue-collar work ethic is literally in my DNA.

The online course consists of five modules, each with a soft due date, then there is a hard due date for the entire course. That due date passed this weekend. I had planned everything out to wrap up the final two modules after Winter Break, but I got hung up on module 4. After a couple of rounds of revision, I was running out of time to work on the final module. Then the I got a change of class schedule which required an afternoon of work to prepare for, and the winter storm descended on us (cancelling a day of school and keeping me out of the building where some of the video tools I would need are located), and I couldn’t make the time work.

The training is not required to do my job (although I obviously see the value in it), and I already know how to run a flipped classroom. In previous rounds of training my district had offered a stipend to teachers who completed the MCP course but things being the way they are these days that was off the table, so it cost me zero dollars to decide against finishing. Self-image aside, there was not a single factor that argued strongly enough in favor of finishing the course.

There’s other aspects of my job to do though, and this seemed like a good time to take something off my plate.

There was a time not that long ago that I would have powered through and finished the course, even if cost me sleep or family time or came at the expense of other duties. But I’m a little older these days, and hopefully a little wiser. If load management is a thing in the NBA, it for sure is OK for a teacher to exercise a little self-care for a long-term benefit.

And of course, as a reflective teacher, I thought a little bit about my students in similar situations. They make decisions daily about when “good enough” is good enough, and we’ve got to respect that. Maybe they’re on to something. Following the lead of Kim Strobel and applying the Minimum Effective Dose:

And sometimes you find out that by pulling your foot off the gas just a hair, you can still get what you want. (The “try easier” philosophy). Jim Bouton in his book Ball Four addressed this concept. Paraphrasing, he said baseball players can’t try to psyche themselves up like football players do. If they did, they’d go out swinging the bat hard, and miss the pitch by a mile.

Swing and a miss. Source

In a related story, this email hit my inbox this morning:

Only thing I don’t get is the support of a dedicated mentor but other than that I can still turn in my final submissions and get the certification. I can live with that.

Oh and if you were wondering, late this afternoon my district leadership announced the e-learning day for tomorrow. A five-day weekend it is. Gonna make an instant pot full of soup, and make some e-day plans for tomorrow, and live plans for Wednesday, and watch some football, leave the faucets running a little, and sleep like a baby.