#MTBoS Challenge - Week 7 - Sunday Summary

Welcome to the #MTBoSChallenge! 

Each week there are two options:

• On Saturdays, you can choose to blog on a weekly prompt.  This week's prompt is about setting goals for October.  Go check out the awesome and amazing posts submitted this week at Middle School Math Rules.  No worries if you didn't blog yesterday, you can still submit your post using the linky at the bottom of her post.
• On Sundays, you can choose to blog a Sunday Summary of your week.  The idea for the Summary is to provide you a way to reflect on the past week and share what you are looking forward to this coming week.

Feel free to choose either option (or BOTH!), add it to the linky on the host page and don't forget to tweet it with the hashtag #MTBoSChallenge as well!

Now on to my post for the day...

My Sunday 3-2-1 Summary

3 goals for October:

• Get caught up!  This school year so far has been fitting of a Dickens novel... It has been the "best of times" in many ways as I have some really awesome students and have had some really great teaching days.  However, it's also been the "worst of times" as I struggle to balance my new responsibilities and not let anything crash and burn as I learn to juggle all of the things I do.
• Redo my bedroom!  Years ago, we ripped up the carpet in our living areas and went with the concrete subfloor as the main flooring.  Hubs has decided he wants to do this in our bedroom as well, so there will be some home renovation projects coming up in the future weekends... (assuming goal #1 is met first).
• Read more!  I have some really great novels waiting for me on my Kindle.  I've neglected my enjoyment reading a lot this year and I want to spend some time focusing on things that relax me, such as reading.

2 things I'm proud of this week:

• My students!  We took our first test of the semester this week and I'm so happy with how well the students did.  I believe my kids are really taking this year's mantra of "The best way to learn is to DO." by heart and I often hear them comment about how class goes by so quickly, even though we learn a lot each day.
• My lessons!  I spent a bit more time on writing descriptions of data this week and I think it's going to pay off in the long run. 

1 fun purchase this week:

• Jewelry!  Last weekend, I wasn't feeling great, which is why there wasn't a Sunday Summary post.  While resting, I decided to browse ebay for some funky vintage jewelry and I found a great auction of about 50 vintage necklaces.  The box arrived on Thursday and I finally got it all sorted out yesterday.  I can't wait to wear some of them!

Submit your Sunday Summary here!








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#MTBoSChallenge - Week 5 - Sunday Summary

Welcome to the #MTBoSChallenge! 

Each week there are two options:

• On Saturdays, you can choose to blog on a weekly prompt.  This week's prompt is about the favorite review activities.  Go check out the awesome and amazing posts submitted this week at Middle School Math Rules.  No worries if you didn't blog yesterday, you can still submit your post using the linky at the bottom of her post.
• On Sundays, you can choose to blog a Sunday Summary of your week.  The idea for the Summary is to provide you a way to reflect on the past week and share what you are looking forward to this coming week.

Feel free to choose either option (or BOTH!), add it to the linky on the host page and don't forget to tweet it with the hashtag #MTBoSChallenge as well!

Now on to my post for the day...

My Sunday 3-2-1 Summary

3 things that made me smile this week:

• New Shoes!  Last weekend, I went to Wal-Mart (which is WAY out of the norm for me!) and ran across these fake Toms.  I've wanted a pair of leopard canvas shoes for awhile, so I was happy to have found them AND they're pretty comfy!   (Excuse the dirty floor.. I need to mop!)
  

• My friends!  One of my hallmates tweeted me last weekend to say she had purchased a gift for me.  She stopped me in the hall early this week to hold me to come to her room...
  

 

• My neighbors!  On Wednesday, I actually made it home during daylight hours (woohoo!), so hubby and I decided to walk to dinner.  On the way home, we took a longer route to burn off some of those calories!  On the walk, here's what I saw...

2 things I'm proud of this week:

• I feel like I have done a good job with "WICOR-izing" my classroom.  We did a Chalk Talk activity to review for a quiz and my kids really enjoyed it.  I love that every day I am using WICOR strategies to engage my students.

• I have made it a month with my 180blogging and only missed ONE day!  YAY!  This time last year, I had already missed several days... WIN!  Check out my 180blog here:  http://druinok180.blogspot.com/

1 thing I'm NOT looking forward to this week:

• This is my week of many meetings.  Lots of late nights in my future... :(

What is YOUR Sunday Summary?  Add it to the linky below!









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Circles, Percents, and Butter Cake

I was reminded of my grandmother's butter cake recipe today after seeing a math-related scenario (sort of a prompt) on the Math Forum, posted by Annie (whom I think I remember from college decades ago, but that's another story).

I love Gram's butter cake recipe (posted below) for several reasons. The recipe style reminds me of her (I can just hear her voice saying "Don't DUMP it in"); it's absolutely delicious; it's fun to make; and then there is this lovely warning: "This is too much batter for 2 9" pans." If you're a member of my family, that is code for "You probably want to make a 9", two-layer cake, so you're just going to have to eat some of the batter so it doesn't go to waste. Oh, DARN." (I should add here that you're eating raw eggs if you choose to do this, which is not advised, not to mention the gazillion calories. So let's consider this a hypothetical scenario that you're too smart to follow.)

So the question that always occurred to me, and which I have solved several times in my life, is: just how much excess batter are we talking about? If we fill two 9" round pans to the same depth to which we would have filled three 8" pans, what percentage of the batter do the cooks need to... um... dispose of?

I suppose if I pose this problem to students, I could come up with how many cupcakes a full recipe would make (probably about 30), then ask how many cupcakes you should make with the excess batter.

I just remembered: the frosting I always use for it also has interesting math. This was a recipe of my other grandmother's. It says to bring 2 tablespoons milk, 3 tablespoons butter, and 4 tablespoons of brown sugar to a boil, then stir in 1 1/2-2 cups of confectioner's sugar and a pinch of salt. But there's also a parenthetical note "or 3-4-5 proportions" under the 3 ingredients you boil. I used to entertain myself figuring out how much the options shifted the share of each ingredient.

By the way, although my frosting grandmother died about 20 years ago, Gram-of-the-butter-cake is still in fine form at age 93. If you live in Greensboro, NC, you've probably met her; it seems like everybody has!

Why Do (Some) Students Hate Math?, or How I Learned To Love a Concept Map

This past summer, I took an incredibly good online course called How to Learn Math by Professor Jo Boaler at Stanford University. Its focus is on research on math learning and student mindsets that can transform students' experiences with math.

Near the beginning of the course, Jo Boaler and some of her students talked about some reasons why people often dislike math classes. As a response task, she asked us to summarize the reasons discussed with a concept map. I groaned, because although I am circumspect about sharing this view in education classes, I've despised concept maps ever since first trying one. I believed they must be useful for someone somewhere, so I've occasionally used them in teaching out of a sense of duty, but I consistently felt that rather than highlighting connections and promoting thought, they just resulted in a big muddled blob of words.

Nevertheless, I can comply with educational directives, so I gave it a whirl. To my astonishment, this concept map assignment actually clarified my thinking and made me see things in a new way. But before I get to that, here's the concept map in question:

Thanks partly to wonderful math education classes with Kasi Allen at Lewis & Clark, and partly to my own observations, none of these ideas were new to me, and I think about all of them a lot already. The breakthrough for me, though, was in seeing that the "boring/irrelevant" impressions of math and the "math is not for me because..." impressions of math are really two separate strands. Improving my teaching to address only one strand would help reach some students, but would leave others with their math hatred untouched. The interconnections in each strand might lead to a positive kind of snowball effect within that strand -- for instance, if I help students not to feel ignored and excluded in math because they belong to a certain group, their math anxiety will be reduced -- but to reach all math haters, I really need to make certain I am working on both strands.

If you want to comment, I'd love to know what you think about my concept math epiphany or what you feel is missing from the reasons students hate math. I was surprised they didn't talk about standardized tests or about the feeling that in math answers are right or wrong without any gray areas (an impression some people find reassuring but many find terrifying), but since they didn't, I left it out of my concept map assignment.

Formalizing and its challenges

I've really been feeling the tension recently between emphasizing creativity, different ways of thinking, innate mathematical processes that are genuinely student-driven and the type of formal math notation and expression that are needed in order for us to have a common language and to be able to demonstrate our understanding to people outside of our community.

This is the first year in a long time that I'm working with students (7th graders) whose almost entire math learning experience has been rich and validating of the importance of expressing their thoughts and ideas in ways that made sense to them. They have done a lot of open projects and pattern investigations. As a result, they are exceedingly curious and creative in their approaches. They are not into answer-getting, they listen to the ideas of others, and they demonstrate really cool insights and ways of thinking. Having said that, their notation and formalizing of thoughts is ghastly. Their work is just numbers and symbols all over the place, a very personal record that somewhat makes sense to the student writing it, but is incomprehensible to anyone else. Equal signs are placed willy nilly, variables are used with little rhyme or reason to sometimes mean one stage and sometimes mean the previous/next stage, the progression of thought skips blithely around the page in seemingly random directions.

So I'm in a position where I know that I need to teach some formalization of process, some common notation and standardization of the way that we communicate our thinking and show our work. But I want to do this in a way that doesn't destroy the freedom of thought that has been carefully cultivated by their previous teachers, their ownership of mathematics as personal expression. Every time I ask a student to show their work in the very specific, standard way, just like all the other round pegs, I feel a little bit like I'm crushing something wild and pure and free.

It's a math fairy in its natural habitat! Let it run wild and free!

Help me out, teachers of younger students. How do you help students channel their approaches without crushing their spirit? How do I know how much to push formal notation? Our high school does not have an Algebra 1 class so by the end of 8th grade, they are supposed to have learned the equivalent of a standard Algebra 1 class. In my previous school, formal and precise approaches were held in very high regard and students bought in and didn't question it. I received my yearly package of students, some of who maybe weren't so amazing at formalizing their thinking, but were definitely aware that this was a goal for which to strive and gave a reasonably good effort to make it happen. Not so here. I feel like I need to be fully confident and able to justify to these students (and their parents) that what I'm doing is for their best development as students of mathematics. And clearly, I have some doubts at the moment. 

If you teach middle school math, I'd love your thoughts and feedback. How do you get buy in to formalization? My approach so far has been to first let them tackle problems intuitively and then try to demonstrate how to convert that into a more formal way, but their response so far has been a bit of

I feel like I can create some need and urgency to communicate more clearly by having them read and edit each others' work, but that won't likely get them to writing in the standard ways that the rest of the math world shows their thinking. And how to approach formal ways of writing without narrowing their thinking and reducing ownership? Or is that a conflict that's inevitable and just part and parcel of continuing in one's studies as a student of mathematics?

Typed, Targeted Feedback on Student Papers: How To Do It

As a grizzled veteran of the MathTwitterBlogosphere of, let's see, about 5 weeks, I've already seen several really inspiring conversations among teachers (including @davidwees, @k8nowak, @occam98, @cheesemonkeysf, @fawnpnguyen, @absvalteaching, and @TRegPhysics) who are searching for a good way to achieve all of these things at once:

• provide high-quality written feedback on student papers (especially, feedback separate from or instead of scores and grades, since research shows students will only read the grades if both are there)
• avoid repeatedly handwriting the same comments
• have the comments personalized and right beside the work being commented upon
• provide each student (and family?) with an online, commented document instead of or in addition to a physical paper
• do all this without installing expensive software (sometimes, without third-party software at all)
• do all this in a reasonable amount of time and without losing one's sanity

So, here's the best procedure I've come up with so far. If anyone wants to comment and suggest improvements, I'll fold your ideas in, crediting you. 

1. Make a test that has room reserved for your comments: a column to the right or left of the problems, a box under each problem or at the bottom of the page, whatever. Make sure to instruct students not to write in that area. (idea from Trevor Register, whose blog post was passed on by John Burk) 
2. After students take the test, arrange their papers in your class list order (presumably alphabetical). You may want to include blank pages for absent students. Scan the tests into a pdf file. (I'm assuming most of us have access to photocopiers that can do this quickly, but sometimes teachers don't realize it can be done. Ask around if you're not sure!)
3. If you have a Mac, open the pdf file using Preview. (If you have a PC, you'll need some other procedure for steps 3 & 4; I'll add it if someone suggests one.) Add your comments using the Tools/Annotate/Text option: click and drag to make a box to type your text in, and type it in. You can change the color, font, and size for the text box; sadly, you can't do equations. 
4. For your next comment, you don't need to select Tools/Annotate/Text again, just make a new box. If you want to reuse a comment, click on it and copy it, then just paste it in on the next student's paper. When you've finished commenting, save the pdf.
   Here's an example I made using real test questions (leaving out the hardest) and real student work (copied over in my handwriting for privacy reasons). See especially how the comment for #5 is almost identical on the two papers -- no copying by hand, though!!
5. Now you can split the pdf with everyone's papers into individual papers. You can use the free website splitpdf.com for this (found by John Burk). Select the file you are splitting, and use the page range thing (if needed; you'll also use "More+") and "Customize split files' names" to (for example) save student JW's test to jw.pdf. (Entering individual file names is a bit painful; anyone have improvements to suggest?) (splitpdf.com also offers a free Chrome "app," but as far as I can tell that just takes you to their web page. John also found PDFsam, which might be even more powerful but needs to be installed and uses Java.)
6. When you hit "Split!", it will make a .zip file and ask you where on your computer to put it. When you unzip the file, it will make a directory with the student papers stored in it. If you want to, you can then upload the whole directory at once to Google Drive, as I did for my split, commented sample test. 
7. The biggest problem I see is, now how do I share the papers out with the students? Presumably each student could have a directory that they have permissions for and others don't, but shoving each file into the appropriate directory would be a pain. Any thoughts, especially from anyone who's been working with Google Classroom?

Conclusion so far: I would rather do this procedure than write comments on tests by hand. I'd especially like to use it to give students a chance to work more on their papers BEFORE getting the scores/grades. (I would still give highest points to students who did high-quality work in the first round, but I'd give generous partial credit for changes made after my comments.) However, I would like a better way to customize the file names in step 5 and (especially) to painlessly redistribute the commented student papers into appropriate directories where they could access them (step 7).

PS Can you guys actually see the sample files mentioned in Steps 4 & 6? The permissions on the directory, and therefore the files, are supposed to be set so you can, but I'm not sure it's working.

#MTBoSChallenge - Week 4 - Sunday Summary

Welcome to the #MTBoSChallenge! 

Each week there are two options:

• On Saturdays, you can choose to blog on a weekly prompt.  This week's prompt is about the first week of school.  Go check out the awesome and amazing posts submitted this week at Middle School Math Rules.  No worries if you didn't blog yesterday, you can still submit your post using the linky at the bottom of her post.
• On Sundays, you can choose to blog a Sunday Summary of your week.  The idea for the Summary is to provide you a way to reflect on the past week and share what you are looking forward to this coming week.

Feel free to choose either option (or BOTH!), add it to the linky on the host page and don't forget to tweet it with the hashtag #MTBoSChallenge as well!

Now on to my post for the day...

My Sunday 3-2-1 Summary

3 strategies I used this week:

• Word Toss - I learned this strategy in my AVID Critical Reading strand this summer and then ran across it again in the book 'Differentiating Textbooks'.  The idea is to take 6-10 words from a lesson, article, book, etc and ask students to write a single, coherent sentence using as many of the words as possible.  I used this as an exit ticket on the day we started talking about observational studies and experiments.  Next time, I would like to try it as a Pre/Post assessment where the students write a sentence prior to the lesson then again after the lesson to see how their understanding of the words change.

• 3-2-1 Summary - This strategy is an "oldie but goodie" that I used to summarize a short video that we watched over experimental design.  Students were asked to write about 3 things they learned, 2 vocabulary words from the video, and 1 question they still had. 

• Chalk Talk - I read about this strategy in this week's #EduRead article and I was quite excited to try it out.  I did our AVID Tutor Training yesterday, so I decided to use Chalk Talk after watching a sample tutorial video.  I really loved the comments and can't wait to use this in my classroom too!

2 things that I purchased this week:

• A good friend of mine (C.) introduced me to the Dexter 'DexFlex' flats from Payless Shoes.  I have not purchased shoes at Payless for YEARS because I didn't like the quality or comfort of the shoes they had in stock.  When C. told me that I really should try them, I was very hesitant at first, but now they are my go-to shoe!  I had 4 pairs already (black, pewter, floral, and white eyelet), but last weekend, I decided to check on their website to see if they had any new fall patterns.  I have wanted a pair of nude shoes for a while, but did not like the look of the nude shoes that were in the Payless stores, but I love the nude/black combo that is new this fall!  I think the gray/black combo will also be a great addition to my fall wardrobe!

1 thing that I'm grateful for this week:

• Air Conditioning!!  The a/c in my classroom hasn't worked at all very well for a long time.  No amount of "putting the man in the house" did anything to cool my room down.  After some a lot of begging and pleading for relief, it finally was fixed on Friday and my room is now quite pleasant!  Of course, this comes just in time for cooler weather to arrive, but that's okay.. I have a/c again! :)

What is YOUR Sunday Summary?  Add it to the linky below!

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Digital workflow

In my previous post, I blogged about starting to use Google classroom with my 10th grade students this year. So far, I'm having not the easiest time with figuring out exactly how I want to use it. When you post to your classroom stream, you have the option of posting as an announcement or an assignment. Every time you post an assignment, Google classroom makes a folder with that assignment name and automatically drops work that students turn in into that folder on your Drive. However, students seem to be having a hard time using the "turn in" feature. For the assignment due today, they were supposed to make a spreadsheet of data (using a coin flipping simulator to flip coins and record the number of heads) as well as answer questions about their data. Apparently, Google classroom doesn't appreciate you trying to turn in two things for one assignment. I was told that there's an option to turn in one document and then add another, but I haven't tried this yet. Also, what to do for students who really want to answer the questions by hand?

This brings me to my second question... in the past, I have had students keep a very organized binder with sections. Not quite an Interactive Notebook, but something that could serve as a reference and be easily searchable and reflected upon. I had a great system for managing student workflow and feedback. Now that I'm using Google classroom, I'm trying to figure if I should go completely digital and have students create organized folders in Drive and scan/take pictures of their work or if I should try to maintain a hybrid system of some kind. My goal is for students to be able to compile and reflect on a portfolio of their work, as well as be able to turn in and receive back work in an organized manner. I'm a big fan of systems and right now, everyone is turning things in completely willy nilly and it's driving me crazy. I feel like I have this small window right now while the year is still in formation mode and students are eager to please to create an organized and simple system that makes sense for different types of Math work.

So please, clue me in to your wise ways. If your workflow system has a digital component, I would love to hear about it. How flexible are you? What's your take on helping students be organized? What do you do that you like or don't like? If you went all digital, how did it go? Tell me all of your things!!