A Fun Activity for the First Day Back

S*** Happens

Not much happening at school since this is "Dead Week" so I guess I'll post a personal story.

This weekend started out to be a perfect weekend. My husband and I went to Austin to see our kids (who are both in college there) and take our son a "new" car (98 honda). Two weeks ago he totaled his SUV and has been without wheels ever since. He would be able to manage in college without a car except for the fact that his job is about 10 miles from where he lives and to keep working, he needed reliable transportation.

Anyway, we were really enjoying ourselves. We went out and had a nice dinner at a very elegant (but not expensive) restaurant. We all dressed up and enjoyed partaking of "Big City Life". The next morning, I continued to relish the weekend when I woke up and saw my husband standing beside me with a large Americano and a newspaper. I got to spend all morning drinking coffee and reading the paper in bed. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Mid-morning, the kids came to the hotel and we all enjoyed the wonderful FREE cooked to order breakfast.


After breakfast, my son said he needed to get home, change and get ready for work so he took off for his house. About an hour later I got a phone call from my son where his first words were "mom, let me talk to dad". I knew in the pit of my stomach it was not going to be good news.

Apparently in his rush to get home and change, he got out of his "new" car and did not put on the parking brake. Did I mention he lives at the top of a hill and the car is a standard? Anyway, the car rolled down the hill, scraping the side against a chain length fence all the way down and building up speed. At the bottom of the hill the car crashed into one very large tree destroying the bumper, the trunk, and flattening the tire.

When my husband and I got to his house to see the damage, we were speechless. I bought this car new 11 years ago and it has been a faithful member of our family ever since. To see it in this horrible condition was a sickening sight. I can't begin to tell you how incredibly sad this whole event was. Today, I am feeling a little better and I am able to count my blessings that no one was hurt and no other cars were damaged in the incident. But yesterday, I felt I was living in some kind of dream where my perfect weekend get-a-way, became some kind of nightmare I just couldn't wake up from.

My son has really been going through the school of hard knocks this year. His first year of college was fantastic, but this year, nothing seems to go right for him. I feel for him, I really do, but this is what growing up is all about. Like the comercial says, "Life comes at you fast". You just better be ready to roll with the punches and learn to persevere in adversity because one thing is for sure. . . life is full of adversity. For most of us, it this adversity that leads us out of adolescence and straight into adulthood.

Calcaholics

Pissed Off Teacher writes that her AP calculus students come to her well prepared. I am envious! Her only complaint is that they are too calcuator dependent. I think most math teachers would agree with her on that topic.

I call my students calcaholics. When you look out and see students using a calculator to multiply 24 by 10, I think you have a real problem!!

In my pre-ap algebra II class, we are learning how to graph quadratic functions of the form:

y=ax^2 + c
y = ax^2 + bx + c
y = a(x - h)^2 + k
y = a(x - p)(x - q)

We are doing this WITHOUT calculators and they are NOT enjoying the process. I especially enjoy watching them struggle with calculations that involve fractions! (insert evil laugh)

Of course, after we do all that, we go back and use the calcualtor to explore the functions in greater depth on the calculator. We learned to find the zeros, how to find the max. and min. and how to do quadratic regression.


Tomorrow we have our last test of the semester over graphing quadratic functions. Half of the test is calcualtor and half is non calculator. I pray they all do all right, Lord knows this is the last chance some of them have to bring up their grade before the end of the semester. By special student request we are having a CRAM session tomorrow morning at 7:00 am. I use my pencil money to buy donuts and the kids who want to do some last minute cramming come to school an hour early. We eat donuts, do math problems out the wazoo and we even have some fun! The other math teachers poke their heads in my classroom door and see 20-30 kids all doing math at 7:00 am and look at me like I am crazy!

Mumbo Jumbo

I spent today in a workshop about Differentiated Instruction. Maybe I'm stupid, but I was really having a hard time trying to see how it would work in my classroom. We started the day by doing a Frayer Model (which I do like and use frequently) and then we did a gallery walk where we walked around and looked at every one's posters. We were supposed to be learning from the gallery walk, but I noticed most of the teachers were just goofing off, making cell phone calls, using the restroom etc. I can't help but think that students would do exactly the same thing. Many of these teaching strategies seem to be great time wasters to me. If you only have 45-50 minutes with your students, then every single minute counts! How can I afford to waste precious minutes doing some of these activities? It seems to me that Direct Instruction is a very effective and time efficient model for delivering instruction. I am not knocking other strategies because I try to vary my instruction from time to time, its just that I have to wonder how many people really go back and put all this educational mumbo jumbo into practice.

I must be crazy

Last night my husband's company had their Christmas party. This is a new job for him so it was our first Christmas party with the new company. Usually I dread these affairs, but he has been going on and on about how nice the people are at his new place of employment that I wanted to go see for myself. I was not disappointed in the least. The people were all so friendly and down to earth. (hidden meaning: they like to drink beer) There were 700 people at the party and it was held at a large hotel. Did I mention the open bar??

Now for the bad part. We got home at 1:00 am and I hade to get up at 4:45 to be ready to leave at 5:45 to take a group of kids to a UIL math and science meet. Needless to say, I am sitting here drinking my coffee trying to become human so I can head out the door. Luckily I am not driving the bus. Oh well, I wouldn't change a thing. The party was the best company party I've ever been to and I met a lot of nice people and maybe even made a few new friends. Now, wish us luck as we are off to our first competition of the season!

I Need a Break!

Last night I had a dream that I was being sued by the Avoider's (see previous post) parents for being a bad math teacher. I was trying to tell the judge that the girl had been absent 10 times already this semester and that she copies her homework from her boyfriend. No one would listen to me.

Sometimes I think I worry more about their grades than they do. Yesterday I counted up that I currently have 12 students failing pre-ap algebra II. They only have one more week to try and get those grades up and some of them still seem pretty nonchalant about their predicament. I guess I was getting a little stressed yesterday wondering how some of them were going to turn a 44 into a 70 by next week. I know I shouldn't worry so much, but sometimes when you teach pre-ap, the parents seem to blame the teacher for their little darlings not doing well.
I mean really. . . how could it be their child's fault when they've always made A's in math before? It must be the teacher since all the other teachers agreed that their child is a pure mathematical genius.

On a happier note, I've got a set a twins who got a rough start to the year. They were not doing their work. When I assigned odd problems from the book, they would just copy down the answers and turn them in. Their test grades would come in somewhere between 40-50%. I had a conference with their mother and I don't know what she did after the conference, but I have seen a complete turn-around in them. They both made 80's on our Quadratic function test and they are doing great.

What Were They Thinking?

Today, we had our CAP meetings. . a 30 minute advisory period that we have every 3 weeks to hand out progress reports, counsel students etc. Today we had a surprise waiting. A home economics teacher and his classes have been working on a special project and they made 1000 buttons that say "I am a contributing member of society". Then they decided to give every student a button who had made the A/B honor roll or was involved in some extra curriculuar activity. I am not sure who went through the list of almost 1000 names to determine who would get a button, but today in CAP, we had a list of our CAP students and we were supposed to give everyone a button whoe name was highlighted. Sounds good, but here is what happened my class. I have 12 students and received 8 buttons. 4 students were being left out. I have no idea why. I have had these students in CAP class for 3 years. I have watched them grow from freshmen to juniors and it has been a joy. The students who didn't get a button are great kids. I have no idea why they didn't get a button. One Hispanic boy has no father and a disabled mother. He leaves school every day and goes to work to earn a living for his family. He did not get a button. Another girl had all A's and B's on the progress report I gave her today. . .she did not get a button. One girl in my CAP class who got a button has failed so many classes that she is still classified as a 10th grader.

Who the f*** made these decisions? Who decided who would get a button and who would not? No one asked me about my CAP students and whether or not they deserved a button.

I was so angry about the buttons that I immediately went next door and complained to my neighbor teacher. When I showed up at his door his face was red and he had an angry look in his eyes. This is a man, who is one of the most even-tempered people I have ever met in my life. I'm telling you, he was steamin' hot. We vented a little bit and then I said I was not handing out the buttons unless every single student got a button. I sent one of my best students to the office to tell them that they had shorted me 4 buttons and he showed back up with 4 extra buttons and I handed them all out.

After CAP class, I went outside in the hall and my coworker had put a huge black X through the button and was wearing it as a silent protest. I think it started a lot of discussions with his students and since we both teach a heavy load of at-risk students, I think they have a new respect for him and the fact that he cares enough about them to protest something he didn't feel was right. One of them asked the teacher if he was going to get in trouble for putting the big black X on his button and Mr. P said, "I don't know, but I don't care either". This student, who quite frequently finds himself on the wrong side of the prinicpal's desk, said, "Don't worry Mr. P, I've got your back". Knowing this student and his rough background, I'm pretty sure he meant that literally.

Sometimes it Just All Comes Together

I had a good day in my remedial classes today. We have spent the last week or so in our unit on inequalities. So far we have learned how to solve inequalities in one variable and how to graph inequalities in two variables. Tomorrow they have a quiz so I thought we'd spend some time reviewing the concepts they've learned and try to bring some of the topics together.

They were doing pretty well and I was getting lots of comments like, "Oh, I am finally getting this", or "Miss, this is so easy! I told them I would give them a challenge problem to see how they did with it so I gave them this problem:

6(x-1/3) - 5 < -5(x - 2) + 2

Most of the class groaned, but this one kid says, "I can do that problem, miss". Suddenly a flash genius struck me and I said, "W, if you can do this problem and get the correct answer, I'll give the whole class 5 bonus points on today's assignment". Well, the challenge was on and lo and behold that child solved the problem correctly. The whole class clapped and cheered and they said "Pick someone else to do another bonus problem! They were so engaged and excited I couldn't turn them down. So we did about 4 more problems and they earned 15 bonus points for todays assignment.

As they were leaving class, this one boy (who has done as little as possible the entire year says to me, Miss that was so much fun today. I wish we could learn like this everyday".

All it cost me was 15 bonus points on their homework assignment and I got 20 minutes of engaged and on task students who left class with a postive feeling about mathematics.

I tried the activity again in my afternoon classes and it worked as well as it did in the first class. I know I can't over-use this or it would become routine, but it was nice to see them engaged and on task.