Deep Breaths

After going to bed last night I realized that I have probably posted the whinyest post ever. See I can explain. For the last couple weeks I have been trying to teach 61 sophomores who are refusing to learn. It's highly frustrating and takes up a disproportionate amount of time. For example, I spent the weekend grading tests where I was desperately trying to give as much partial credit as I could. If I hadn't pulled the questions right from their homework, I would question whether my test was too tricky.

Then, while the instructer says that we should have known to be formulating a portfolio of our class work throughout the course, I must not have seen that directive. In theory that's a good idea, except that we had something due almost every Sunday at midnight and frequently the directions on how to do them were incomplete. For example, the portfolio due last night had a link to the website of a woman who develops portfolios. I didn't see a link anywhere on there on HOW to make a portfolio. I'm sure portfolios are useful to someone, but that doesn't help when I'm trying to make one.

So in the frantic few minutes before midnight last night I let some of my frustration leak into my post. I'm sorry.

As to this class, I really didn't learn that much. Perhaps I started at a higher level than most. I was already blogging. I've done tons of power point presentations. I've planned my wedding in excel. I've done extensive work in Word. I may have picked up a finer point, but overall, there was very little new.

Although I did like the video.

Finally it's Almost Over

This has been a difficult semester. Substituting full time and taking 4 graduate classes is exhausting. Finally I am finishing up though. Unfortunately, I'm a little rushed. See, I'm making lesson plans and working on end of the semester Power Point presentations for my other classes and my job and then to top it off, I have to spend time searching online help to figure out how to link to a word file. It seems to me that might be something helpful to include in the instructions for the online class. But what do I know? I'm just the student. And here I am trying to get this done by midnight when its due.

And I'm teaching seven classes of history tomorrow. So not much sleep for me tonight. I'm overextended and frustrated.

I did learn some important things in this class. I learned how to make a webquest. And I learned how to make a website. And my electronic portfolio may come in handy (but I'm sorta doubtful). But I do think that now that I know how to make a video and upload it to Teacher Tube, that I probably will do it again. Good thing my stepdad could answer my questions and help me when I ran into trouble!

Check it out. I'm pretty proud of it.

Integrating Technology

I have mixed feelings about my Instructional Technology class. On the one hand, technology is very important and I think it is a good idea to expose students to various modes of technology in the classroom. On the other hand, the technology that I am asked to work with for my Instructional Technology class is at best a mismatch for the kind of classes that I most likely will be teaching.

For example, there have been several assignments that would be more useful for an elementary or middle school age group and a subject far less abstract and exact as math. One example would be the storyboard/ visual learning tool that I blogged about here. In this particular assignment we were supposed to have at least two (apparently) hyperlinks. For a math class, I hesitate to have hyperlinks because if students are given permission to go off on the Internet, what is to stop them from merely looking up the answer to the math question rather than figure it out themselves? How would that be different than handing a student a calculator to teach them how to add, multiply, subtract, and divide?

This man starved himself to death because he was afraid of being poisoned!

We also had an assignment to create an interactive PowerPoint presentation. This was actually a fairly enjoyable exercise for me. Although, I'm not sure if it was enjoyable because I was able to go searching for photos and illustrations of famous mathematicians (click on the photo for the hyperlink to take you away!) and I got to make text spin around. It took me a long time to come up with an application for such a PowerPoint though. I created a study quiz for a group of high school students preparing to go to the OCTM Math Tournament. Because there is no way to track which questions a student would get right it couldn't be used for a regular quiz or something that the student would receive a grade for. And again I had to include hyperlinks. Did you know that you can Google most math problems and come up with an answer? So in summary, an interactive PowerPoint, while fun to create, would only be useful in limited applications.

What about excel? Excel has thousands of applications in math classes. Excel can show students how to use formulas, how to create formulas, how changing variables can affect outcomes. I was really excited to go wild with Excel. And here it should be noted that I am a fairly large geek and I have bought and played with excel formula and function books for fun. But our assignment was disappointing to say the least. We had to make a grade book and have three graphs for three different classes scores in the grade book. I have three problems with this. 1) If I am employed at a school where I will have access to computers for all of my students on an as desired basis, it would be odd that the school would not have enough funding to purchase a grade book software program. 2) For any set of data there is only one graph that will best display the data. For example, if you were going to graph the actions of the stock market based on the daily closing numbers, a trendline line graph would be best. A pie chart, or a bar graph would be odd and difficult to read. 3) Out of all the beautiful things that excel can do, a grade book is what's assigned? Excel isn't just about math. I personally used excel to keep track of the 430 guests invited to my wedding. Excel was used to track wedding expenses (which were graphed), timelines for completion of tasks, who gave what and whether thank you notes were written. I think excel is the most versatile of all the Windows functions and I was saddened that the assignment was to create something that we wouldn't need.

A right triangle inscribed in a circle!

On a more positive note, this week I learned how to use Geometer's Sketchpad. This is one computer application that I will most definitely use when I get hired to teach. Even though I'm fairly well versed in the ins and outs of Geometry, I had a revelation, an epiphany, an Oprah A-HA! moment when I had a triangle inscribed in a circle so that the two of the vertices of the triangle were on the diameter of the circle and I moved the third vertex along the arc. By theorem, the angle of the vertex formed by the point on the arc is a 90° angle. Up until I wiggled that triangle around, I have to admit it was something I memorized, but was skeptical about. Using Geometer's Sketchpad it became a concrete knowledge for me. Imagine the possibilities of incorporating such software into my classroom! I think this would be far more useful than a storyboard. Even though they both are visual learning techniques. The difference is that a storyboard is geared towards stories, and Geometer's Sketchpad is geared towards math (and maybe science).

The Wacky Adventures of Johnny Derivitive and Olivia Integral

By far the most frustrating thing about taking education classes to become a math teacher is that my classes and assignments don't have an understanding of math itself. I spoke with the math department at my school and they informed me that there are no "math people" in the education department. Why should that be a problem? English and History and Library Sciences are all important and necessary fields. Believe me I get that. The problem comes along in the assignments and unfortunately the grading.

For example, in my Content Literacy class I had to come up with a reading guide with specific types of questions on it; i.e. questions the students could look up the answer, questions that required critical thinking, etc. Now I think content literacy is very important. I think it's important that students know how to read. I think it's important that students know how to write well. I think that students today need to understand that they will use reading and writing in everything they do. With one tiny little exception. There's no reading in math class. Yeah, sorry. To be honest, I didn't even use the text book for anything in class than to have the students do homework problems. Yes, I could have the students read from some fine books about math. Or I could assign reports on great mathematicians. The problem is that there is precious little extra time in the school year and the books and reports don't meet any of the math content standards. My Content Literacy professor understood the challenge I faced and when my reading guide looked more like a quiz, she didn't complain because she saw that I had the asked for types of questions.

(When I taught the 7th graders from December through February, I did make them write to express themselves. They hated it, but I still made them do it. Because content literacy is important and should be included in teaching all subjects. Even math.)

And now, in this Instructional Technology class, I've been asked to use specific software to create a story board. What stories are there in math? The story of Pythagoras? All about Benoit Mandelbrot and his fancy fractals? So, I did what the math department suggested and I made a concept map. A concept map is a diagram that shows relationships between concepts. I used the concept map to teach my 7th grade class how to classify quadrilaterals. Believe it or not, this is a hard concept for 7th graders to get. It's also really important for the students to understand how to classify the quadrilaterals before teaching them things like area and perimeter. SO I created this concept map to teach the algorithm for how they should think when faced with a quadrilateral. It was more than three levels, included a hyperlink to a dictionary of math definitions in case the students forgot what congruent or parallel meant, and it was geared toward the appropriate age group.

Unfortunately, I had points taken off because I only covered one concept. One really fairly BIG (and important) concept. And in most classes I didn't cover an entire concept. Math is like that. Books, BIG books, have been written on the single concept of pi. But perhaps I should have paid more attention to the example we were given before we started. It was a storyboard about the conflicts in the Harry Potter series. Silly me, that's far more complicated.

Extra Extra?

A little while ago, we had an assignment to write a newsletter for my Instructional Technology class. Because I'm a long term substitute, I've been teaching the same class of 7th graders for 6 weeks. We also are just coming to the end of a unit on area, perimeter, and circumference so I knew adding a table would be easy. I would create a little cheat sheet of sorts.

The problem is, who was I supposed to write the newsletter for? I aimed mine towards the parents to facilitate a discussion at home about how area is used in everyday life. I had just given the students a quiz and one of the bonus questions was to give an example of a practical application of area, or why they had to learn it. So I included a couple of the best answers from the students. I also introduced myself to the parents.

The problem that I had with this particular assignment was that I just couldn't shake the feeling that this would be better received in a larger city at maybe a public school. I think newsletters to the parents are an excellent way to keep the parents involved in their students learning, but at a private school in a small town, I am confident that the parents are already fairly involved. And I wasn't sure they wouldn't just scratch their head at what the new teacher was doing.

And as for introducing myself, I was torn. I am an outsider to my pleasant little town. I was born in Michigan, which one of the students thought was similar to his mom being born in Argentina. The small town culture eludes me on most days. But I do know that the great majority of my students know that my father in law is the local veterinarian. And some of them know that my husband's law firm is across the street from the post office. Introducing myself then seems sort of silly. Most parents already know who I am.

In the end, although I packed up the hard copy of the newsletter that I had printed up the night before and took it to school with me, I never did make copies for the students. I lost my nerve.

School Starts Again!

The new semester of school has started and I'm finding myself traveling back and forth to go to school, and also teaching a bunch of rambunctious and hillarious 7th graders. For my new semester of going to school I am seriously hoping I enjoy it as much as I did last semester. But we'll see. So far I've been late to one class and another was cancelled because of snow. go figure.

One of my new courses is an instructional technology course and one of the assignments is that I maintain several blog postings. At first I thought, AHA! this will be easy, I'll just post on Shazam in the Kitchen the mandatory three times and be done with it. But then I thought about things and decided that people who are oohing and ahhing over fancy bread with salami and cheese embedded in it aren't terribly interested in what I have to say the challenges of creating a desktop movie will be. Well, maybe one brussel sprout loving person or two, but for the most part, probably not other than an occasional amusing anecdote.

So I created a new blog. It will be linked to the other and more delicious blog, but this one will contain my reflections that are assigned for the course as well as what I find to be interesting tidbits about my experiences with teaching. And like my other blog, I will continue to maintain anonymity for my husband and my small town and probably those students that I might mention. SO hang on. This could be an interesting (and I meant that in a good way) ride.