Grand Theft Lesson Planning

Just finishing the first week back at school and I had to reflect on the changes I made from my previous first weeks. Both as a reminder to me next year, and a way to acknowledge that fact that much of what I do in the classroom can be improved. Here are a few of the things and who I stole them from.

#1) I stole this lesson from dy/dan. He worked it in a little bit different then I did. Infact I paid credit to him in the lesson. Mostly with this photo. I told students this guy I met in Duluth (met meaning heard speak) held the record for most amount of paper clips clipped together in a 24 hour span. I presented the certificate and waited for the questions to poor in.

After battling the "why" questions, which are easilied answered with "I don't know." I challenge them to ask questions we could answer together. Questions about cost came in, about rate/speed, wither we could beat the record. Lot of different ideas, the one I wanted to run with for this lesson was the rate.

Why convert units? Many different reasons but one of the uses on this day was to make the huge (24 hours) into small (a class period). I started putting paper clips together and asked if I would beat the record, students scream YES or NO but it was all feel, it was a judgement call and I wanted to know forsure. We needed to compare rates but our units were not matching. So we converted paperclips per 24 hours to paperclips per 10 seconds. It was a worthwhile introduction to a fairly basic yet sometimes confusing topic.

Wisdom gained: Last year I did a unit conversion for them, then let them work on a few, then gave them a 'challenge' problem. Last year sucked and was boring and students were doing a task that was arbitrary and ugly. They didn't know why they were doing it. Poor lesson.

#2) In the advice of @mpershan I had all my students email me with in the first 3 days. I loved having the connection with the students right away. I made it a point to email everyone back which worked much quicker then it sounds, and I was able to get some good insight from students. I might change the questions I asked next year, maybe add another layer but for now I have everyone's contact and we have something to talk about.

1. Do you have consistent internet access at home? On your phone? Have you followed me on twitter yet?
2. What is one thing you look forward to this school year? What one thing are you going to different from last year?
3. What one thing can I do to make this a successful math course for you this year?

#3) I dusted off a clip I have been using ever since I became a teacher. This is a video from the 1994 classic Little Big League. Billy the new manager of the MN Twins needs to finish up a tough word problem before the big game. He enlists the help of the whole team to crack the classic question "If I can paint a house in 3 hours and you can paint a house in 5 hours how long does it take us to paint the house together?"

If anything an entertaining watch. I pause it after the introduction of the problem, after 'Mac' says "You never told me this was a word problem." I have students write down a number they think is close to how long it will take. I pace the room, have them circle it, verify it with a partner and then we go through the answers the players give and debate wither or not they have used sound reasoning. This is fun cause we separate math and reasoning. I always ask "Does anyone disagree that 3X5 is 15??" "no" "Does anyone think that reasoning is correct..." and so on.

What I particularly like about this part is when one player says 4 hours (an average of 5 and 3). I always have a bunch of students guess 4 here. (reasoning skills) But what is nice about the video is that I ask students why the player is wrong, I am not looking to embarasses the kid with a giant 4 on their paper.

I pause it again before the answer is revealed and let students try to get it down to the minute. With a little guidance most can start to combine the rates and figure it out. (I use a filling the pool metaphor, two hoses one at 27 gal/min the other at 20 gal/min how fast is the pool filling? They seem to understand that we can add those rates, painting a house is harder to visualize.)


Overall a great week, here is to hoping the next is even better.

What is Teacher Fashion?

It is back to school time and I tend to only buy clothes for myself once a year so I made my annual run to Kohls (plug) and the Albertville Outlet mall for some fresh wears. I came out with these, and hey its an Outlet so they were only moderately over priced, but Nikes are Nikes, worth it.

When I was out and about walking into stores seeing high school aged kids ready to spend their parents money I began to think about what a teacher should look like. On that sunny afternoon I looked like an average guy, my jeans were worn but not tattered and my shirt untucked but collared. I started teaching at 22 years old and I do believe that in order to not blend in with the students only 4 years younger then you yes you need to raise the bar, maybe throw on some dress pants. But now I am 27, I don't blend in (thanks grey hair genetics) and I have finally found a solution to the age old "what does a teacher look like" He looks like me. See back in my younger days (young people can have younger days) I used to have 'school clothes' and then 'weekend clothes'. It was a crazy separation but I liked it, I liked pulling my jeans on knowing I didn't have to be a teacher today. (Friday night to Monday morning I was a teacher only if the girl I was chasing at the bar seemed like a philanthropist.) One could go as far to say I put on a uniform, its wasn't natural for me, never fit right, had pen stains on it and mostly outdated. This year, day one will be those fresh kicks above and a pair of slightly worn 514 Levi jeans.

So what has changed? How did I go from the uniform wearing tuck-it-in general I was four years ago to the laid back, this is me take it or leave it teacher today? Did I get lazy? (a bit) Am I fighting the man? (no) Will this cut 4 minutes off my morning prep time? (4 minutes is my morning prep time) So what changed?

The blog-o-sphere. It has infected my life. I still don't know if I'll ever match some of the passion I read from some of the top blog names, but it has taken me from a MON-FRI teacher to an all the time teacher. For better or worse I can no longer take off the uniform Friday night and say "See ya Monday teaching." Once you get hooked into the possibility that everything/every moment is one step away from a dynamic lesson, you can't afford to turn teaching off.

So thanks bloggers, I think.

DISCLAIMER 1: We in the greater 279 district have sat through meeting after meeting of AYP crap that has sucked any energy out of coming back to school. I had but one choice to blog fashion.

DISCLAIMER 2: There are some articles of clothing not appropriate for school (ie co-worker wore this shirt to workshop).

Math teachers ask too many questions.

I was at an entertaining presentation last spring in Duluth, MN during the MCTM conference. Dan Meyer spoke of math blogs, twitter feeds, electronic resources and finally perplexity. Since then I am continually impressed by the math teacher community that has formed online.

This blog is a result.


MCTM was fantastic, but the great mysteries of the internet were not the only things I took away from Mr. Meyer's keynote presentation in Duluth. He described an atmosphere of questioning, one that I found lacking in my classroom. I finally realized that in my class I ask too many questions.

My whole teaching career has been about getting to the right questions which is exactly what I should be doing...but it isn't me that should be doing the asking, it should be the students. In my experience teaching was about questioning the students, "never give an answer" was the old adage. I never stopped asking questions and so I took the perplexity out of math and let students only experience the work/outcomes. When all along what I truly love about math and teaching is coming up with the questions. If I like it, maybe students will too.

So I tried it. I wanted to stop asking the questions. I am teaching a summer math course to students who want to leapfrog ALG II and I presented this story. Abbreviated version:

Farmer saves kings life. King says farmer can have anything in kingdom. Farmer wants one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, then 2 grains on the second square, 4 grains on the third etc...

Now I have taught exponential growth multiple times using different stories like this, sometimes its money other times its grains of sand. What was different about this time is that I didn't ask any questions at the end. I just had the story up on the screen and waited. After a few minutes I wrote the heading "questions" on the white board and asked if anybody had any.

Students stared at my blankly and thought to themselves, that's a fun story, can we please move on... (side note this is a group of accelerated students, who are great, but have also taken 3 hours everyday out of their summer to do math, by mid July they (and me) are ready to cut any and all BS and get out of class as soon as possible).

I dragged some questions out of them and it went relatively well, I had a few things in my back pocket and we had some conversations that I would have never thought come up. We used skills (algebra II skills) that I did not think would apply (unit conversion, volume formulas) we even fired up excel to do a quick sum. I realized this this type of teaching is hard. You have to be a true mathematician at the board but also an emcee to document and narrate events as well as a facilitator to keep conversation flowing but not over flowing.

No doubt that this transformation is going to be hard but also necessary. If I am just coming to grips with the idea that I ask to many questions then I have a feeling students are coming to me from a long line of questioning teachers who thought they were provoking thought when they really were feeding unquestioning brains.

So today I embark the journey to change my classroom. To stop asking all the questions. To allow (at times) students to drive the lesson/conversation.

Challenges ahead, better thinkers to follow.