So my team (all freshman English – Math – Biology teachers are teamed at my school) are in the middle of doing a large Interdisciplinary Unit in our classes. The driving force of this is the biology teacher who has done a biome project over the last three years in her biology class.

As a new person on the team, I was asked if I would want to do a unit as a part of this several months ago, and I said yes. We turned the unit into business plan / theme park/ zoo project. The Biome project was not modified, but we added the fact that the learners had to construct a business plan for the math part, do graphs in excel and be able to interpret the numbers in the P&L statement to answer some questions.

The English component is a sales brochure and a presentation to “sell” the theme park and zoo.

We had 150 learners actively working for several days in class (all three combined). We had 150 learners asking, freshman learners, asking for help, asking for tips on how to tweak the searches, and asking to learn!

What does success look like in the classroom? It definitely looked like this. It looked like learners engaged and trying to figure out excel without step by step instructions, (I gave general guidance earlier). This was a very successful project where the learners were trying to learn and reason mathematically.

That looks like success.

Ok, so the lesson on reading graphs in the book was boring, I knew it and more importantly the learners knew it. So, to liven it up, I brought in my spreadsheet that I keep track of my utilities every month for my house.

In it, I have my gas therms, my KWH (Kilo Watt Hours) and water by 100’s of gallons, and then dollars per day. Four graphs, a combination of bar graph and histogram, with real data for the last 9 years of living in my house and graphs for the last seven years.

Here is one of the four graphs. I told the learners upfront that this was the data for my house, and I explained how I did it. The first asked things like, “how much time does it take to do this?” Answer is 1 minute a month, and about 5 minutes every year to start the data and set the colors for the new year.

Then we started talking about the usage graphs. What months do I use more water (summer), what months do I use more electricity (summer) what months do I use more gas (winter). Then, what months do I spend more? that graph is above. Obviously, winter. From this they determined that gas is much more expensive that water or electricity.

Was it successful? I think so. The learners definitely were into talking and asking questions about the graphs. The February water graph has a broken pipe, so there are interesting things to talk about. Would I do it again? Absolutely.

More graphs below the fold (lets see if this works!) I did lose some formatting in changing from excel to openoffice.

Read the rest of this entry »

I had a very Ah HA! moment today. I was doing a lesson on graphs, and had the annual reports from GE and Citibank as examples of why graphs matter. As I was passing them around and discussing the different graphs present, a group of Hispanic learners were looking at the pictures of the Board of Directors and of the people in charge of GE. One of the learners said, “none of these people look like me.”

(taken from GE’s website)

You know, he was exactly correct. 3 women, 1 African American male, and one of the women is African American. No Hispanics at all.

Is that really a problem? I mean, just because they don’t have any Hispanics on the board is that a problem with GE? I don’t think so. But it does mean that we need to have some educated and smart young people who can put themselves on board of directors and run companies. Given the statistics of the population, many of those smart young people will be Hispanic.

I quit working in the private sector because I care about making sure that these kids aren’t counted out before they even get started. The best way to do that was to get involved and make it happen myself.

Is there really a better reason to start teaching?

Well, here I go into the wide world of blogging.  First, a little about me.  I am a new teacher, just finishing my last three weeks of my official first year of teaching.  That’s right.  My experience in teaching is 1 year of grad school doing coursework, 1 year of internship (simultaneous with grad school – that was a rough year) and 1 year of actually being fully employed as a teacher.

And, after my first year, I have to say I am pretty not happy with how I taught that first year.  Oh sure, I tried some different things, and I had some pretty happy kids who did some pretty amazing things and learned some math pretty darn well.

But …. was I successful? ….

How does one define success in teaching?  When I was a manager in business, success is pretty obvious; did sales go up? did expenses go down? did profits go up? good job!

But teaching … how do I define success?  I know how I don’t define it.  I don’t define success as having to tell learners to constantly sit up and not sleep.  That is not success.  I don’t define success as having a homework turn in rate of around 20 to 30%.  That is not success.

So I started doing some research outside of the M.Ed. that I am working on.  I started reading blogs. Lots of blogs. I read Dan Meyers blog http:blog.mrmeyer.com and I realized that there is about 10 million things I can do differently in year two.

So, why am I setting up a blog?  So that I can use it as a tool for feedback and reflection on how I am teaching. I WILL use video and sound to teach math.  I will be using some of Dan’s ideas and methods.  I will come up with some of my own.  But I will improve.

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