Well, I have gotten into the school year, and I am getting comfortable in the routines. It was more difficult this year with three preps, so I have spent some time getting more prepared and have had to focus constantly on how I am planning.
Some things I have done to make sure I am successful.
1. I have been using PocketMod to keep myself organized. I have the current week, the next week, a yearly calendar, and then to do lists for Algebra 3-4, AP Stats, Gateway Math, and UNR Class, with one blank page for general stuff.
2. I have flirted with the idea of installing PlansUnfolding.It is a turbocharged version of PocketMod. Both are free but PocketMod is web based and requires no installation of Latex like PlansUnfolding does. However, Latex could be very helpful to learn.
3. One thing that killed me this year was that I did every lesson free hand on my SmartPanel last year. It worked, it was cool, and it left me absolutely nothing to reuse for this year. I am essentially starting over from scratch! Bad Glenn. Bad Bad Glenn.
4. So, in response I have chosen my Algebra 3-4 class (everyone else’s Alg 2) and am doing every lesson on OpenOffice Impress. I would rather be chained to opensource than Microsoft, although I have started playing with Presentations ver. 2007, and it is nice. I don’t know if my current laptop can handle the software though.
5. Finally, I am recording my lectures for Alg 2 (about 15 minutes per day) and posting the MP3 version of it on Edline for my learners to download. They actually have been downloading the podcasts. I am using an 80 Gig iPod video with the iTalk. I purchased the iTalk on ebay for $12, including shipping.
Finally, I have gone over the deep-end on use of technology in the class room. I will do a separate post on that.
Okay, disaster almost struck yesterday. I had an open (refillable) bottle of water on my desk at school yesterday when the phone rang. I run across the room to get it (school doesn’t start until Tuesday for us, so no learners in the room) and I bump my desk.
Can you see where this is going? Laptop open on desk, turned on, water on desk, …. yup. Water in laptop. Fbomb dropped. Thank goodness no kids in the room.
And guess what, the last time I backed up was in June. I have done so much work over the summer on my laptop, and I almost lost all of it. And I HAVE a good backup strategy. I use SyncBack every week to backup my laptop to an external hard drive.
At school, I use it daily to backup my networked H drive, my desktop folder where I save all docs to, and my active flash drive to a 2 gig flash drive. This software has options to do all of this automatically, with no input from me what so ever. At 3:15, every day, all of my files at school are automatically backed up.
My laptop, however is manual.
Guess where my system failed? I was not at school every week, so I stopped the manual backup of my laptop on the weekend. That is one of the big dark secrets of being a plugged in teacher. If WE don’t actively back up our files, we can lose everything in the blink of an eye.
I recommend Syncback. It is easy, fast, and fairly idiot proof. But, you have to use it.
For one of my classes (two sections) I was given an 89 Gig Ipod Video. This class is (badly) called the Gateway class, and it is a quarter of Post Alg 2 mathematics in Finance, a quarter of Mathematics in Art, a quarter of Mathematics in Technology / Computers, and a quarter of Mathematics in Medicine/ the Human body.
It is a very different kind of math class, where only seniors can take it. It will be mathematically rigorous, but 100% focused on the mathematics in each of these areas.
So, back to the ipod. Part of the issue with this is I need, I mean really NEED to use it. After all, my district just paid $400 for me and five other teachers to each have these ipods. If we don’t use them in class, we are in some deep doo doo trouble.
So I have made a goal for myself of finding, in advance, two to three videos that are relevant to the course each day. I have watched a lot of YouTube crap, let me tell you. Of course there is also DNATube, TeacherTube, Teachers.tv, and Vimeo where you can find some good stuff. There is also TED.
I have been using these sites to find good video. Today I watched this one, and it blew me away. Who know fractals and Africa had such a rich history, and that that exact history influenced Western culture to such a high degree. I did not.
If the player doesn’t work (I had it work and not work) here is the link: Ted Talk – Ron Eglash
I finished reading “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman about two months ago. Wow. It really makes you think about our place in the educational system. I have a whole bunch of quotes noted on the back cover that I can use later.
The most striking quote I picked up on in the book was on page 11. It was one sentence.
Where do I as an individual fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally?
The rest of the book can be thought of as justifying that one small challenge. Why should an individual care about the global marketplace. I mean, really. The book talks forever about Walmart, and business? Should a teacher even care what happens to Walmart and GM and other business?
My answer is an emphatic YES. We have to care. Those trends will shape the learners we have today and the learners we will have. Those trends are going to shape the future of all of us. After all, the future is what I care about. It is where I am going to spend the rest of my life. (paraphrasing Charles F. Ketterling)
I have mulled over the quote by Friedman almost daily over the last two months. I had already set up my blog before I read TWiF, but I had not posted to it. I really didn’t know why I wanted to set up a blog and post things to the interwebs. Friedman gave me a reason to follow through and post the things I am doing.
H tried this with Intermediate Algebra (my district’s Alg 3-4) and found it to be lacking. That makes sense to me, because Alg 3-4 is more complex. At least Alg 4 is. The first semester of Alg 3 is really just a review of Alg 1-2.
Well, not to be discouraged with what H found out, I am going to try it as well in my Alg 3-4 classes as well. I think, however, that H is right on the money when she says that Alg 3-4 covers HUGE amounts of math more than Alg 1-2 does. This means that the objectives either need to be very vague and all encompassing (kind of like the standards are) or I need to have 40 or 50 skills to assess.
Obviously there is a problem here. I have worked over my district’s blueprint once, and then went back and read what H had to say on the matter as well as Dan Greene and looked at the amazing video project that Sam did with his class. My bottom line is that I think it is possible, but not easy to do.
I have a rough draft of my skills checklist done right now. I am not sure I am going to post it yet. I am not happy with it. I think I am stuck in the “do I have to assess everything?” mode.
More on this later after I yank myself out of that mode into a more productive setting.
I was kind of quiet over the last two weeks. I drastically underestimated how much time was required for the last two weeks of school. Who knew creating review packets, grading huge projects, and getting all of the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed would take up so much freaking time!
Not me.
My first official year of teaching is over. Wow. It was a terrific year. I have a great department, a great school, and I think I fit in very well with my peers. What more could a person ask for, right? I mean really. The complaints I read about from other teachers center around “that so and so is such a jerk” or “I hate my school they don’t support me in X”.
Me, I love my school. My school is fighting to do new things and constantly improve. My district is constantly trying to figure out ways to take what my school does and move it to other schools. My school was just nominated as a Model School for my State! What more could a new teacher (at the ripe old age of 38) want?
That is not to say that my first year was all roses. It was tough learning classroom management with freshmen. I think I sucked in several different ways, and I had way too many F’s. I made it so difficult to fail, but so many learners still just gave up and refused to do anything.
What more can be done? Well, we (my department) are going to re-write our Alg 1 curriculum to radically change it to a more flexible and more focused on the assessment and teaching alignment.
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.
