Month: January 2016

Thinking out Loud…

A super brief post here – hoping to find some great advice from the world outside.

Two years ago our school launched a Discrete Math course. We realized that we had a number of students who were not being served well by our curriculum – a relatively standard one, really – that served to deliver most of our students to the doorstep of Calculus. I loved Calculus as a student and I have been happy to teach some form of it for most of my teaching career. However, we realize as a department that not all of our students need to see Calculus as the pinnacle of their high school math career. We also offer AP Statistics but we still saw a groups of students who were not being served properly. We have a vision of this Discrete Math elective being a lively, provocative course that exposes these students to more (and different) mathematical ways of thinking. We adopted the text For All Practical Purposes (9th Ed) and in the first year we had the course, the publisher released a new edition. I am teaching the course this year and I really like the students in the course and I feel that we are making some real progress in showing a different side of mathematical thinking, something other than algebraic reasoning and equation-based mathematics. However, I am not thrilled with the text. I am not sure that the level of the writing is suited well to my kiddos and I spent most of the fall term writing my own problem sets. Since the text is not available anymore I am faced with a choice of moving on the the 10th edition, finding a new text to serve as the center of the course, or going text-free and writing/borrowing unit notes and problem sets to support the students.

I know that there are people who visit my space here who have experience with math electives outside of the algebra to Calculus stream. I would love to hear some advice from them either in the comments here or through my twitter feed (I am @mrdardy over in the twitterverse) The ability / interest level of the students varies in this group. Some are taking the math course out of good conscience/concern about the college process. They know it is a ‘good idea’ to have a fourth math course. Some are taking it to fill out their schedule. Some end up in it after dropping back a bit from another math course that was more of a challenge than we/they expected it to be. This year we spend some time on elementary statistics/probability already. We spend a little time in the fall getting ready for a last swing at standardized tests. We are currently immersed in a unit on elections and voting strategies. We will visit some finance ideas and we will dip our toes into graph theory / network theory ideas. I am not married to any of these particular ideas, but many of them pop up in most discrete math text options out there. I kind of love Jacobs’ text Mathematics: A Human Endeavor but it seems not to be currently in print and I do not want to go down the path of a text I cannot reliably get my hands on.

So, dear readers, I would appreciate any wisdom you can share from experiences at your schools.

An Old Favorite

Screen Shot 2016-01-26 at 8.54.16 PM

The image above is found on the Nrich math site at http://nrich.maths.org/1053&part=note

 

I first encountered this problem in 2014 in Jenks at a TMC session run by Megan (@Veganmathbeagle)

In the past two days I presented this to three of my classes – my Geometry class and my two Discrete Math classes. Much to my delight the classes all solved the problem and they all solved it different ways. In one Discrete class the group locked in right away on the fact that squares are worth two more than triangles. One of my students made a quick decision to attack this by a guess and check method and he, luckily, guessed correctly on the first try. We had a pretty good conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of relying on lucky guesses. In my second Discrete class there was a bit of debating about what clues to focus on. While they were tossing some good ideas around one student told us that none of our ideas mattered. Well, he was nicer than that but he did manage to circumvent all of our clever ideas by simply asking if he could add all the sums indicated in the right column and compare that to the sums indicated in the bottom row. It too a little convincing for his classmates to believe him, but they came around to his way of thinking. Interestingly (at least to me) some of the students still wanted to know the individual values of the shapes. In my Geometry class the students also focused on the difference between a square and a triangle. Before we went much further in that conversation, a student pointed out that the first and third columns only differed by a square turning into a triangle. Since we knew that squares were worth two more than triangles (again, they found this using the third and fourth rows) we can know that the question mark should be replaced by ______ (no spoilers here!)

 

I loved listening to the ideas bubbling out and I especially liked that they moved forward quickly in all three classes with nothing more than the visual prompt above. It’s great to hear the interactions and it is instructive to hear what they are focusing on when engaging with a problem like this. Fun problem solving in these classes. Later this week I intend to write about our Calculus exploits and revisit my ideas / frustrations with homework in my Geometry class.

A Fantastic Day of Wrestling with Problems

imageA former colleague of mine, Lisa Winer (@Lisaqt314) tweeted a problem at me last night. Wednesday night I s my basketball night and then I curled up to watch some Netflix with my wife, so I did not see the problem until this morning. It has since been making the rounds a bit. It is called ‘The Hardest Easy Geometry Problem’ and you can find it at https://www.duckware.com/tech/worldshardesteasygeometryproblem.html

I started working on it on my side board today and it caught the attention of my BC students. One of them found a solution using trigonometry and I constructed the triangle in GeoGebra to confirm that he is correct. However, I still have not found a way to solve it geometrically. I reduced the problem to four equations with four unknowns but the matrix is singular and I could get no solution. I did, however, have fun playing with it and watching a number of my students dig in.

In Calculus BC today we talked ourselves into the area formula for regions bounded by polar curves and we had great conversations about it in both of my sections. In each class I had at least one student remember some area formulas for triangles that are rarely used and that help serve as the basis for the integral involved. I was pleased with each of those classes today.

In geometry we are working with quadrilaterals and a recent HW problem presented the students with a parallelogram and some algebraic expressions to deal with. Most of my students made an assumption regarding the intersection of diagonals for the parallelogram. They correctly assumed that they bisected each other. I was pleased that they made this assumption but I made sure that they felt comfortable with an argument supporting that fact and then a series of questions erupted that carried us through the end of the day. Do diagonals bisect each other for all quadrilaterals or just parallelograms. A couple of quick sketches at their desks implied that it was not always true. A quick visit to GeoGebra seemed to convince them. Then a student asked if a quadrilateral could have congruent diagonals if they do not bisect each other. A few more sketches and then the guesses started flying in. It did not take long to guess that an isosceles trapezoid would fit this bill. Again GeoGebra confirmed our guess. What next? How about the triangles for,Ed when the diagonals cross? Are they all congruent? Are they congruent pairs even? Quick feelings that the ‘side triangles’ are congruent but the top and bottom ones are not. Right again! But my favorite part came next. I did not plan on talking about area for a couple of days still, but the moment felt right. I asked if we could deduce an area formula for this trapezoid. Now, last year at this point I had a student suggest drawing one diagonal to find two triangles. Standard and clean. I also had a student suggest dropping two altitudes from the ends of the shorter base. Again, a nice standard solution. I had one student suggest rotating the trapezoid 180 degrees to create a parallelogram twice the size of the trapezoid. Not standard at all, but also kind of confusing for his classmates. This year, I had a student named James make a suggestion I had not head before. He asked me to draw segments from the end of the shorter (upper) base down to the midpoint of the lower base. This created three triangles all with the same height. I took a picture of the sketch we Made on the board. That is the photo on top of this post. I must say that I am completely delighted at this clean and clear way of looking at this area problem.

A pretty good day overall, I must say.

Beautiful Problem Solving and Odds and Ends

While most of my colleagues enjoyed a well-deserved day off in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. we were at work here in our boarding school. We take advantage of these days as visitation days and we keep on counting the days of the year.

Last week I wrote about my frustrations with trying to find a way to help keep my students more aware of the benefits of daily practice in Geometry. This weekend I engaged in a lengthy and mind opening twitter conversation with Elizabeth (@cheesemonkeySF) and my mind is still buzzing with ideas. I noticed something today that I may be able to take advantage of. Tomorrow we have our next Geometry test. This is the second year that my school is using the Geometry text that I wrote. This means that we are still working our way through the strengths/weaknesses of the text and we have a storehouse of documents to draw upon. I decided earlier in the year that I would hand out last year’s tests as practice a few days before this year’s test over similar material. So, last Friday I gave a copy of the test from last year that covers through Chapter Six of our text. Today in class I saw more evidence than usual of HW completion. So, when the HW feels particularly helpful then my students are more likely to complete it. Pretty logical, right? What I need to do then is to make sure that I can get buy-in like this more frequently. I have a batch of quizzes from last year that I can easily give out mid chapter as weekend HW that both serves as a sneak preview of the kind of quiz questions I was interested in asking last year AND serves as good, focused practice that feels to my students as if it has more payoff. This will not solve all of the problems I have been wrestling with and I need to sort out Elizabeth’s sage advice and figure out how to incorporate it in a way that fits me, but this feels like progress. I am happier about Geometry than I was last week and I am optimistic about tomorrow’s test. I hope that I will be able to report on student success.

Last week I also wrote about a problem posed to me by an alum when he was visiting. I may not have reported the problem accurately, so here is a second take. One hundred people are lined up to board an airplane with 100 seats. Each person has one seat assigned. The first person boards the plane and randomly chooses a seat. After that, each person who boards will sit in his/her assigned seat if it is available. If the correct seat is not available then that person will randomly choose a seat. What is the probability that the 100th person will be able to sit in the correctly assigned seat? I broke this problem down after one of our boarding community dinners last Thursday and a colleague and I simplified it to two people (50% chance, no surprise!) and then three people. With three people – call them A, B, and C – the seating arrangements are ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA. Two of these arrangements have C sitting in the third seat and for the purposes of this permutation, I am treating that as the ‘correct’ seat. However, the arrangements ACB and BCA are not possible under these rules. If person A does not sit in seat B, then person B is obliged to sit in his correct seat. So we have two of four possibilities for a 50% success. This seems pretty suspicious and I try to sort out the arrangements with four people. I won’t bore you with the detail but this is also 50%. When I mentioned this problem to a number of colleagues one of them mentioned that her son had talked about this problem from a math competition. Her son is in my AP Calculus BC course and he is an extraordinarily talented mathematician. He explained the problem this way in class today and I probably will not be as elegant as he was. Here is his take:

By the time that person two sits down on the plane we know that his seat has a person in it. Either it is person one and then person two chooses another seat or his seat was available and he sat in it. Similarly, by the time person three sits down we know that someone is in person three’s seat. Either person one or person two is accidentally in that seat or person three sits in her proper seat according to the rules of this problem. We can extend this argument all the way to person ninety-nine. Now, we know for a fact that all seats from person two’s seat through person ninety-nine’s seat are all occupied. The only mystery is whether the other occupied seat is the first person’s seat or the hundredth person’s seat. It is not a stretch to see that these two possibilities should be equally likely.

What I LOVE about this explanation is that it does not rely on combinatoric wizardry or thorny algebra manipulations. It also make crystal clear sense once it has been explained but it did not make crystal clear sense before that. It seemed completely unreasonable to me that, with so many people involved, the answer would be so clean. In fact, my student’s explanation made it clear that the number of people on board is a complete red herring. It might as well be one thousand people instead.

While I might have enjoyed the day off, I also enjoyed the day on.

Geometry Progress Report

I have a couple of posts that I want to make. It might be a busy weekend between writing midterm comments and airing my thoughts here. I promised to report back on my grand experiment with lagging HW. Now that we are three weeks into the term I think that I have some meaningful observations.

My first observation is that I need to find some meaningful way to regularly incorporate HW so that my students feel that it is a meaningful exercise. I think I am making strides by writing problem sets that reflect my book and our class conversations. I think that I have written problem sets that strike a decent balance between practice and challenge problems. I have been making class space for conversations about the current topics and trying to create some space for simple practice and check-in with some entrance slips. However, it is becoming pretty apparent to me that too many of my students are not in the habit of doing their HW on a daily basis. When we check in on HW at the beginning of class there are plenty of empty desktops and too much silence. It also seems clear to me that these are old habits and the reason I say that is that MANY of the problems they are struggling with now are related to writing line equations. Since we are juggling perpendicular bisectors of triangles, altitudes of triangles, medians of triangles, and angle bisectors it is kind of essential to be able to work with line equations. I know that these are skills that they have had and have displayed, but if the practice was not put in originally, those skills do not settle in and stick very well. I am reluctant to grade HW for a number of reasons. If all I am doing is checking for completion, then I feel I will be often rewarding sloppy and incorrect work and possibly helping some bad habits settle in. If I collect and grade it based on correctness I fear that I will be encouraging students to take some dishonest shortcuts. Instead, I am trying to use the entrance/exit slip idea to encourage attention during class with the hopes that that attention and the reminders of the skills necessary through the entrance/exit slips will (a) make the HW easier when it rolls around about three days after the class discussion and (b) allow me (and my students) to realize what they do or do not know.

My second observation is that this idea of HW lagging behind instruction will take some time for my students to get used to. They have been SO accustomed to trying their hand at something as soon as they begin to think about it and this new pace feels very different to them. I think that the old habits are working against them as they have expressed more confusion on some of the problem sets than I saw last year when I was using these HW assignments and assigning them the night that we introduced ideas in class. This, again. is something I need to address. I need to figure out how to help coach my kiddos to be able to deal with this process. I am too convinced that this is the right way to do this. Reading about it, thinking about it, I am sure that this is the right thing to do. My first time checking in on their progress right now (on this quiz on Tuesday) was a bit of a disaster. There were a number of scores hovering around 50% and for each of those students I returned the quiz with a practice assignment on writing line equations. I am trying to be positive and emphasizing that they know how to do this. I am convinced that this is true but I saw SO many mistakes on the quiz that it was a bit disheartening.

 

Conclusions? As I mentioned, I am convinced that this is a good way to weave in review, encourage reflection, and try to embed knowledge more deeply. I just need to figure out how to help coach my students so that they can realize the growth that I want to see for them.

A Day in the Life

Here we go -jumping on the MTBoS Blogging Initiative wave

 

5:30 AM Wake up to hear that Mrs. Dardy is already in the shower so I roll out of bed to grind and brew our morning coffee. I often make a point of going out for a walk or heading to the gym in the morning, but I am kind of dragging after having been out of town for a couple of days. Besides, it is awfully nice to have some peaceful time in the AM with the missus enjoying good coffee.

6:15 AM Start doing some last minute planning for the day. As I mentioned, I was away for a few days and as most of you know it is hard work to get ready to be out of school AND hard work to catch up when you return. Find a couple of good AP FR for Calc BC and I am ready to get going.

6:40 Wake up the kiddos. We usually head to our school’s dining hall a little after 7 for breakfast. On those days we wake the kids just a  few minutes earlier. Today we eat at home and give ourselves a little more time. The bus for my kids picks up in front of my classroom building. I live in a boys’ dorm at a boarding and day school. I am pretty spoiled by walking to work but I pay for it by being Mr. Dardy 24 hours a day on campus. There are some real perks like last week when we had a groups of students from China cooking in our kitchen all day preparing for our International Dinner or the way that I get to know about my students in a deeper way than I used to. I can talk to our boarders about much more than their HW (or lack thereof!) and test grades. So, anyways, we get the kids moving and get their breakfast planned while Mrs. Dardy makes us a lovely breakfast.

7:15 Start brushing Lil Dardy’s hair and getting everyone moving to get prepared for leaving the house on a chilly morning.

7:30 Walk over to the classroom building and stand in the cold air waiting for our crossing guard to call out the arrival of the bus. Some mornings it gets here as early as 7:40 and I get to my classroom with time to think before my 8 AM Calc BC class. Today, it is closer to 7:50 by the time it arrives. I head upstairs to start the day. I open up our computer lab, I fire up my old iMac with my music drive on it, turn on my AppleTV and connect my laptop to it to show off my AP FR questions and I turn on the heater.

Our school has a number of different schedules we run and today is what we call a T Day. Fifty minute class and the day ends at 2:55 PM. Let’s get started…

8:00 – 8:50 AM Bell One – AP Calculus BC

My morning class is a terrific group but they have been having trouble getting to school on time. It is a bit frustrating and today I start with three of my seven students there at 8 but we dive right in and by 8:10 they are all there. We have a great conversation looking together at a free response question on vector functions defined parametrically. We spend about 25 minutes untangling the problem together and conferring about technique. I then flip to another old FR and I sit quietly for about 10 – 12 minutes while they work. This group is really good at sharing ideas and picking each other’s brains. I like listening to them think.

8:55 – 9:45 AM Bell Two – FREE

I split my time between the faculty lounge chatting and running a couple of copies and sitting in my room reading and listening to music this morning. I catch up a bit on my email reading and I eat up some more articles online getting ready for my second prep of the day.

9:50 – 10:40 AM Bell Three – Discrete Math

Yesterday we spent most of our time talking about Powerball odds and financial strategies. Today I circle back to the group quiz they took on Tuesday during my absence. we compare notes and they feel pretty great about their decisions. I graded them later in the day and confirmed their good feelings. We spend some time talking about an unusual voting strategy called preference voting and we have a decent discussion about its benefits and pitfalls.

10:45 – 11:35 AM Bell Four – AP Calculus BC

During this second session of the class I always have to battle myself not to speed up too much. This group of nine students is pretty phenomenal and it is far too easy to just rush through the problems since I already talked about them and this group is quick on the pick up. I fight the urge pretty well this morning and we have a nice leisurely discussion. After working through one together I give them time to work on the second in their group and we get to look at the AP rubric together just in time before the bell rings.

11:40 AM – 12:10 PM Lunch Time

Normally I wait a few minutes, dash over to grab lunch and bring it back to the faculty lounge or to my room. Today a student who graduated two years ago came by to visit so I spent the first 15 minutes catching up with him. He took a summer Geometry course with me and year long courses in Precalculus Honors, AP Calculus BC, and AP Statistics s well. He is a terrific young man and he is engaged in an interesting project related to a Space X challenge. I excuse myself to grab a super quick lunch and another student stops me in the hall to ask for Calculus help. I run over and back in time to chat for about 5 minutes with the Calculus student who is trying to make up for lost time in school and lost time for HW since he was working on a more pressing assignment for another class. We do not accomplish too much in the brief amount of time we have to chat.

12:15 – 1:05 PM Bell 6 Discrete Math

A repeat of the earlier class and I let them out a few minutes early since I am subbing for a colleague next Bell and I need to get my room in some oder for my last class of the day.

1:10 – 2:00 PM Substitute for an English class

I have some time to finish up some Geometry grading while supervising an English class. They have a quiet reading assignment while I get some work done.

2:05 – 2:55 PM Bell 8 Geometry

I am going to write more about this class later tonight or tomorrow. We have been really struggling with basic Algebra in writing line equations. I am trying to keep some good humor about all of this but I am getting pretty frustrated. We start by projecting last night’s HW on the AppleTV but very few students have their work out while we are reviewing. I have to take that as a sign that many of them are not actually completing what I am asking them to complete. We do have a decent conversation about the problems which makes me think that they could do the work, many are just choosing not to. I need to figure out a meaningful way to motivate more HW completion without resorting to punitive measures. Need to think…

We then look at a problem set together that focuses on the midsgement theorem for triangles. I spend some time circulating and listening in while they do most of this work on their own. I return quizzes at the end of the class and another T day is now in the books. At least, the classroom portion of the day is…

3:00 – 3:30 PM Bell 9 Conference Time

Not much action in after school help today and my former student vista again. He poses a challenging problem for my consideration. One hundred passengers enter a plane and the first passenger sits in the wrong seat since s/he misplaced his boarding pass. I know this is not realistic in these days! Now, every other passenger sits in the right seat if it is open or random;y chooses a seat if someone is already sitting in his/her seat. What is the probability that the final passenger gets to sit in the proper assigned seat? I need to do some thinking on this one.

3:35 – 4:35 PM

Stand around outside chatting with passing students and waiting for my kiddos to come off the bus. We walk home and I make them nachos for an afternoon snack. Lil Dardy watches an episode of Lab Rats while her big brother plays his new PS4 game. I take a brief nap while Lil watches an episode of Chowder.

4:45 – 5:30 PM

Mrs. Dardy returns from work, my boy gets dressed for his basketball practice and I catch up with the missus for a few minutes before heading out to pick up another boy on the way to basketball.

5:30 – 6:00 PM

Jot down some HW notes for my Calc and Discrete kiddos. I post assignments to our LMS and send out group emails.

6:00 – 7:30 PM Family Style Dinner

Two nights each week we have a sit down dinner where boarding students sit at tables with faculty and their families. On Monday and Thursday we eat like this. Since my son has basketball, he is not with us tonight. Dinner is from 6:15 – 7 and my daughter plays with friends for awhile after dinner. Tonight she was excited to bring along her new doll. It is a bit of an America Girl knockoff. She was proud to show it to some of her friends and to some of the campus moms. She even let one of the students at our table hold her for awhile. While she was playing with friends after dinner I get to chat for awhile.

7:45 – 9:15 PM Grading

I FINALLY finish the grading that has been hanging around from my two days off and then I get started on my Day in the Life blog post.

Whew. Off to bed soon. Another blog post to come tomorrow…

 

 

 

 

Progress?

This post is a few days late due to, well, you know, life getting in the way. When I last checked in with you here I was preparing to put into action a plan to lag my homework with Geometry and have a series of HW assignments incorporating more review of past skills. My kiddos took their first quiz of 2016 yesterday and I plan on grading them tonight so I will have some data to back up (or refute) my reflections at that point.

What I have noticed so far:

  • Review assignments – at least the ones I have written – make my students pretty frustrated. I certainly do not want frustration to be the go to emotion for my students when I ask them to work, but I am willing to have that as a  stepping stone if I can help usher my students into a place where they are more comfortable with problem sets that do not depend on a small set of skills and ideas. I realize that I am combating years of habits and expectations.
  • We have more time to practice some of the new(ish) skills that I am hoping that they develop. We spent days in a row visiting some linear equation writing skills and some  ideas about linear combinations.
  • When we did  finally get to HW concentrating more on single sections of the text I was not receiving quite as many questions as I had been expecting. This I am taking as a positive sign. I will be more convinced that it is a positive sign if I see some stability on their quiz. We spoke briefly about the quiz today and I suspect that I will see some hesitant work. If the mistakes are more algebraic in nature I will feel better about the development of their Geometry skills and ideas.
  • We took a day in our lab to play with GeoGebra and I realize that I have to do something more consistent next year to encourage/require my students to engage with GeoGebra more frequently. What should have been a productive activity drawing some connections about the ‘centers’ of a triangle that we are examining, too many of my students were either distracted playing with zooming in and out on various images or they were flummoxed by some of the commands that we ‘learned’ in the fall. One of my new colleagues and I are brainstorming ways to make check-ins with GeoGebra a regular and meaningful part of our life in Geometry.

 

Part of the way that I am organizing out of school work right now is by asking my students to read based on class discussions while they do not practice those specific skills for a few days. I am not at all convinced that they are reading as I request, but I also do not think that they were doing to reading under our old structure either, so that is a wash. I will write again tomorrow after I grade the quizzes and I will check in to see if the data backs up my observations in any meaningful way.

 

MTBoS New Year’s Resolution

Every year we all experience this, right? We have big goals for the new year, we make promises and many of them fall by the wayside. I am going to be modest about my new year’s aspirations (at least in public!) and I am making a vow to myself to try something new for my Geometry kiddos this new calendar year. Awhile ago I got into a terrific twitter exchange with Henri Picciotto (@hpicciotto) and some other folks ( I wish I could remember everyone involved, I am pretty sure that Julie Reulbach (@jreuhlbach) was part of this) about HW. I mentioned that I will sometimes include problems in HW that touch on ideas we have not talked about yet in class. This brought up a conversation about leading vs lagging homework ideas and Henri is particularly articulate about these ideas over at his blog space (http://www.mathedpage.org) We tweeted about the idea of letting ideas percolate either before instruction or after instruction. I spoke about my feeling that it is important to have students struggle with an idea a bit to (maybe) help them appreciate a new idea/definition/formula when it does arrive. This, I think, is sort of like Dan Meyer’s series of if ______ is the headache, then ______ is the aspirin essays. One of the results of this terrific, spontaneous twitter chat was that I walked away with a commitment to instituting lagging HW assignments in my class. I wrote out a careful pacing calendar with the optimistic idea that I have a solid sense of how long these conversations will take and a hope that mother nature will not interfere by dumping snow on us at some point. Obviously, this calendar is not set in stone. What IS set in stone is my commitment to the pacing of the HW assignments. What I did was write out a pacing calendar that delays by three or more days any HW that directly relies on reading/instruction of a new section of my Geometry text. I do still feel a bit of a commitment to daily practice out of class – I know, this is another conversation completely – so I wrote a series of review HW assignments that reach back to old ideas/skills but I tried to do so in a way that is thoughtful and leads to preparedness for the new ideas we are discussing. I also wrote a series of entrance slips that I will start class with the day after we first discuss a section together. These will be collected and marked, but not graded. I am hoping that these will provide both me and my students a way of monitoring their developing understanding of new ideas. After three or more days they will final have a HW focused on a certain section of our text. Meanwhile, in class we will still be following a pace similar to what we followed last year in our first run through my Geometry text so I have some sense that this is a reasonable pace for our students. However, instead of going home and immediately practicing some new set of skills, they will be looking back either weeks (at the beginning of the chapter) or days (after a few days in) to ideas that have, hopefully, been percolating a bit in their brains. They will have had time to think about these ideas, they will have had an entrance slip check in on their facility with the ideas at hand, and they will have had further class time combinations of lecture and discussion to play with these ideas and build them up together. A few days afterward they will go home with focused practice and their assessments will also be lagging a bit to line up with the HW practice. I anticipate that there will be some concern expressed by my Geometry team and by my students because, you know, change is a bit of a challenge. This is especially true once you have established a rhythm and pace that you are comfortable with together. One of my three colleagues has expressed a desire to try this as well but the other two have not commented yet and I have no expectations that anyone else needs to follow me on this path. As department chair I kind of want to test the waters on this so that I can report back on the inevitable speed bumps as well as the successes that we encounter. If this works the way I think that it will, it will radically alter how I think about pacing and how my students think about HW. My biggest wish for this endeavor is that this practice will enhance retention and help my students think more about connections in the ideas we work with in class. I feel more confident about taking this leap in our Geometry course first for a couple of reasons. I feel more intimately familiar with the contours of this course since we are using a text that I wrote a couple of summers ago. I also feel that the Geometry course lies a bit outside of the vertical tower that much of our math curriculum builds. If we slow down a bit and there are not topics near the end of the course that we reach, it feels that there are fewer consequences in terms of what future courses and teachers will expect of these students. Also, these students are younger than those in my other two courses (a Discrete Math elective and AP Calculus BC) and I am optimistic that these younger students might be more flexible with the idea of changing their habits.

If you have not seen my Geometry book yet and want to take a look, you can download it from my Dropbox at this link. If you want to look at my Chapter Six pacing calendar, entrance slips, and HW assignments, you can find them all in this Dropbox folder

I am hoping that January will be a productive month for this blog space as I reflect and report on how this experiment unfolds.