Today was a pretty blah day until my last period class. My first three classes all had assessments so I had no fun conversations and I watched work pile up. As I came in to my last class of the day – my Geometry class – one of my Geometry teammates was waiting in my room to share that his students had been making some great strides in GeoGebra. He told me that a number of his students were really beginning to dig into what GeoGebra could do for them, especially now that we are talking about transformations. I used Geogebra extensively when writing my text and I borrowed from resources around the web for activities. One of them was an activity called A-Maze-Ing Vectors which had been created by the amazing Jennifer Silverman (@jensilvermath) and we used that activity the past two years. My teammate who had been waiting to share his good news had asked me this past summer about modifying this activity. We had had trouble completing the activity in one day and it did not take up enough for two solid days. He also had an idea about combining vector transformations on objects more complex than points. He created a pretty wonderful adaptation of the activity (you can find it here) and my students worked through it yesterday. I opened class today by projecting the last page on my AppleTV where we had to navigate a triangle through a maze and I invited a student to come up and draw on the TV (with a dry erase marker, don’t worry!) and I cannot tell you how great the conversation was in class. I sat down – a commitment of mine based on my #TalkLessAM session at TMC16 – and just watched the fireworks unfold. Kids were challenging each other, going up to the TV to draw their ideas, debating distances, talking about slope, worrying about vertices colliding with walls and discussing the option of rotating the triangle as it moved. I was SO thrilled with the engagement and the level of conversation. I credit this to a number of factors. The original activity was terrific and my colleague’s rewriting of it is creative and concise. Kids like drawing on a TV – it feels naughty or something. I sat down and got out of the way. Kids had worked this through the day before in their table groups and were invested in both supporting their teammates and making sure that their memory and their perspective was clearly heard. They were supportive of each other and slightly defensive if someone else had a different approach. After a pretty uneventful day at the end of the week it would have been easy to just limp tot he end of the day, but these kids brought each other to the finish line for the week sprinting. I am optimistic that we can pick up with a similar level of energy on Monday.
