Busy busy start to the year. I want to take a moment to reflect on and remember a couple of important highlights.
Opening Day
We meet all classes for 30 minutes on day one and we have an hour long convocation ceremony. Our Student Body President is always one of the speakers. This year’s President was in my Precalculus Honors course last year. She delivered a touching speech about productive struggle in my course last year – a course she ended up excelling in, by the way. I have heard a number of speeches by adults advising the importance and lasting power of productive struggle. I imagine that this speech by one of their colleagues probably meant more to our students than hearing some grown up tell them about the glories of allowing yourself to struggle through something. The fact that she highlighted the very things I hope my students take away from my class made it pretty special. The fact that the whole upper school community (and my immediate supervisors!) heard it as well made for a pretty special opening day.
Regular Old Day One
My day started with my AP Calc BC team. I had assigned a HW problem I had never done before. They were asked to graph x + |x| = y + |y|
The table group that had this problem struggled a bit and we talked it through as a group. We then called on Desmos to graph it and the result was not what we thought it should be. I did what I do, I tweeted out the problem and within fifteen minutes one of my former advisees tweeted out a fix so that Desmos would agree with us. It is delightful to have that connection with a student who my current students still remember. It was also fun to think that my questions are still interesting enough to warrant his attention.
There will be some rough days this year, there always are. I want to remember days like this so it is easier to get through the tough ones!