Late Night Reflections

The NCSSM conference ended around 1 today and my flight back home got cancelled due to snow. Luckily, a former student of mine lives nearby and he graciously has offered his place for me to sleep. We also had a great night out catching up.

 

I’ve been thinking more about @JustinAion’s quote from a couple of blog posts ago. He said that he only feels like he is teaching when he is answering student questions or going over examples. After the sessions here at NCSSM I am even more committed to fighting that urge – the one that Justin put his finger on. I want to be more invisible, give my students more room. Ask more than tell. I want to analyze their thinking more than their answers. I want to think deeply about their questions and misunderstandings. I hope to get better at this and I’ll report back as I try some new ideas out about how to do this. 

 

A quick aside based on a  conversation before one of the sessions. A teacher behind me was talking about his daughter Maya who had recently learned to spell her name reliably. He mentioned that she had also recently learned that her middle name was Sage and she decided that she’d rather be called Sage. She was still spelling her name the same way but she was announcing that she had written Sage now, instead of Maya. I have to imagine that the set of alphabet symbols that we would read as Maya simply read to her as her name. If her name is now Sage, then those symbols mean Sage. I was reminded of my own 4 year old who we call Mo. Over the past five months Mo’s ‘signature’ has evolved from OW to WO to OM to MO. However, whenever she sees something with her name on it she simply says it is hers. She seems to see no difference between them. I wonder how similar this is to some of our students writing down things like (x + y)^2 = x^2 + y^2 and not having any recognition that it does not match anything we’ve written.

Conversation Follow Up

A brief one tonight as I am solo dad while mrsdardy is off at a work event.

 

My AP Calculus BC class has a test tomorrow. Their last HW assignment – some review problems I put together was assigned for Monday night with the idea that it would help guide their studying and that today would be a day in class to discuss any concerns. Well, the class where I had the sprinting is similar to cramming conversation did not seem to take my hint at all. It was clear that plenty of cramming is planned for tonight. even asked the one girl directly about our conversation and she just sort of shrugged and said she’d be ‘sprinting’ tonight. I know that these sorts of habit are hard to change. I mean HARD to change.

 

So, tomorrow morning I teach a couple of classes then head to the airport. I am off to NCSSM for their Teaching Contemporary Mathematics conference. I went there about eight years ago and was wowed by Dan Teague, Floyd Bullard, and the whole atmosphere of the place. This time I am going to make a point of meeting Daren Starnes – the author of the Stats text I use. He’s also the Dept Chair at Lawrenceville and he’s been so helpful in setting up a professional visit for two of my colleagues to go there. They got snowed out Tuesday and have already rescheduled. It’s rewarding to start feeling connections outside of my building and it’ll be nice to  meet him this weekend.

 

Oh yeah, while I’m out on Friday my Calc BC kids will work on Problem Set 3

 

Two conversations and a Blog Quote

Okay – so I’m thinking out loud here. Hoping some wisdom comes from this exercise and/or from brilliant comments by my dear readers.

 

Conversation #1

Working with my outgoing Calc BC group and I comment to one of my students that it’s a tough day for him. He’s on our swim team and they had a 6 AM practice Tuesday morning and a meet that afternoon. One of the other students – a member of our field hockey team – says that her team never ran sprints the day before a big meet. Now, it’s important to understand that our field hockey team has won’t he state championship three of the past four years. This student was a member her whole high school career. I take this opportunity and I ask her if she thinks that this strategy (don’t stress out your body the day before an important match) might be carried over to another realm. I am greeted by a quizzical look and I say ‘Maybe you should not cram the night before a big test.’ Another quizzical look. She asks if I am advocating not studying. I say that the daily diligence of regular work and studying is comparable to daily hard practice in field hockey. Then, relax a bit before an important match (or test) and maybe this is a formula for success. I don’t think that many of my students saw that as a winning strategy.

 

Conversation #2

I just observed a lovely Precalculus class taught by one of my colleagues. The class was working on a variety of word problems – coins, movie tickets, area/perimeter, etc. My colleague is a remarkably calm, zen-like fellow. He sat in a student chair the whole time (sort of invisible!) and asked one student at a time to come to the board. The rest of the class was attentive, offering help to their colleague and generally being cooperative and positive. The teacher kept asking nudging questions of the student at the board. “What do we want to find here?” “How can we relate the number of coins and the value of the coins?” etc. Being an observer in the class (and not stressing out about HOW to do the problems) I saw that my colleague was modeling for his students a lovely strategy for tackling these problems. If each student could play that conversation back in their head as they struggled with any problem, then they would see much more progress. They might still make mistakes, but they’d have a sound strategy for success. What troubled me – and I spoke with the teacher about it the next morning – is the fact that I KNOW that some of them will not ask themselves those questions. They won’t take his advice for attacking these problems to heart. I am not saying that all of our students need to mimc our behavior. What I am saying is that students who struggle, ought to feel that it is a lifeline that is being offered here. When I asked him about this the next morning, I told him that I was impressed by his careful teaching and modeling. His response was something along the lines of ‘I am a big believer in teaching. I just think it works better when learning happens.’ I really don’t think he was being mean or cynical. 

 

Quote

This morning, I awoke to another terrific blog post by @JustinAion over at his blog Relearning to Teach. If you are not familiar with his work, you should change that and visit him. Pay attention to his tweets as well. Life will be better. He closed out his post today with a powerful quote – “Even with everything I’ve seen, done and learned, even with all of the conversations I’ve had with other teachers, I still only feel as though I’m “teaching” when I’m answering student questions or going over examples.

I wish I could scrub that feeling.”

 

I think that I’ll walk away from my computer now and let these conversations and this quote marinate a bit. I know I have some questions, but I am not sure that I can ask them accurately enough yet.

Quick Update

I’ve been VERY pleased this week with my classes and with carrying out my new year’s resolution about shifting my classes. In my AP Stats class we worked on a fun project from the Mathalicious crew examining Simpson’s Paradox. The kids were in small groups working pretty well together. They did not need me to talk much (remember – it’s important for teachers to be able to become invisible!) and I was able to listen in on some pretty great conversations. We looked at three years of batting information about Derek Jeter and David Justice and saw that Justice had a higher batting average each of the three years but a lower cumulative percentage for those three years. The activity starts off with a fun parlor game. I had six groups in my room. Three of them received year-by-year data and the other three received cumulative data. I asked them to conclude who was the better batter and the predictable vote of 3 to 3 happened in one class, the other class went 4 – 2 for reasons I could not decode. Then we worked our way in to a conversation about school admissions and looked for evidence of discrimination. It’s a great activity that they designed. We also watched a pretty interesting TED talk by Dan Ariely. It’s been a good couple of days and we close out the week with another Mathalicious activity.

I am typing this while my quiet morning Calculus BC class works on the second of my in-class problem sets. Again, they are silently working and I have decided not to fight against this as long as they are willing to share when we look back at the work. 

Next week it is back to the text for my AP Stats class, but I feel that this week has been an important breather for them AND an important reminder that they don’t need to hear my voice all the time. they’ve been doing fine listening and talking to each other.

My School

This weekend is one of my favorite weekends of the year. Our school, a co-ed day and boarding PK – PG independent school, hosts an annual international dinner. This year there will be 21 tables set up in one of our gymnasiums with students serving food from their home country. The list is impressive – France, Russia, Czech, Hungary, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Spain, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Italy, Holland, India, Greece, USA, Venezuela & Germany. Many of these meals are prepared on campus in the kitchens of dorm parents and campus faculty members who live in homes that the school owns. This year, we will host China in our kitchen. Last year we had a contingent of Taiwanese kids and we have also hosted a Saudi boy and Thai scholars in our kitchen over the years. It’s a major event and I often see people at the dinner who are alumni (especially our international alum) and people who have retired from our school coming back to share in the lovely food and companionship. It’s hard to get my little ones to try too much in the way of adventurous food, but I tend to stuff myself silly. The students preparing the food take such joy and pride in their work on this day. The students eating have so much fun and the conversations are lively at the tables. Overall, it’s just a wonderful day.

I’m now in my 4th year here and I made some adjustments in my life coming here. We live in one of the boys’ dorms and I had not lived in a dorm since I was 20 years old. My wife had never lived in a dorm. I was asked to teach AP Stats – a course I had never taught before, so I went to a summer workshop and worked hard to learn the material. I have been asked to teach Calculus BC which I had not taught since the 200-2001 school year. I am learning (still) to teach in classrooms with speakers of many different native languages. I’m a wordy math teacher, so this has been a challenge for them and for me. I love it here and I’m excited about the future of our school and of my department. We have a new STEM curriculum initiative. We launched it this year with a trimester sequence of science courses that ALL of our freshmen take. Next year we are looking to expand to create some upper level STEM electives. We are looking to expand our robotics program and infuse programming into more areas of our school instead of simply in our AP Computer Science class. We are hiring a new teacher under the STEM umbrella and we envision that this new teacher will teach two math classes and two science classes. I have a departmental colleague who came out of retirement from our local public school system five years ago when we were in need of a replacement teacher in the spring. He’s done a great job anchoring our Precalculus courses, but he has decided that it is time to retire again. So, we’ll be looking for a new teacher there as well. New faculty members are always cause for excitement as we infuse new ideas and new energy into our school. 

If any of this sounds appealing to you, you should check out our school at http://bit.ly/1dMbDQl

 

Curious

Today was an assessment day for Mr Dardy

Two sections of BC Calculus taking quizzes. Two sections of AP Stats taking tests. One big question for me in each situation. I’m interested in hearing your opinions.

My first class is a Calculus section. We’ve been working with parametric equations and dipping our toes into the relationship between polar and cartesian equations. We spent a day with Desmos and we spent a day on regular old lecture. They had a five-question quiz and four of the questions were very standard. On one of the questions, I asked them to convert an ellipse in rectangular form (factored already so they could see the center and lengths of the axes) into a parametric equation. Now, they had already had homework converting parametric equations into non-parametric forms. We had also looked at polar forms and I reminded them of the polar equations that would result in a unit circle. My hope was that they would piece those two skills together. It is an AP class and I feel that I owe it to them to ask them to react on the fly to situations that are at least slightly novel. Much grumbling ensued. I haven’t graded them yet to see how they responded, but I did not walk away with a positive feeling. 

My next class was an AP Stats class and we were (finally) taking a test on probability distributions. Between the Christmas break and our snow day this week, this unit has felt very choppy to me. I had two girls finish the test in about twenty minutes and they are two of my stronger students, so I don’t think it was due to just folding up their tents. Some students stayed the whole 45 minutes, but I am sort of convinced that some students will stay sitting and pondering any test as long as they are allowed to. 

 

So – my two questions are 

  1. What is your feeling about questions on assessments that don’t match up with a practiced skill?
  2. Should I feel any sense of concern that some students finished a 45 minute test in less than half the time I allotted? It somehow feels like I must have aimed too low with them. Again, I haven’t graded yet, so my opinion may change by the end of the night.

Dorm duty calls and I am bound to stay in my apt near my desk all night – so I suspect I’ll get a good amount of work accomplished.

 

Changes for the New Year

So, I had recently blogged about some ideas to change the pace of my Calc BC class and I want to report on how it is going so far. We are one (partial) week into the new year. We lost Tuesday to extreme cold and I am losing the second of my two BC classes today because I’ll be visiting another classroom. As department chair, it is one of my obligations (and one of my real pleasures) to visit my colleagues to watch them at work.

I have two very different sections of BC this year. My morning class has seven students and they are somewhat reluctant to work together. They get along fine, they are just much more independent workers by nature. My afternoon class has seventeen students and they are much more social and collaborative.

 

I want to summarize the past two days by section, rather than by day.

Yesterday we were in our computer lab for both sections working on the Desmos activity I slightly modified from Sam Shah’s Virtual Filing Cabinet. By the way, if you haven’t seen this resource, click on the link. You’ll be glad you did. My 1st period class was typically quiet and worked individually with only a little bit of collaboration. I started class with a quick exploration of the polar functions of the form r = 1/(1 – kcos(theta)) and r = 1/(1-ksin(theta)). After five minutes, I left them alone for the next half an hour. I wrapped up class with a verification that, when k = -2, the graph is a hyperbola. A Desmos graph shows this quickly and some recall from precalc days allowed us to convert this to a rectangular equation. It was not a pretty one and the process required recalling the standard form of a hyperbola as well as remembering how to complete the square. I was pretty much the lone voice (unfortunately) but it sure seemed like they were all fine. Today, they worked on the problem set that I also linked to in my last post. I sat and worked myself and had all 7 of them sit at one of my two big tables together. Normally they split themselves with five at one table and two at the other. I thought that this would encourage more collaboration. Instead, I sat working quietly for 30 minutes while they all worked quietly as well. No talking, no looking over each other’s shoulders, no recognition of each other at all that I could see. I must admit that I was getting kind of frustrated. At one point, I catch the eye of one of them and his attention seems to be wandering. I ask him why he’s not talking to anyone and he says he answered them all except for the first question. This is very surprising to me on a number of levels. I think that the first question is the most straightforward (and most related to Calculus) and I thought that this was the one that would seem the least intimidating. The next fifteen minutes were spent sharing solution ideas to that problem as well as the other problems (we only made it through the first five together) and I have to admit I was knocked out by their creativity. Especially on the question involving counting digits. Three of my students actively shared their solution ideas and they just knocked it out of the park. Frustration turned to a combination of delight and confusion. I’ll ask some of my questions later.

 

Yesterday, my afternoon class also met in the computer lab to work with Desmos. Again, I spent about three to five minutes looking at an animated drawing of the polar curves I mentioned above. For the next thirty minutes the class had a consistent hum of chatter, people arguing with each other about conclusions, kids looking at each other’s work. When I reconvened the class to focus on the same k = -2 case, they were engaged. telling me what the hyperbola equation was, catching a mistake I made in factoring, just a lively discussion. When class ended, I checked in with two students who were just packing up. One of them said something to the effect that my class made his head hurt a bit. He said it cheerfully and his neighbor said that my class was ‘interesting’ which is the word I use to describe difficult or challenging questions. He, too, said this rather cheerfully. I won’t be around to see them work on the problem sheet but I have asked the colleague who is subbing for me to collect their work so I can see what they can accomplish and how they approached these problems.

Now, I am left with these questions as I move forward.

  1. How do I create a situation so that my first period class actually talks to each other?
  2. Is it important enough to make that happen, given that they are productive workers? I have a pretty strong belief that talking about ideas is important, but I don’t know how to win this class over to that point of view. Is my personal bias important enough to try to change the nature of my learners in my 1st period class?
  3. Can I build momentum for these problem solving days if they only happen once per week?

I’ll keep reporting on progress and I’ll keep an eye on any wisdom that you can share int he comments section.

 

 

Brrr…

So, today we saw school cancelled due to the cold weather here. Woke up to an air temp below zero and wind chill about 20 below. Took the morning to finish the first of my weekly problem day assignments. I’m sticking to my guns and using this Thursday as our first class work day despite losing today to the weather. I sent out a parametric/polar practice sheet to my kids and asked them to spend some time with Desmos. Tomorrow we’ll be in the computer lab working with Desmos (gotta get started on that doc next) and then we’ll have our problem day. I’ll report back on how it goes. The doc I created that is linked above is a collection of stuff I’ve scoured from the web.

Parametrics / Conics

As I have written before, we teach AP Calculus BC here as a second year Calculus course in our school. This gives me loads of time to play and explore with these students. On Monday we start up again – weather permitting – and we start with our study of parametric and polar equations. Our precalculus class does not cover either topic in great depth (a situation I hope that I can remedy starting next year) and a number of our BC kids are ones who start off in AB Calculus when they come to our school. With so many of our students coming from different parts of the world at different times in their career, we have a wide variety of experiences in the BC group. I guess this is a long-winded way of saying that I have to treat this material as if they have not encountered these ideas at all, really. I intend to spend two days in our computer lab working with building up some fluency with Desmos. I have my room set up in a sort of Harkness-style where the kids are facing each other. Being in the computer lab gives me the flexibility of having the students work with Desmos in a hands-on fashion rather than just watching me. That’s the plus. The downside is that they are working in isolation in this room. I’ll have to deal with that downside for a few days. So, I was digging through my memory bank and I remembered that the great Sam Shah had written a lovely post about introducing conics through Desmos. I downloaded his Scribd file and modified it a bit (you can see my version here) but I still need to go back and play with it a bit more. The way the file looks to me now is way too close to plagiarism – though I do give his website a nod of thanks there. I want the language and the feel to reflect my language and the way my students react.

I am making a real commitment to myself to get out of the way more in 2014. There was a lovely piece that was tweeted out by an old colleague named Gayle Allen. It was called ‘Becoming Invisible in My Classroom‘ and it has given me a renewed sense of mission here. I am also thinking of my visit to SLA last year for EduCon. I walked into a physics class and could not figure out who/where the teacher was for a few minutes. I was amazed and humbled. Need to hold on to that feeling…

So, I’ll start on Monday with a bit of leading/lecturing to set the stage. I’ll give them an assignment to play a bit with Desmos Monday night, then we hit the lab. I’ll be giving an update on how it goes. Wish me luck!

PS – I have a fun Desmos file to look at for them as well. You can see it here. It’s fun to animate the slide and see what happens.