Opening Day Activity – Evolving

I am not 100% sold on how I have divided the data, but I want to think out loud about how my opening day activity for Precalculus Honors is developing.

Last year, I took the advice of a number of online colleagues and divided my classroom into table sets of 3 for student groups. I anticipate that I will have five of these student groups in Precalculus Honors (PCH from now on in the post) so I set up five subdivisions of the data that I previously shared (in this post) and I will start off with the cleanest of the data sets. At the bottom of the post I will attach GeoGebra file links as well as the current status of my handout. I will present screen shots of the data subsets and discuss my hopes and dreams for how this activity will unfold.

Group #1 will have an image similar to this when they graph their data. I will share this exact one with the whole class. I set up five GeoGebra files with the same screen dimensions (at least I think the dimensions are exactly the same, hope so!) My hope is that this will feel largely quadratic to them. I do not think that they have previous experience with regression equations on their TI or with any online tool. I am suggesting that they use Desmos in class. I will present GeoGebra with the goals of exposing them right away to two of my favorite tools. We’ll discuss which one might feel better for different situations. In the past few years I have had a number of students adopt both programs as a natural part of their problem solving. On more than one occasion a student has written a note on a problem set along the lines of ‘Desmos agrees with my conclusion!’ A natural direction for them to go is to use point H as a vertex and develop a quadratic that fits this reasonably well. Hopefully, we can incorporate a discussion throughout the year of the messiness of real world data compared to mathematical models. I love quoting George Box here – ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful’

Group two will generate something similar to this image. Again, I am anticipating a quadratic guess. This time point E should be seen as the vertex. Playing a bit with my TI and anchoring my guess at point E yields the following promising picture. 

Now, we are getting somewhere!

Group three sees this data and has some decisions to make. This is where I am really questioning myself. I worry that there is too much here for a first day activity. I think I may tweak this data set so that it is also more deceptively quadratic in nature.

Group 4 picture above.

Group five data picture.

And, finally, the whole set together here –

As I write this and think about my goals for that first day, I am sure that I want to modify the data that group 3 gets. I don’t want this play to become frustrating on day one. Let’s save frustration for later on!

I am hoping to plant seeds for a number of interesting conversations to have over the course of the year. I want the students to think about decisions based on small sets of data versus larger sets. I want them to think about periodicity and where/when/why to expect that behavior. I want to present them with an intentionally open question on our first day together to set a tone for open questions together throughout the year. I want them to remember something fundamental about quadratics and I expect to present two forms (standard and vertex) on the board after a little nudging from the groups.

I worry, as I often do, that I am being too ambitious. We have about 30 minutes together on day one due to a whole school convocation that day. I am really debating whether to make this the activity and conversation for our first full class day together. In that case, I would pull out an old favorite problem to have as the conversation seed for day one and mix in a bit of the boring old syllabus, etc on day one. Any advice there?

Here is a link to a dropbox folder with the GeoGebra files as they currently are arranged as well as my Word handout.

As always, advice/comments/questions are welcome here or over on twitter where I am @mrdardy

Preparing for Precalculus

For the first time since the 2010 – 2011 school year, I will be teaching our Precalculus Honors course. Since I left the course we changed texts and five teachers in my department have arrived since then, including the colleague who I will be working with on this course. Now that it’s August, I sat down this morning with our text (we are using the Demana, Waits, Kennedy, etc) book and I have some thoughts/questions that I want to air out. I will understand my own thoughts better after writing and I anticipate some helpful wisdom coming my way through this site or over on twitter. We start off in Chapter Four of this text, doing right into trigonometry.

Things I know I don’t like

  • Any formula to convert angles to arc length. Just emphasize part/whole relationships!
  • Language of vertical or horizontal shrinks or stretches. I just want to talk about amplitude and period. It feels like this extra language just clutters things up.
  • Inverse trig function using the odd negative 1 power. I want to write arccos x or arcsin x. Pointing out where it is and what it looks like on their calculator is a necessary nuisance.

 

Things I think I don’t like

  • The text has an odd emphasis on the word sinusoid. I don’t know why I would want to use that word, not clear on any benefit.
  • DMS notation. Why? Not sure, other than in surveying, when they will encounter this.
  • Introduction of cosine as x / r and sine as y / r – I kind of want to talk about the fact that all triangles are similar and simply scale down to ‘unit right triangles’ with a hypotenuse of length 1. This feels like a natural lead into the unit circle.

 

Things I know I like

  • An activity my colleague shared with paper plates, strings, and discovery that an arc that is equal to the radius will be subtended by the same central angle no matter the size of the plate.
  • The opening day activity I am tweaking that involves the length of daylight hours as a function of days after January 1.
  • Conversations I am planning on having about why it is usually sufficient to solve a triangle by knowing three facts out of six (three side lengths and three angle measures) and when it would not be sufficient.

 

I have taught Precalc at each of the four schools where i have worked and I always enjoy the course despite its weird, buffet style curriculum. The kids are fun to work with, sophisticated enough to have serious math conversations. We do not have the AP calendar breathing down our necks and our new schedule that includes a 90 minute class once every seven school days really lends itself to some meaningful play time in this course. I’m excited.

As always, please share any opinions/advice/questions here in the comments or over on twitter where I remain @mrdardy

 

Hijacking My Own Blog

I have used this space for years as a platform to talk about math teaching. Today I am going to use it for another passion of mine. Today I am thinking about music. Many of you (most? ALL?) follow me on twitter and you know that I have been fortunate enough in the past year to score a DJ gig at a local college. I have been posting all of my playlists on Spotify where I can be found (as on twitter) as mrdardy. I have been a bit obsessive about music since my middle school years. In college I worked in a record store. After college, in my early teaching years, I wrote for the local newspaper and then for a free news monthly. Later, when I moved to south Florida I wrote about music for another magazine there. I am pretty deeply obsessed.

As evidence – here are my CD and LP racks in my basement.

 

For reasons I do not understand, each image is upside down. Oh well, the point is made.

Part of what has come along with the music obsession is a good bit of snobbery. Long ago I stopped listening to radio to find music and dove deeply into music criticism and word of mouth. I can recognize labels and producers and often purchase something simply because of some arcane connection to something I already love. The I had a child. Then, six years later, another one. I stopped going to shows. I moved. I let myself wallow in my collection and got swept up a bit in the huge world of streaming music. First Pandora, then Spotify. I probably could have gone for the rest of my life without really digging in and learning new music again but the DJ gig saved me from that. Somewhat at the same time, my son (now 15) started really getting interested in music. In the past year I have taken him to see Gorillaz (I quite like them and was happy to go), Tyler the Creator (not quite as happy), and Kendrick Lamar (glad I went but much of the show was not my style). I have been really delighted to see him so animated by something important to me and it gives us a safe venue to talk which is not always easy with 15 year olds in the house. I don’t love the music he loves. I feel life an old fart being bothered by the language of much of the music he listens to, but I remind myself of generations of parents complaining about ‘that noise’ that delights their children.

All of this concert business with my son has made my soon to be 9 year old daughter (birthday Wednesday!) jealous. She has started listening to pop radio and has her own pretty extensive playlist on Spotify. Listening to this station of hers is trying for me. I am not a fan of the style and they seem to play only about 8 songs over and over again. On the other hand, it brings her joy and it is music. So, last Friday I took her to Philadelphia to see Charli XCX, Camila Cabello, and Taylor Swift. I think that all of you reading this know Taylor Swift even if you don’t know much of her music. The other artists, probably not so much. I had not knowingly ever heard Charli XCX but I discovered that I did, in fact, know a few of her songs. So, when she asked me to go to see her #2 favorite singer (Camilla) and her #3 favorite singer (Taylor) I kind of had to say yes.

The show was at Lincoln Financial Field – home of the super bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles. I am pretty sure that the last time I went to see a stadium show was when I saw The Who as a freshman in college (1982 or 1983) with Joan Jett and the B-52s as opening acts. I am used to seeing shows in clubs where I can be 50 feet from the performer or in nice old theaters where the acoustics are great and the seats are pretty comfy. We were FAR from 50 feet away from Taylor, Camilla, and Charli but that did not phase my lil one bit. From the time that Charli XCX came on at about 7:10 PM to a crown only about 1/3 of what it would soon be, my daughter was engaged. Charli XCX was energetic and passionate. She worked what crowd was there and she kind of won me over. Camilla Cabello had a tight, synchronized, and choreographed set. She played most of the CD my lil has and she mixed in bits of Frank Sinatra and Prince in the middle of songs. She is still pretty new to this business (she was previously in the girl group 5th Harmony) but she will likely have a long career ahead of her. Then Taylor Swift came on.

What a spectacle. There were probably 40 semi trailers in the parking lot that had been carrying the three stages for her performance in addition to the fire, the 40 to 50 foot video screen, the fireworks, the cables that transported her from one stage to another while she sang, the cameras, etc. etc. etc. I have to say I was there out of a sense of duty and a sense of wanting my daughter to have a meaningful memory of an adventure with dad. She knows I love music and I think that she wants to connect with me on this field (as does my son – I am flattered in both cases) but I was fighting my snobbery and my cynicism. Let me tell you, it melted away quickly. Her opening numbers were from newest album and I am not terribly familiar with them. I bought my daughter the 1989 album and know all those songs. I know some of the older country-ish songs and I know a couple of the newest ones. It didn’t matter. The show was so energetic and spectacular, the songs are so carefully crafted, and the JOY of over 50,000 people cheering and singing along is simply transformative. I found myself so swept up by the whole thing. My daughter was taken by it, the crowd near us, the whole damned stadium was in the palm of her hand.

Now, I do not imagine that I will be dialing up the music of any of these artists during my free listening time. I will hear them because I live in this world and because I have a young child in my home who is taken by this music. I will, however, hold on to the memory of this show. Not just because I hope my daughter will treasure this but because it cracked through my grumpy music snob exterior. It made me smile and sing along to songs that don’t particularly matter to me because I was in a crowd of about 50,000 people to whom these songs really mattered. Because this talented artist who was playing in her home town really cared about the fact that she was coming home.  Because she has crafted a show (hell, a career) designed to bring joy to large groups of people together. Because it was a summer night and a beautiful one at that. Because I was proud of myself for having made arrangements for this event. Because I just love music. I love being in its presence, even when it is music I do not inherently love.

I have seen hundreds of nights of live music in my life. I am totally lucky in that respect. I have distinct memories of dozens of those shows/nights. This show will definitely live in the small set of special nights for all sorts of reasons.

Thinking About Trig

In the fall I will be teaching a section of Precalculus Honors at my school. I have not taught that course in about six years so I have not spent a bunch of time thinking about teaching trig functions for awhile. Our Precalc Honors class starts off with a study of Trig and I am thinking about an opening day activity that might plant a number of seeds that we will need to germinate over time. I want to play with some data that is periodic in nature and try to generate some hopefully interesting questions. Thinking along the lines of Dan Meyer’s challenge of finding an aspirin. I tweeted a bit about this and have been engaged in a terrific conversation with Bonnie Basu (@GotMathHelp) about a similar activity that I used as a demo lesson for a job interview years ago. The context is different since those students had already been a bit immersed in their study of trig but they had not been graphing yet. My goals with that group were to uncover the periodic nature of the hours of daylight, to talk about why other functions that seemed appropriate to the picture (especially quadratics) were not appropriate, to build up some sense of important vocabulary for trig graph analysis, and to simply plant some important ideas that would be explored in greater depth after I was gone. Looking back on the activity I see all sorts of tweaks I want to make and Bonnie has been super helpful in asking questions/making suggestions. Anyone who wants to take the time to share ideas or questions would certainly help make the beginning of my precalculus class this fall more meaningful and successful. I thank you in advance for any tips.

After another round of conversation on twitter that included tips from a student who just graduated from our school, I have been playing with three different data sets. I want to play with average daily temperature, high tide level, and with daylight hours. The data for the first two came from wunderground and the third data set came from dateandtime. Below are pictures of the data and Desmos links to the tables.

This picture (above) shows the average daily temperature in my town during 2017 at 10 day increments. You can see the Desmos table here. There are some things I like about this picture. I like the fact that the general shape can be inferred. We can talk about why it fluctuates on a number of different levels. However, I don’t think that this is a great data set for beginning to develop an idea of periodic functions. It feels too noisy to me.

Here is the picture for high tides.

This table was built on data at 6 day intervals from the beginning of the year through June/July. You can see the Desmos link here. I would definitely ask the students to play with window sizing and I think that some powerful ideas about amplitude and vertical shift can quickly come out of such a conversation. I picked 6 day increments thinking that I would be slightly off phase with what I thought would be a period related to the full moon. A quick survey on google just talks about a 12 hour plus period so I may have been making this up in my mind. This picture feels more friendly with just a little noise involved. I might use this one early – maybe even on day one. The next one is much cleaner looking. Here is the data on length of daylight hours during 2017.

This is where my mind was when I created the demo lesson. However, this data is for our hometown here. You can see the Desmos link here. My thoughts about this data set go down two different paths. One thought is that this is clean and clear and easily explainable. One tweak I might make based on my conversation with Bonnie is that I might extend past one full year (say about 400 days or so) to make the periodicity visible not only intuitively meaningful. My second thought is that this might be too clean that it might lead my students into expecting such clean, clear periodicity in a messy world. I am probably overthinking this on the second train of thought.

I expect to have five table groups of students (groups of three in my classroom after long debating it, I accepted the wisdom shared by a number of MTBoS folks – especially Alex Overwijk (@AlexOverwijk) and my classes were better this year because of that change!) and I am thinking that each table group should have different data. I am playing with the idea of mixing up sunlight or tidal subsets of data versus simply subdividing one larger set. For example, if I go with the cleaner daylight data I can extend it to about 450 days or so and give different table groups subsets of about 35 data points each. I feel that they would benefit from seeing how the data ‘fits together’ and that individual table group decisions about amplitude, vertical shift, and period all match each other pretty well.

 

I would love some feedback/suggestions/questions and I thank Bonnie again for her valuable thoughts. You can drop comments here or over on twitter where I am @mrdardy

Some Fun Approaches

We have adopted a new schedule at our school and we are on a seven day rotation this year. At the beginning of each rotation, I give my AP Calculus BC students a problem set that is due at the beginning of the next rotation. These are just grab bags of problems that I find interesting. Some are calculus problems, but most are just fun stuff I have gathered over the years. On our most recent problem set (the last one of the year) I gave a problem that I think I found in an Exeter problem set. The heart of the problem was the image below. 

We are told that we are to start at hexagon #1. We are allowed to progress at each step to an adjacent hexagon as long as that hexagon has a number higher than the number we are currently on. So, for example, from 5 you can proceed to 6 or 7 but cannot go back to 3 or 4. The question is to determine how many pathways are possible from hexagon #1 to hexagon #13.

I did not know the answer to this question, but I was confident that I (and my AP Calculus BC students) could find the answer.  I approached this problem the way I do many problems, I wished it was smaller and I hoped to see a pattern emerge. I have advocated this problem solving strategy with my students but few pick up on this. I think that this has to do with their sense of freedom as mathematicians. I think that changing the problem feels like a privilege that they don’t think that they have. Need to work on this…

So, I built up a table and saw that if there was just one hexagon then there is just one path. A boring one of standing there. If there are two hexagons, there is also only one path. Hmmm, not promising yet. Three hexagons? Two paths, from 1 to 3 or from 1 to 2 to 3. Four hexagons? 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, 1 to 2 to 4, and 1 to 3 to 4. Now, I am confident that Fibonacci is hiding here. A quick check confirms this and I was pleased with myself for finding a fun problem that did not have an obvious solution.

I used the word obvious for an in-joke. One of my particularly clever AP Calc students will routinely refer to things being obvious in class discussions. His name is Owen and the way he marked his diagram was interesting to me on his problem set so I asked him to explain this in class. He started essentially the way I did but instead of a chart he simply wrote a 1 in the 1 box for # of paths and a 1 in the 2 box for the same reason. Now, his explanation gets interesting. Next, he mentions that it is obvious that if you get to hexagon 3 you have to have gone through either #1 or #2 so that the total number of ways to get to #3 is the sum of these two other numbers. Similarly, to get to #4 you have gone through #2 (one path) or #3 (two paths) and now Fibonacci is obvious. I was so delighted by his approach to this problem.

So I decided to present this problem to my other classes to see how they might approach it. In each class I explained my result after allowing them about 8 – 10 minutes to share thoughts about the problem with their small group partners. While none of my other students arrived at a conclusion in this relatively short amount of time, they did have some interesting approaches. One of my Discrete Math students tried to leverage what he’s learned about combinations by starting with the notion that a pathway along the odd numbers is six steps. Then he said that we could add one even number and this could be done one of six ways. We could add two even numbers to our path. This could be done in 15 ways (using combinations or Pascal’s triangle) and he wanted to simply add all of these up. A super cool idea but we started to see problems here. For example, if we add 6 and 8 as stops along the way in a row, then we have to skip hex #7 so we started trying to enumerate all of the path restrictions. Similarly, we realized that we’d need to individualize the number of odd hex visits in a similar way. Daunting, but a great example of trying to use knowledge he has gained this year. A group in Geometry recognized that the shortest path had six steps and the longest had twelve. They wanted to enumerate the number of pathways broken into these categories. A great idea and a way to get a handle on smaller cases to imagine. They quickly became frustrated by the daunting task of keeping track of these tracks, but I loved the idea.

It was a fun couple of days batting around these ideas. I have been really thinking about the distinction between ‘problems’ and ‘exercises’ and  problems like this one reinforce the ideas I am wrestling with. I am determined in each of my classes next year to have homework and classwork assignments labeled as ‘problem sets’ or as ‘exercise sets’ and I am hoping to help develop some clear strategies with my students to use when they encounter a genuine problem in math.

Persistence and Patience

Neither of the qualities in the title of this post are apparent in abundance at this time of the school year (exams here start on May 21!!!) so I am especially pleased to be able to write about today in my two Geometry classes. They each took a quiz with me in their last class and I asked them to read ahead to the next section (more on that later) before meeting again today. After a brief warm up we reviewed the quiz and I returned papers. Then I presented them with this image from our Geometry text

 

Now, at this point we have established that the measure of a central angle in degrees is equal to the measure of its intercepted arc in degrees. We have proven that the measure of an inscribed angle in degrees is half of the measure of its intercepted arc in degrees. I told them that my dream for today was to derive some formula relating the measure of angle EFC to some combination of the arcs BE, EC, CD, and DB. I reminded them of what we already know and suggested that using what we already know is often pretty helpful when trying to learn something new. I then stepped back and let kids toss out ideas. In one of the two classes I took a walk to the water fountain and popped in on a colleague for a two minute chat. I came back into a room with people debating and waving their hands in the air to show what segments they wanted to draw. I wish I saw more drawing at their desks, but it was good engagement. In both classes they wanted me to name the vertical angle pairs at the hinge point F. I was a bit surprised that neither group wanted to name arcs yet, but it worked out just fine. I dropped a hint that another segment drawn would help and this spurred some lively debate about what segments to draw. BE and DC were popular but I pointed out that the vertical angles were not included really in these triangles that were formed. Some folks wanted some radii drawn. One girl was sad when we named our vertical angle pairs. She saw that BFE and DFC were clearly equal but that they faced arcs that clearly weren’t. I was pleased by this observation. There was a real desire in each class to assume that BD and EC were equal and I wish my diagram was more clearly designed to discourage that. We finally settled on drawing the chord BD which created two inscribed angles that we called x and y creating arcs called 2x and 2y. The heavy lifting and guessing were done by that point. Arriving at the conclusion that we now need a relationship between one angle and two arcs came in a couple of steps. In both classes I made a clear statement about what we just discovered and they seemed pretty pleased with themselves, if a bit tired from the exertion. In my morning class we were on our 90 minute block and I gave them some practice exercises that we will revisit tomorrow. In my afternoon class that ended the day we simply left the discovery on the board. I start tomorrow morning with that crew and I am excited to pick this up again.

In each of my classes I have 14 students. One was absent today, so I had 27 overall joining in on this conversation. One of them, when I mentioned my dream for the day, said ‘In the reading last night it said that this angle is the average of two arcs.’ [Thank you Niko!]

One student. Now, it is entirely possible that other students did the reading I requested. It is possible that some read the section and were confused by it. It is possible that some read it and forgot the conclusion. It is possible that some who read it simply did not feel like saying anything out loud. It feels more likely that few (maybe only 1?!?) did the reading.

I could dwell on that, but I am dwelling on the discovery we made. I am dwelling on the persistence and patience of my students today. I am dwelling on what went right to end a day that started poorly for me.

 

Later, I’ll dwell on how I can help overcome the likely habits of not reading that I am faced with. I’ll save that for a less beautiful day than today.

Sad Little Girl

Two posts today, both kind of brief. They are about two aspects of my life. The first is my dad post, my Geometry teacher post is coming later today.

 

I have a 14 year old boy and an 8 year old girl. They are very different people. My son does not stress out about school in any visible way. While I hear parents in our community talking about their 8th graders spending hours on homework, I never see that. He is up an down in his school performance but he does not seem to judge himself by these exterior reports on his progress. Sometimes I wish he was just a little more concerned, but he’s doing just fine.

My girl cares deeply about these exterior reports on her performance. She wants her teacher to think highly of her, she wants to please us. I am charmed a bit by this but I also wish she was less stressed about these types of things. This morning she was unusually quiet and reserved before school. I thought it might be her allergies – she has pretty wicked seasonal allergies and spring has just exploded on us here – but that was only a small part of it. She was worried because in PE this morning she was due to take part of the annual fitness test. This made her super sad. She loves to run and play with her friends but she has already begun to identify some friends as ‘sporty’ friends and she does not see herself this way. She had tears in her eyes because of anxiety about a fitness test this morning. This brought tears to my eyes as I thought about other students crying in the morning because of an upcoming Geometry test (or an upcoming Biology test or whatever), I was shook up thinking about the impact on self-image, on feelings of self-worth, on just the general task of living through the day that I saw a glimpse of. I am so sad to think that I am seen as the cause of such stress in my students’ lives. I wish I had some insight into how to battle this for my daughter and for my students. I know with my daughter I can talk to her about how her time in running around a field has nothing to do with how much I love her or how I value her. I try, in an appropriate way, to let my students know that their grade on a paper is not an evaluation of them as people, just a snapshot of them as learners. I need to be more explicit with them more often as I was reminded this morning. I also need to be more explicit more often with my two lil Dardys at home.

Man, what a bummer of a way to start my day today. My next post will be about a much rosier ending to the day (at least the school portion of it.)

Vectors!

A brief post this morning. We are winding down in our AP Calculus BC class and the last topic of the year is a short unit on vectors and parametric equations. Many of my students buy a (slightly) different version of our text book so some do not have the vector chapter. I use a curriculum module from the AP site as the spine for our work through these ideas. I have to admit that I do not have a great amount of enthusiasm for this topic, at least at the level that we work with it. But on Wednesday we had a fun breakthrough in class. We were working on a fairly typical example of a parametrically defined function on the Cartesian plane and found its derivative. The kiddos asked for a picture so we graphed both the position and velocity vectors on Desmos. One of my students expressed disappointment that we did not see the order of the graphs so it was hard to move our eyes from one graph to the other to see how they related. I am more comfortable making GeoGebra jump through hoops so I moved on to GeoGebra and graphed both with sliders and leaving a trace on. The kids seemed to perk up a bit liking this visual better. Then one student asked me to change the velocity vector. Instead of having it rooted at the origin, he asked me to redefine it so that it was attached to the point, so that it would be a tangent vector. I made this adjustment (you can find my GeoGebra of it here) and the kids seemed so much more engaged immediately. The power of seeing the trace points move apart from each other combined with the direction and length of the velocity vector changing along really caught their attention. I want to tweak it a bit still, there was a request for adding the acceleration vector as well. At a time of year when energy is running low, it was a fun blast of energy and engagement here.

 

That’s all for now, just wanted to share something fun.

Looking for a New Teammate

My school is looking to hire a new upper school math teacher beginning in the 2018 – 2019 academic year. I am in my eighth year here as chair of the upper school math department at Wyoming Seminary. We are located in northeastern PA right across the river from Wilkes-Barre. We are a preK through post-grad school on two separate campuses. The young ones – including my two children – are on our lower school campus located about three miles away from our upper school. My son, by the way, will be at our upper school next year. I am equally anxious and excited about this development. Our upper school is a 9 – post grad school that is a mix of day and boarding students. We have three dorms on campus and a number of faculty also live in campus housing. I lived in a boys’ dorm with my family for six years before moving into a campus home. We have a wonderfully diverse student body both in terms of where they come from – we have over twenty countries represented in our high school student body – and what their interests/talents are. We have nationally recognized athletes, we have top notch artists, we have stunning scholars. We have kids who LOVE math and are in Calculus as freshmen. We have kids who dread it and are in Algebra II as seniors. I firmly believe that all of these kids have meaningfully experiences and they grow as students while they are here. We are losing one of our valued members of the upper school faculty and I am sad to see him go. However, this is the time for me to look ahead and dream about what a new colleague can bring to our school. If you are reading this and are contemplating a change of scenery for next year, please reach out to me in the comments here or through twitter where I am @mrdardy or simply write to my work email. If you are reading this and you know someone who might be a great fit, pass this info along.

Our school’s website is https://www.wyomingseminary.org/

 

What Math Teacher Do My Students Want?

At TMC16 one of the impressive experiences was listening to the keynote speech by Tracy Zager (you can find it here ) and I remember briefly mentioning it in a post soon after the conference. Sadly, I never went back and really dissected my positive feelings about it, but I do know that one of the habits I developed after her speech was to communicate pretty regularly with our elementary school teachers more regularly when I ran across interesting math tidbits. I also know that Tracy has written a well regarded book called Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You’d Had. I have not read this book (yet!) but the title of the book has been haunting me. I am not speaking with any deep knowledge about the strategies that she is advocating and I may be doing her a disservice, for which I apologize in advance. But as I am sitting here at the beginning of my spring break, I am thinking about what has gone right and what has gone wrong so far, 2/3 of the way through my 2018 – 2019 academic year. I also think about the phrase from Dan Meyer’s TED talk, ‘Be Less Helpful’ and this morning I want to try and wrestle with each of these phrases that are resonating in my head.

I will admit up front that my interpretations of these two phrases are my interpretations. I also need to fill in a little background to explain how I understand Prof. Zager’s phrase. I had two high school teachers who were enormous influences on me. I had the same English teacher, Mrs. Myra Schwerdt, for my junior and senior year. The way her typical class went was this – we came into class, she tossed out a question prompted by our reading assignment from the night before and then she moderated the discussion. Tossing out another question if the conversation ran dry or probing someone on an opinion/interpretation that they made. She was sort of first among equals in these conversations. I never felt that she forced us to interpret anything in any way but I also felt that we better have some backing for what we had to say. In my senior year I took AP Calculus BC from Mr. Barry Felps. A typical day in that class started off with a quick look at a new idea with Mr. Felps offering an example or two of ‘how to’ after explaining some new idea. He would sometimes go over a HW question or two from the recent past (often after his go to joke, we’d ask ‘Mr. Felps, can you do problem #12?’ He’d look at the book and nod while saying ‘Yep’. Still cracks me up a bit thinking about this…) After this, typically 15 – 20 minutes total, he’d say ‘Okay, you have work to do and so do I’ He would sit and we would work with our neighbors and friends. If we got stuck, we’d go ask him but most of the time we felt that we wanted to figure it out ourselves. We also had a study group that would periodically meet on Sundays for a combination of football, pizza, calculus, and physics. So, here I have in my mind what ‘Be Less Helpful’ looks like (to my 17 year old self for sure) and an image of the math teacher I wish I’d had (which, I feel enormously fortunate to say is a math teacher I did have)

Fast forward from 1981 – 1982 academic year to the 2018 – 2019 academic year. This year I am teaching four different classes with pretty different groups of students. I teach Geometry with the text I wrote four years ago to mostly 9th and 10th graders, I teach a Discrete Math elective to mostly seniors, I teach a non-AP Calculus class to a mix of juniors and seniors, and I teach AP Calculus BC to a mix of juniors and seniors (with one brilliant sophomore in the mix) These classes all have different needs and different inherent investments from the students involved.

It is, of course, unfair to generalize too broadly, but I think it is fair to say that the general needs/wants of these classes differ. I try to account for that, but I know that there are some tendencies in my teaching that appear in all four subjects. I ask more than I tell. I redirect questions to other students to get their input. I have student in groups of three facing each other. I randomize these groups so that a group of three is together at most for five classes. I write problem sets that dip into past knowledge and ask some questions for which we have not been explicitly prepared. My quizzes are narrowly focused on recent information and they are weighted less than tests. My tests are all cumulative in nature but they are about 70% focused on what has happened since the last test. I want at least one test question to feel novel, to ask students to put together information in a way that feels new – a problem rather than an exercise, I guess I’d say. We have a test correction policy that we adopted this year (you can read about that here, here,  and here  ) and this policy seems to have helped reduce anxiety a good bit. All of this is to provide a little context into my classroom and my vision of what these phrases ‘Be Less Helpful’ and ‘Becoming the Math teacher You Wish You’d Had’ mean.

What I have struggled with, this year more than in the recent past, is the discrepancy between the math teacher I wish I’d had and the math teacher that my current students wish they had. A good number of my students seem to be happy wth how our classes run. I have posted a number of entries this year about student success. I have received some lovely emails from parents of students in Geometry, some nice remarks passed along from colleagues about students in Calculus Honors, some terrific conversations with students in Discrete Math, and an abundance of energy and creativity from my AP Calculus BC gang. In all four of my classes I feel I am reaching some students and making a positive impact. What concerns me, and what prompts this post, is the fact that a number of students are not buying what I am selling. They are frustrated when I respond to a question with a question. They think it is unfair to have a test question that does not look like something they have explicitly practiced. They feel that I am off loading my responsibility as the teacher when I ask them to work in groups to figure something out instead of lecturing and telling them how to figure it out. I have students across a wide range of abilities and a wide range of reactions to what I am trying to accomplish. It is important that I recognize this and do not simply bask in the glow of the students for whom this approach really clicks. Where I struggle, is trying to reconcile what I think I understand about teaching research, what I understand about NCTM’s recommendations, and what I valued as a student with the discomfort and unhappiness that I see in some of my students. I also struggle with balancing what is clearly working with some students in each subject. I don’t want to lose that energy and motivation that I see in students who value what feels like a different way to experience math. I know that this is not an either/or situation. I have two weeks of spring break to think and reflect. I know that there is a way to reach the frustrated kids without giving up the the facets of my class that are valuable to some of their colleagues (and to me!), I know that there is a balance to be struck between asking kids to step out and feel challenged and making sure that they still feel supported.

I think back to a comment from a student abut 6 years ago. About three weeks into the school year she asked for a personal conference to talk about her struggle in our Honors Calculus class. By the way, struggle for her meant that she had a B average instead of her typical A. She said to me ‘I thought that I needed to learn formulas and how to use them. That isn’t working here.’ She and I had a lovely conversation and in the years since I have run into her dad a number of times. He always tells me how important my class was for his daughter. She has sent me lovely thank you notes updating me on her progress. She is an example of a student I was able to help cross a certain threshold. I want that feeling for all of my students in some way or another and I have solid evidence that this is not happening often enough right now. I have some serious thinking to do.