Tag: lessons

  • Thank you #MTBoS & #Iteachmath community

    Friday night in class, I gave out an assignment to my preservice teachers (PST) entitled “Engaging the Mathematics Community.” Here it is in it’s entirety: Engaging the Mathematics Community;  Miscellaneous Assignment 2: 10 points The goal of this assignment is to encourage you to engage with the existing larger mathematics education community. You must do…

  • Why I wont use direct instruction

    This post is born out of a PhD class I am taking called “Models of Teaching.” It is a great class, but one of the requirements early in the semester was to write how I would use direct instruction in my classroom. I refused. I wrote a lengthy screed against DI. I attacked it, aggressively.…

  • Math on the Move

    I had the opportunity to read a preprint edition of Malke Rosenfeld’s new book, Math on the Move, and here are my thoughts. First off, let me start off with what this book is not. As educators we have probably sat through a professional development where someone told us that in math class, we can…

  • MTBoS Resources

    I took yesterday off of blogging because of being overwhelmed with todo lists for work. Fixed that. Yay! So, another #BlAugust post for me. OMG! I also earned a “Star of the Week” from Meg Craig for this post! Wow. That is an honor coming from her. She also made a shortlink for the page:…

  • Central Limit Theorem Love

    Besides the usual quote on the board today, I also have this math pickup line: How can I know hundreds of digits of pi and not know your phone number?  I am featuring a new math love / pickup line each day this week (some days will have more than one). If you want the…

  • Polynomials in Alg 2

    I haven’t posted in a while, mainly because I am just so happy with how my classes are going. I will focus on Alg 2 here, because these awesome learners are just knocking my socks off. I am in the polynomial unit, knee deep in graphing, and increasing, decreasing, relative mins, relative max’s, absolute mins,…

  • Pictionary in Stats

    I tortured my learners with a game, a game that was awesome and they all agreed was worth while. We played a Stats Pictionary! I used this document.  Ch 5 – various distributions- Pictionary   I created these distributions using the Illuminations Applet called plopit.   http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/PlopIt/ Here are my rules: 1. Each pair gets one…

  • Greedy Greedy learners – a good thing

    That’s right, they got greedy, and lost. Well, everyone gained, knowledge and skills that is.  Today (and tomorrow in one period) in AP Stats we are playing The game of Greed. This is a great game, that challenges the learners in the end to make box plots and comparison statements about the created data. You end up…

  • Torturing, er, teaching today

    All models are wrong, but some are useful. George E.P. Box AP Statistics I was able to use this quote today in class. I was happy. My learners were happy too, well, mostly happy. Well, okay, not happy at all at first. At first they hated me. They were struggling with learning how to do…

  • Notes, Pacing & lesson idea

    One thing I am really working on in AP Stats is the amount of notes, the lack of notes, and the engagement of my learners. AP Stats is one of those courses where the amount of vocab to assimilate is so huge, that it cannot all be done by activities. I have found that a…