Project Reflections - All Stars

My students are finishing up an "All stars" project in which they were each assigned six athletes, all playing the same position, to analyze. They had to write equations of lines for each player and use them to infer information about the player and predict how the player would do in the future.

Positives about this project:

• Because I let them help me choose which sports we did, many of them were immediately interested in the project.
• The repetition involved in analyzing six players helped them really master writing an equation of a line when given two points.
• I worked in not only finding x- and y-intercepts (with some nice review of solving equations) but also a review of making predictions using an equation of a line, which was in the last project too. I hope they are starting to see the ways in which an equation can be useful.

Negatives about this project:

• I need to use real information about the players next time. When the students can immediately tell the information is made up, it takes away from their interest (thus negating the first positive). Yes, it would be an investment of time on my part to find the real data. But I think it would pay off in terms of my students' buy-in.
• This is a LONG project. The repetition, while great for skill mastery, takes a lot of time. Even though I remembered not having enough time last year and built in more time this year, I still had to push the deadline back several times in order to keep it reasonable.
  
• Individual work for this project is key. Since I didn't put the kids into groups until most of their work was done, some of them will never make it that far. Normally, they have someone encouraging them, prodding them, to get their work done. Without a group counting on them, some of them don't have the self-motivation to get the work done.
  

When technology breaks

We had server problems today, especially during one of my classes when the server was down school-wide for pretty much the entire period. I noticed some interesting things happen when this occurred:
First of all, I was happy with my ability to roll with it - even though my lesson plan for today relied on technology for the whole period, I came up with a workable back-up plan as soon as I started to realize something was wrong.
I think more interesting to me was my student's inability to roll with it - they were at a loss, completely. First, they complained that it was taking longer than usual to log in - but didn't connect that to something being wrong. They were happy for the excuse to fool around for a few minutes, thinking that the computers would fix themselves and be up in no time. As I realized there was a bigger problem at play, I was simultaneously trying to alert our IT support of the problem and trying to alert my students to the fact that we needed to change our plans. Interestingly, several students did not seem to realize this was a system-wide problem and thought it was only their computer that wasn't working. (I ask myself - are they just that self-centered? Did they not look around and notice the trend? Are they not good at seeing patterns?) In fact, even after the problem was solved, all day I had students telling me about the problem they'd had in such and such class in the morning, unaware that it was a school-wide breakdown that had occurred. I can't help but wonder about their critical reasoning and pattern recognition skills after a day like this!

Second Year Insights

Being a second-year teacher, I am always fighting the urge to compare everything to last year. Sometimes, I don't feel like I have improved enough and still have so far to go before I can really consider myself a successful teacher. Luckily, the last few days have not been like that.

Last year, my students really struggled with equations of lines. Looking back, I thought I taught them too fast and didn't include enough examples. In order to go through the different cases, my examples got complicated way too quickly.

So this year, I kept that in mind. I added more examples, increasing complexity much more gradually. I split it into two days. And.... voila!! My students, by and large, get it! They still get stuck on occasion, but I am getting much fewer questions, and better questions, than I got last year. I love this feeling of success!

Slope

I feel like my students are once again struggling to understand slope. I know that they struggled with this last year, so I presented it in different ways this year:

1. in the context of a real-problem, as rate of change (how fast my hair grows)
2. through an online reading with lots of illustrations, along with questions to guide their reading
3. an in-class discussion of what they had learned and multiple examples

The good news is, some of them get it. They can identify positive and negative slopes with ease. But give them two points and ask for the slope.... and most will get it wrong. I've got to move on soon (like, Monday) to equations of lines, but if they can't get the slope right their whole equation will end up wrong. Any ideas? How do others present slope?

A Hair Problem

In the style of dy/dan's WCYDWT...


How long is long enough?

My hair has grown quite long since the beginning of last school year. I realized recently that it might be almost long enough for me to cut off and donate to have a wig made. However, I’m starting to get annoyed with how long it is. What I want to know is: How fast is my hair growing? How much longer will it take to grow long enough? I don’t want to have to cut it much shorter than it was in the first picture because I look silly with really short hair.

August 26, 2008

October 28, 2009