End of School Year

It took till the end of the year to find out what to do that would get the kids learning:
PLAY
laughter is really important too. Makes everyone more easygoing.
Not getting angry is also a plus.
Getting angry, a minus.
They appreciated me when I wasn't trying so hard to teach things.
So that's where I'm going to start next time.

(Really, I will be aiming to teach self-motivation skills. quality vs. quantity of work, asking questions for your own benefit, and starting off the year with fundamentals for maintaining a positive environment already set in place)

Be the change you want to see.

Algebra Lesson for 7th Graders

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what I'm going to teach and how I'm going to teach it. I came up with this lesson this morning--having fallen asleep worrying about how and what I'm teaching next week.

You have two children, one boy and one girl.
Whatever you give to the girl you have to give to the boy, and vice versa. They ar really loud and annoying, so you have to keep everything equal.

Bank Account Game:
Materials: Slateboards/Whiteboards, pens, erasers
Setup: Draw a girl in one top corner of the board and a boy in the opposite top corner. You're going to set up a bank account for the children. Your goal is to see if you can keep both sides equal.

Rules: Start with a solved expression (like x=2)
Student calls out an action and a number from -5 to 10
You can + or - a variable
You can + - x or ÷ by a constant
and we all do it. For example "Add 2x" or "multiply by 5"
X is just a fixed amount of money in a bundle. (Different banks use different ways of bundling their money. You're new at this bank and they didn't tell you).

I would do one example round, then one class round, using a different letter as the variable each round.

Then ask how we can get back to the original solved equation. You can follow the same steps backwards (using inverse operations) to get it solved...kind of like a rubik's cube.

One day, to keep them busy, you give one of the children 3 bags of comic books and 12 more, and the other you give two bags of comic books and 16 more. And they start to complain, until you say "I gave you EXACTLY the same amount, but I'm keeping them now until you can tell me how many is in one of the bags. Each bag has the same amount in it."

At this point the class would solve the problem together.
Then I'd set the kids on 5 problems for guided practice, making sure to throw in a negative number or two, and go over it 10 minutes later.

The independent practice would be a homework assignment posted on the board.

Finally, we'd review the guided practice and I'd ask for some feedback about understanding--this tends to be a slip of paper with a checklist and room at the bottom for comments from the students.

What I'm doing now

Motivation is strongly tied to success.

Success cannot be given. To be felt, it must be earned. (yeah, I came up with that!)

The Houghton-Mifflin style of math textbook that I grew up with does have its drawbacks, but it works well to motivate kids to success. Each day a new skill is taught and then the day's work is to practice that skill. Learning and applying a new skill is a success reward on its own. The teacher is free to meet with students individually and to answer questions, and the student gets practice applying the skill. Highly functional.

The current book that I'm using (the CMP2 textbook series) does much to tie big ideas together, thus making the skills learned meaningful. However, it does lack some in the motivation department. In Looking for Pythagoras, the book has students proving that a general case of the Pythagorean Theorem works before they understand how cool it is, or what it even does. Transitions are missing: Too much learning is heaped on without time to build up to it, and it is not easily accessible as an "I-just-want-to-learn-it" tool.

However, the CMP2 series is generally better because of the story-like approach it gives to each lesson. There are deeper questions early on, that require deeper understanding of the subject being taught. And it does provide practice problems at the end of each chapter. In addition, CMP2 books are much lighter, since they are broken into mini-units.

Although I am coming to a realization here about how motivating it is to learn, and how teaching a single separate skill each day is functional in the classroom, I am stuck with the CMP2 series, and I now just need to try fixing my teaching style to increase that motivation.

And I need to keep waking up with this kind of epiphany.

The Base Layer

They moved like hundreds of white flies

hovering in the air above the frozen ground

Afraid to land because it was so cold.

Each snowflake in turn,

brittle and light,

would gradually descend until it met the pavement

suddenly exploding into a thousand pieces

becoming fragmented clouds

of crystalline dust

My Memory for Names

The part of your brain that saves and retrieves information is called the hippocampus. It turns out that memories are formed in connection to other memories, and are stronger if there is something to associate with them. (The strongest memories are formed when there is an emotion attached to them).

So why does my brain have such trouble with names? Is it because I'm not associating them with an emotion, or is there some rationale for the way it's working?

For me, the priority seems to be:

Boys name or Girls name

Number of Letters

Number of Syllables

Specific letters in the name

and then I lose track of what my brain's doing from there. So if I were to build a catalog of names to make it easier to recall one, I would start from there.

Girl>4 letters>Two syllables>ends in a vowel

Tara, Sara, Olga, Lisa, Tina, Gina, Emma, Kara,

closely associated with

Amy, Stacy, Lacy, etc.

Search Engine Syntax

All pervasive, at least on the internet, the Search Engine has begun shaping the way we think. Search engines are special websites that act like indexes for the world wide web, and the first place most people go when looking for information on a specific topic. But does this mean that they're shaping our thinking?

To get what you're looking for with a search engine, it helps to have the end in mind. If you're looking for a list of famous baseball players, type in "'Babe Ruth' 'Hank Aaron' 'Joe Dimaggio' and 'famous baseball players' list". It's bound to give you at least those three, and is probably much closer to the result you wanted in the first place. And this is only one way that our thinking has to adjust to communicate with machines.

In his Atlantic Monthly article "Is Google Making Us Stupid", Nicholas Carr describes several ways that the internet affects our thinking. There is a chance that repeated interfacing with 'Google', trying to get an answer, creates neural pathways specific to that search-engine. The amount of available information, alone, makes us dependent on a search engine to filter through it for us.

Having the ability to use Google isn't the end-all-be-all of operating on the internet. A majority of web content is inaccessible by Google. The ability to adapt to new ways of thinking is enhanced by using that ability, and NOT falling into a comfortable routine of reading. One research summary points out that we're developing parallel thinking skills and perhaps losing our talent for sequential thinking skills.

On the other hand, McLuhan's book "The Medium is the Massage" (1967) points out that sequential thinking is due to sequential writing, and that the parallel www makes us think verbally again. (Here's a really annoying video that summarizes much of that book.) The change is happening, and it will affect us.

20 year Rule

Why does Hollywood and pop culture seem to revolve on a 20 year cycle? I saw 1970's fashion try a comeback in the '90's, the show "I ♥ the 80's" hit starting in 2002, and now the V miniseries has me thinking about the original V miniseries. It's as if there's a holding pattern for our culture's growth. People try selling us our nostalgic feelings, and we buy them.

I suppose there's another angle here. The makers of pop culture are people, just like the rest of us. They are packaging their own nostalgic feelings. "Oh, remember that show I liked when I was a kid? Why don't we do something like that?. . ." So what if it's not new? The general population will buy it because it's familiar. It's no wonder "It takes any really new idea about 20 years to reach the public." Chuck Wagner, HHS Teacher.