Today my kids started their school year. They all rushed out the door so excited to start their adventure. It just get a tremendous amount of joy seeing their enthusiasm. I can still remember my first days of school. I don't know what they are going to face today, this week, this year, etc., but I hope they are prepared. What does it mean to be prepared?
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As I start my 21st year teaching mathematics, it's a good time to reflect on the past and plan for the future. I often reflect and reread Mindset by Carol Dweck. As a teacher and parent, this book has had a big influence on me and I encourage more to read it. As a matter of fact I recommended it on Craig's List: PA Faculty and Staff Summer Reading List. This book has influenced the education community. Everything from grit to describing ways of cultivating learning dispositions can be traced back to this book. Actually, it's a lot. In my effort to sift and simplify, throughout the year I'll try to instill the following four learning mindsets in students. A natural way to talk about trig functions is to model using a wheel...in this case a ferris wheel. Here is a problem my students have worked on recently.
Here is an animated GIF of a classical optimization problem: Regiomontanus' angle maximization problem. A similar problem appeared on our final exam yesterday. My students commented that for a variety of reasons the "optimum" solution isn't so optimum, especially if you are watching TV.
I spent this year in an effort to transition my students from a the tradition lecture, example, home work model they were comfortable with to problem based, discussion model. The transition also involved moving from away from a traditional text book for students to follow and to problem sets designed to invite students to develop their own mini text books for reference. Looking back at their work from the fall, its great to see how far they have come.
I put a few lessons in to a Prezi for my students. I like that their is a story and flow to how the material is presented. Adding some audio is the next step.
Here is a description of our new unit on waste written by one of the teachers that created the content: What is waste and why should we care? Home to only 4% of the global population, we (Americans) are responsible for more than 30% of the planet’s total waste generation. Each American discards an average of more than 1,650 pounds of garbage every year, or approximately 4.6 pounds per person each day, nearly double the 1960 average of 2.7 pounds per day. In Jackson, Wyoming, a town of about 10,000 people, we produce nearly 80 million pounds of waste per year, nearly 65% of which gets hauled over 100 miles away to a landfill in another state! How does your community compare? And, for every 1lb of waste you generate (downstream waste) nearly 7lbs of waste were generated to create the stuff you throw away (upstream waste)! Your task in this unit is to learn about the social, economic and environmental impacts of waste in your community and come up with a solution to help. To help you, you will learn about cause and effect mechanisms in science, great literary figures who effect change in their communities, artists who repurpose trash into treasure, go on a field trip to a recycling and/or waste transfer station and work to design a solution in social studies. You’ll also be exposed to people who have found problems, come up with creative solutions to those problems and made a difference in their communities. In the final stage of this unit, we will ask you to do the same. We call it the Greatest Show (& Tell) on Earth. Maker Faire is part science fair, part county fair, and part something entirely new! As a celebration of the Maker Movement, it’s a family-friendly showcase of invention, creativity, and resourcefulness. Faire gathers together tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, food artisans, hobbyists, engineers, science clubs, artists, students, and commercial exhibitors. Makers come to show their creations and share their learnings. Attendees flock to Maker Faire to glimpse the future and find the inspiration to become Makers themselves. Jackson Hole Mini-Maker Faire 2016: Celebrating innovation in the Tetons May 21, 2016/12-4 PM at the Jackson Campus of Teton Science Schools https://jhmakerfaire.wordpress.com/ http://makerfaire.com/ https://www.facebook.com/jhmakerfaire/
I'm not here to change any of that. Instead, I want to help them manage all these pitfalls and still get everything done. The following suggestions are adapted from "How to be a High School Superstar" by Cal Newport. If you don't have time to do it right, when are you going to have time to do it over? Too often, school is a place where students are told what not to do. It's all to common for teachers hand out or write their "classroom rules." Lately this has been renamed "expectations." Whatever its called, these are usually not the most motivational or inspirational statements. So I thought about how I could change this. This is something that resonates more with my ideas about teaching... |
Author"Your only as good as your record collection." -DJ Spooky Archives
September 2020
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