(Let it Snow) x 3

Today is the first day of Christmas vacation and I get to celebrate it with more than a foot of snow!  Most of you who read my blog can see this same storm out of your window, but I thought the rest of you might enjoy some photos.  I went for a 2 mile walk in the neighborhood and it was amazing how many people were trying to drive someplace.  Several said they just wanted to go buy some milk...didn't they think about this yesterday?  Are they really so desperate for milk that it's worth digging out the car, pushing it through drifts, and digging out a spot when they get back?  And if so, wouldn't it be faster just to walk??

This is a good indication of what the back roads looked like 2 hours ago - and it's still snowing!

It's hard to capture in a still photo how hard it's snowing.

Celebration

Tomorrow my students take their midterm exams.  Historically our students do very poorly on their exams (across the board, not just in math).  So before the potential downer that tomorrow may bring, I thought I should take a moment to celebrate the good things that are happening in my classes.

- My IB juniors are getting better at problem solving and explaining their solutions, which was my goal for the year.  Last week I gave them a bunch of very challenging problems and it was a pleasure to watch them bounce ideas off of each other.  It was hard not to give them help but it was worth it to see their delight when they figured it out by themselves.

- One of my Precalc students memorized the unit circle.  (If you don't remember, the unit circle contains all of the basic trig values like sin 30 = 1/2.  You probably once had it memorized too.)  We don't require our students to memorize the values because it would be impossible for some of them, but anyone going on to Calculus needs to know them.  So I made it an extra credit opportunity for students who could take the test without their circle.  Only one student took me up on it but it was a pleasure to see her figure out all of the patterns and grow to a deeper understanding as she figured out how to commit it to memory.

- Another Precalc student has turned around from barely passing first quarter to getting A's on every test.  He attentively takes notes and asks excellent questions.  His parents and tutor get all of the credit on this one, but I get to reap the benefits.

- My students were quiet and focused during our review day for the exam.  Typically these days have been a disaster for me as some students just don't care enough to pay attention and end up disrupting the students who want to learn.  This year I am really blessed with studious kids - maybe the exams won't be so terrible after all!

Surviving November

I didn't realize how long it had been since I last posted.  Last week I was off for a glorious 9-day Thanksgiving break and tried to avoid thinking about school.  Even with that ridiculously long break, November is still consistently the toughest month of the school year.  In fact this was the first November that I didn't start planning my next career move.  What makes November so crazy?  I'm not completely sure, but here are some contributing factors:


- The honeymoon is over
The ice has been broken, personalities are coming out, and as the course difficulty increases, stress sometimes brings out the worst in people (myself included).

- Parent-Teacher Conferences
I actually really enjoy these, but teaching from 8-12, meeting with parents in 10-minute intervals from 2-8, and then getting back in at 7 the next morning to teach again is exhausting (especially for an introvert!).

- Senior Retreat
Every faculty member goes on retreat with one of the classes.  The seniors go to a retreat house for a brief 27 hour retreat (Monday afternoon and Tuesday).  Only 60 seniors go on each retreat and it's actually pretty low-key and relaxing.  The downside is having to make sub plans and grade the papers that I left for the students to do to make sure they actually learned something while I was gone.  I also tend to be wiped out for the rest of the week after getting very little sleep on a Monday.  I really do not function well without adequate rest (how did I survive college?).

- Many consecutive 5-day weeks!
This year the administration got rid of all of our Professional Days (instead we get an hour of team planning every Wednesday morning).  Having one day a month to get caught up and get a break from the students was rejuvenating.  I don't think I realized how much those days helped with sanity until they were gone.

Well, all that is behind me now for another year.  Just two weeks until exams and then Christmas break!

"Do you think he smells like nachos?"

Teenagers are weird.

Exhibit A:  Before school started this morning my first period class spent five minutes sniffing one of my students because someone thought he smelled like nachos.  At first I feared that this was some kind of ethnic slur since the student is Latino.  But eventually I concluded that for some reason he must really smell like nachos at 8:00 in the morning because that was the general consensus of the many people who came over to sniff him.  Somehow I managed to resist the urge to verify this strange fact for myself.

Aerosol Adderall

One of the things I love about teaching seniors is that they are close to being adults - most of them can carry on interesting conversations, some of them know what is going on in the world, and all of them are taking on more responsibility for their own lives.  This supposed maturity does have its down sides and one of them is that many students with ADD decide to stop taking their medication.  I can't blame them for wanting to be free of the drugs - many of them are like zombies when on it and apparently it messes with their eating and sleeping.  However, a classroom filled with students with ADD who have never learned how to focus without the aid of medication can be completely overwhelming. 

That's why I've decided that I need to invent an aerosol version of Adderall (the current ADD drug of choice).  Too many students trying to walk around the classroom or escape to the bathroom?  No problem - just one spritz and they will all settle down.  Is a class of 28 students carrying on 15 different side conversations (yes, some people are in more than one conversation at the same time) - just give a little spray.  Are the non sequiturs driving you crazy?  Just use this product and you'll be able to do math uninterrupted.  Last period on Friday will no longer be a headache-inducing near waste of time!  It's the perfect solution!

Factorial Fun

Today my IB juniors were learning about factorials.  (As a reminder: 5! is read as "5 factorial" and means 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1.)  Several said that they loved the exclamation points because it made the math more exciting.  For the rest of the period whenever the answer called for a factorial they would shout the number to account for the exclamation point.  So 10!/5! would be "TEN divided by FIVE."  As their hilarity grew it got a little difficult to tell the difference between "TEN" and "ten" but I have to agree that it did make for an exciting class.

Tomorrow they want to learn math that uses question marks...I think that means we're going to be inventing something.

New Record

I may have set a personal record for number of absences in one period.  My first period on Friday was missing 10 out of 25 students!  No, we haven't been hit with an epidemic of swine flu - I think that only one student was sick.  The others were seniors who were helping on the 3-day junior retreat, helping at the soup kitchen (a group of 10 seniors goes every Friday), or going on college visits.  This sort of absenteeism is so typical for our school that I've decided not to bother giving tests or quizzes on Fridays if I can possibly avoid it - it's just not worth dealing with all of the makeups.

Down to Two

My three person senior IB class has shrunk again - now we are down to two!  In some ways this class is a dream come true - two highly motivated, very gifted students who will tackle any problem that I throw at them.  Unfortunately I'm rather rusty on the advanced math, so trying to find some interesting problems that supplement the curriculum is proving to be a challenge.

We're zipping through the curriculum, so last Friday we took a break and spent the period figuring out winning strategies for various simple games, including Nim and a variation of tic-tac-toe.  (In a simple variation of Nim, two players take turns taking 1 or 2 stones from a pile of 20 stones.  The last person to take a stone wins.)  Unfortunately my students decided that now that they know how to force a win in each of these games, they can start hustling people!  They may be my only students who see how what I teach them actually applies to real life!

Laugh of the Day

From first period study hall...

Me: Why aren't you doing any work?
Student: I left my backpack in the hall during the assembly and someone stole it.
Me: Really??? [Kids leave their stuff all over the place at our school and theft is very rare.]
Student goes out in the hall and returns in about 20 seconds with her backpack.
Student: I didn't see my backpack the first time because my sweatshirt was on top of it.

Trivia Fridays

Three times a week we meet for 10 minutes in the middle of the day in small community (basically a homeroom).  Considering that our classes are 85 minutes long and lunch is only 25 minutes, I think having this extra break for students to talk with friends is a good idea.  However, other than reading announcements that my community of seniors couldn't care less about, there isn't much to do during that time.  So this year I instituted Trivia Fridays using the new response card system that the school purchased for each department.  I type up the multiple choice questions in powerpoint and then students use the "clickers" to record their answers.  The computer keeps track of the points for each student.  It's a fairly nice system and the students love it, but somehow I don't think when the administrators spent however much on this system that they envisioned it being used to play games.  Hey, at least it's being used!

The Allure of an Empty Water Jug

Last year one of my students brought one of these empty water cooler jugs to class.  There was no good reason for it - apparently he just found it somewhere and couldn't resist picking it up.  I had to confiscate it because of course it was a major distraction.  Over the course of the day students tried to use it as a drum, a kazoo, a bat, and, my personal favorite, a telescope.  I, on the other hand, saw the tremendous mathematical possibilities in it and since that day have dreamed of my students using geometry and calculus to verify that it really does hold five gallons of water.  Today my dream came true!  After starting with an angled water glass and moving on to a wine goblet, my senior IB students used volumes of rotation to calculate the volume of the container, taking into account the cutout for the handle.  It was a truly beautiful sight!

The Verdict is In

The Precalculus students took their first full-length test on Thursday.  Testing weeks are full of a roller coaster of emotions for me - typically depression and stress the day before followed by hopeful anticipation during the test and then either joy or deeper depression after grading them.  To illustrate, here is what I was going to post on Wednesday:

School gets out at 2:45.  I was there until 4:45 today helping Precalculus students prepare for the test tomorrow.  I should be feeling good that so many students cared so much about learning the material.  Instead I feel like a failure because I know that several of those students will need a miracle to pass the test.  I don't like it when any of my students fail but I hate it when a student works hard and still can't do it.  I know that they have accumulated deficits from 12 years of math education.  I know that at least one has documented memory problems.  I know that several of them should not have waited until the day before the test to come in for help.  But I still believe that if a student sees me for extra help, I ought to be able to get him to pass the test.  When I look at the grade distribution on this test last year, I can't believe that I was able to help the students do that well.  There is no way that the majority will get A's and B's tomorrow.

Well, today I graded the tests and the verdict is...joy! Unbelievably my students actually did better this year.  I had about the same number of A's and B's but far fewer D's and F's.  One of the students who I thought would fail got a respectable 65%, almost double his score on the last test!  I am so proud of them! 

Logic Club

Today we held the second successful meeting of the Logic Club, the new group which I am moderating this year.  You are probably thinking "what in the world is Logic Club?"  No, we don't discuss Aristotle's syllogisms or make truth tables.  "Logic Club" is a title designed to look good on the students' college applications.  We actually spend an hour and a half every other Friday afternoon playing strategic board games!  So far they have played Risk, Othello, Stratego, and Warfare 1917 (an online game that they played using the projector and interactive whiteboard).

There is also some of the total silliness that one would expect from a group made up primarily of 17 year old boys.  For example, several of them spent about 15 minutes today typing phrases such as "I want" into Google and examining the suggested search options that appear in the drop down menu!   (To their credit this is pretty interesting - as an example, typing in "I want mi" produces "i want miley cyrus hair", "i want michelle obama arms", and "i want michael jackson back"!!)

When my student first approached me with the idea for the club I thought he would have a hard time getting anyone to join.  But it turns out that this club fills a real niche - we have had about 15 students at each meeting and they just love being there.  They run into the room and fling open the game cabinet as soon as school gets out.  Today I taught several of them how to play Settlers of Catan, one of my favorite games, so I had a great time too!

Precalculus

I've put off writing this post, hoping that I would eventually get to know my two Precalculus classes so that I could give them a proper introduction.  However, it's a month into school and I still don't know much about these two classes of 28 students.  As usual most of them dislike math and have a lot of gaps in their knowledge of algebra.  Unlike last year, both classes actually stay quiet while I teach them.  As a result, I leave class thinking about how delightful they are, but the students' personalities are only now beginning to appear.  By this time last year I already had one class that gave me a splitting headache on a regular basis, so I am very thankful for my current schedule.

It is also a bit odd not knowing any of the students (except for a handful from my freshmen homeroom two years ago).  The previous two years I had moved up with my students (teaching Geometry then Algebra II then Precalculus).  Last year there were 13 seniors who I had taught for 2.5 years and another 20 that I taught for 2 years.  I enjoyed getting to know them and miss them this year.  However the fact that they were so comfortable with me did cause some classroom management problems.  It was hard to break them of some bad habits we fell into when I first started and had no clue what I was doing.  All things considered, I think I'm happy to have a clean slate this year.

The Mullenator

I found out through the grapevine that some of my students from last year are calling me "The Mullenator". At first I wasn't sure how I felt about that title. But this week is Spirit Week and today's theme was superheroes, so I finally decided to embrace my alter ego. The Mullenator (also known as Mathgirl) can solve all of your math mistakes with that giant pencil in her hand. (Well, the design looked like a pencil in my head - we can see why I'm not an art teacher!)


My favorite moment of the day was when one of my students called me over for help while taking a quiz:

Student: I keep trying to find this value and the calculator won't do it.
(She performs the same keystrokes and it works perfectly.)
Student: I don't understand why it's working now.
Me: The Mullenator strikes again!


** I can't really believe that I walked around school like that all day - or that I just posted that picture online! The things you do to connect with your students...and entertain your potential blog readers! **

And Then There Were Three...

My new class this year is the Senior IB HL math course. The course is an odd mix of vectors, probability and statistics, and discrete math. Although the past two years I've had some non-IB students in the junior year course who want to get ahead in math, there is no reason to take this course unless you are in the IB program. As a result, we started with a whopping 5 students. Unfortunately two of them dropped out of the IB program after the first week of school, so now we are down to three!

Though this might sound like every teacher's dream, it actually presents a bit of a problem because all of my teaching strategies are designed for more people. It's hard to break up into groups or confer with a partner when there are only 3 people! It doesn't help that two of the students are incredibly gifted in math and whip through the practice problems, while the third student is a typical honors level student who, though intelligent, does need clarification and practice. Somehow I have to figure out how to give harder problems to those two while I help the third student fill in some gaps in his knowledge while still covering a packed curriculum. Once I get this figured out it could be a lot of fun. But for now we're just four introverts in a room quietly doing math problems for an hour and a half every other day.

Junior IB Class

Every day for an hour and a half I have the pleasure of spending time with 11 gifted juniors. They are taking the first year of the IB* higher level math course, which covers Precalculus in the fall and Calc I in the spring. This is my second year teaching this course and I love it. Of course I love that my students are capable of doing advanced math problems and of asking questions that often teach me something new. But the main reason I enjoy this class is because we spend so much time together that we get to know each other very well. After three weeks of school I know next to nothing about the students in my other classes, but we are already sharing stories and joking together.

I also give these students a lot of credit for how they are handling the difficulty level of this class. Most of them are used to putting in minimal effort and getting A's on tests whereas now they could easily end up with a B even after studying. We have one question quizzes every day that could be on any topic that they have ever covered in math. We have a unit test almost every week. For part of every test I take away their calculators. Yet they still have a positive attitude and most seem to be thriving. I guess they must really love math!

* The International Baccalaureate program is a worldwide diploma program in which students take advanced courses in all of their subject areas. The emphasis is on applying and synthesizing knowledge. Based on their aptitutde, students pick which subjects they can master at a higher level (at our school most students go standard level in math - the higher level test is tough).

New Year, New Blog

During my first year and a half of teaching I used to send out semi-regular email updates with (hopefully) amusing anecdotes about life in a high school math classroom. Last year was so exhausting that I never had the energy to write a long email. However, I know that some people enjoyed the updates and I liked having them as a chronicle of my first years of teaching. So...I decided to try out this blogging thing, hoping that I would be more motivated to make small updates on a more regular basis.

The next couple of posts will introduce each of my classes. If anyone else is reading this...enjoy!

By the way, the title of this blog comes from a common complaint of my students. Once we got to trigonometry it was entirely possible to solve complete problems (particularly proofs) without using any numbers!