Donating

On a lighter note than the last entry, here's a conversation from my last period Precalc class...

Steve:  Would you like to donate blood?  I have to get 10 people to sign up.
Paul:  Will I get paid?
Me:  If you get paid, then it's not donating.
Paul:  Would anyone pay me for donating blood?
Me:  The Red Cross won't but maybe somebody would.
Steve:  Someone in a back alley maybe.
Paul: Well, what else could I donate for money?  Do we have two livers?
Me: No, but your liver does regenerate, so you could donate part of that.  But I don't know if anyone will pay you.
Paul:  What about a kidney?  I'd be willing to sell it on the black market.
(I gave up and walked away at that point and when I returned I heard...)
Paul:  The problem with that is that 18 years later someone might walk up to me and say "hey, I'm your daughter!".
Kevin:  Or you might end up having to pay child support.
Leah:  I think you get paid more for donating eggs anyway.
Paul:  Hey, that's not fair!

I decided not to explain why eggs might be worth more.  I'd already cleared up the biological fact that we only have one liver - it was well past time to get back to math.

Tough Day

Yesterday was a tough day at school.  One of our students who graduated last year had been diagnosed with cancer during his sophomore year.  He was in the hospital for most of the next 3 years and received two bone marrow transplants during that time.  Amazingly, he was able to graduate and was in remission at the time.  We heard in the fall that the cancer had returned and earlier this week he passed away.

I never taught this student but I often saw him in the math office last year getting help to pass Precalculus.  He was polite, kind, funny, and hard working.  Just by talking to him you would never know what he had been through.  Like many children who have been that sick, he hoped to become a doctor one day.  As recently as November he was still looking ahead to college when he emailed his old math teacher to get some review material.  That's the anecdote that gets to me the most - all of that potential and those future plans cut short.

We are going to have a prayer service for him and his family tomorrow (one of the perks of teaching in a Catholic school) which will provide closure for many in our community.  I have to remember that many of my seniors who were close to him will be grieving for a long time to come.

The Overhead

Despite the digital projector built into every classroom ceiling, the teacher who shares my room sticks with using the (literally) old school overhead projector.  I think that she has to buy her own bulbs and she definitely buys her own pens, but it's worth it to her to be able to look at the class while she is writing down notes.  Anyway, the other day some of my students "discovered" the overhead and its remarkable capacity to blind unsuspecting passersby.  This resulted in the following prank...

Matt (sitting casually with his hand next to the projector power switch)
Dave (looking into the top of the projector):  What is that thing in there?  I can't tell what it is.  Hey Kelly, can you see what that thing is?
Me (as Kelly naively attempts to stare into the heart of the projector while Matt goes for the power switch):  Noooo, don't do it!

Poor Kelly...luckily she was not permanently blinded...that thing is dangerously bright.

Money for Grades

At the end of every marking period or right before exams students start bargaining for grades.  Several always try to offer me money for an A.  I don't know if this is a universal teenage trait or more specific to my school where many kids are used to being able to buy anything that they want.  Even though I know it's a joke, there are some who would truly pay me if I'd let them.  I used to get really annoyed that this is their response to adversity and angry that they would think their teachers could be bought.  Now I've gotten better at rolling with the joke.

This year I pretended to be insulted that they only offered me $20 - you think I'm so poor that $20 is worth lying and not doing my job?  They upped the ante to $1000 at that point. :)  When that still didn't work, one boy offered to let me adopt him!  I'm still confused about how suddenly having a 17-year old son is beneficial to me, but this display of his "logic" may explain why he is having trouble in math in the first place.

Despite all of these discussions, no money (or children!) has ever actually changed hands.  Not so for my colleague who received a $1 bill stapled to one boy's midterm!  I don't think $1 will buy you any points but the laugh we got might be worth a couple.

The Benefits of Sleep?

I don't know who was in my classroom today during second and third period, but it sure didn't seem like the same Precalculus students that I had before break.  In each class there was a good 45 minutes in which they quietly took notes, worked on the problems, and asked good questions.  You could have heard a pin drop - I didn't have to stop side conversations or refocus their attention up front. 

They were remarkably good on Tuesday as well, but not quite as extraordinarily quiet.  I think one reason that they were paying so much attention is because this material is new (the first truly brand new concepts of the year) and yet also very do-able for people with mediocre algebra skills.  They didn't care about when people would use this in the real world (though I tried to tell them) - if the material seems manageable they will happily do it.

Or maybe they were just well rested after Thanksgiving break and things will be back to normal on Monday.  We shall see...

Precalculus 2010

I don't know how I managed it, but this year I ended up with two awesome Precalculus classes.  One class is filled with excellent students who also possess reasonably good math skills.  Out of 27 students, only 3 earned below a B for the first quarter, which would be a great outcome even for an honors class.

The other class is a bit more challenging because almost half of them have ADD.  Somehow this class of 22 feels bigger than the class of 27 because their personalities are much stronger.  Thankfully I enjoy being around them, even if I do occasionally lose control of the class discussion.  For example, this conversation occurred right in the middle of the lesson one day -

Student 1: John has a new kitten at home.
Student 2: I hate kittens.  I wish they would all die.
Student 3: I love kittens.  They're so cute.
Me: Great, thanks for sharing - so what about the domain of this function?
All students start talking amongst themselves about their feelings regarding kittens.  Once they finish sharing we can finally go back to the lesson!

Never a dull moment!

Inside the Non-Mathematical Mind

Part of what makes my job so interesting is trying to understand how my mathematically challenged students think.  Often when they do something that seems completely random there is an odd kind of logic behind it.

For example, one of the problems on the last Precalc test involved finding the cost of fencing for an oddly shaped piece of land.  Multiple students found the area of the figure instead of the perimeter.  When I reiterated that this was supposed to be a fence, several told me that "yes, I'm fencing in the area."  For students who are more verbal than visual, their mental use of the word area (it didn't appear in the problem) led them in the wrong direction.

In another question students were given that the lengths of the diagonals of a parallelogram were 8 and 14.  Several students drew the problem incorrectly as shown below.  They claimed that since the sides of the parallelogram were not perpendicular, they must be "diagonal."  Of course this is perfectly reasonable if they had not already had a course in geometry!

Senioritis

Apparently the following equation is true:

2nd semester senior year + 49" of snow + 10 days off + Winter Olympics = A Major Case of Senioritis

I have a hard time understanding how students could be off for 10 days and not even complete 20 minutes of math homework.  Playing in the record-breaking snow all week and putting off the work until the last weekend is one thing (that's what I did!).  But showing up to class and having no idea if homework was even assigned is tough to understand.

I figured things would get better after they were back in school for a couple of days, but the next assignment was even worse because we didn't have time to start it in class.  In one class only 8 out of the 24 present students had completed the homework, which was only 4 of 19 seniors.  I could handle these statistics if they were doing any work in class, but that is not the case, and unfortunately it is rather difficult to solve trig equations without practicing.

Is it May yet?

Fear of Fractions

In Precalculus we just finished the first of the two most challenging units of the year.  Students had to draw graphs of sine and cosine functions that had been transformed in some way (stretched/compressed, moved vertically or horizontally, etc.).  The ultimate goal was to complete word problems that could be solved by writing a sine or cosine function to model the situation.  One would think that the most challenging part of this would be the word problems, but those actually went fairly well.  No, it was the fractions required to correctly label the scale on the x-axis that caused meltdowns even among some of my better students.

Note that if you just look at the fractions this student thinks the order should be 5/2, 1/4, 3/2, 1, 2/2, 2/3.  Yes, my high school graduates students who think that 3/2 is less than 1, 2/3 is greater than 1, and 2/2 is a different number from 1.  I just hope when they go to college they don't mention who their last math teacher was.

Report Cards

The end of the quarter is tomorrow which always brings a flurry of last minute makeup work as well pleas for me to bump up grades. It can also bring some amusing conversations, such as this one that occurred with one of my seniors last year:

Student: Could you please stop writing comments on my report card?
Me: Well, we have to write comments for anyone who got a C or lower. Why?
Student: It makes it very difficult to Photoshop!

Yes, the student who rarely completed homework spent several hours Photoshopping her report card to improve her grades and comments. I guess her parents never figured out how to log in to the online gradebook??

Back to Work

After a 16-day hiatus, we finally started back to school on Monday. Boy was that a tough day! I tried to keep my classes very interactive to help the students ease back into things, but they were too tired to do anything even quasi-fun. They were supposed to make graphs on poster paper and usually the mere mention of markers gets them excited. On this occasion they were too lazy to even hang up their posters and tried to complete the project without moving from their desks. It's a good thing I had already moved the desks into groups or we might not have gotten anything done!

Today was not much better - they seemed even more exhausted and looking at the class gave me flashbacks to zombie movies. On the plus side we got a ton accomplished because they were sitting quietly and dutifully taking notes. We'll see if they remember anything next class.

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!

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.