Time to assign class nap time

Today is less of a blog and more of a diary and general complaint directed at the pointless institution called Daylight Savings time. Who really is benefiting from more sunlight in the morning anyway? All the farmers have head lights on their combines these days.

Today at school was really tiring. More than half the student body looked like zombies even with the supposed "extra hour" of sleep. It just made the day feel all out of whack. So I think tomorrow I will assign a mandatory 5-minute nap in each hour. No drooling allowed.

Staff also got extra zombified by showing up 15 minutes early to work to practice our "Thriller" flash dance moves. It's gonna be epic. Thanks to our new choir director for choreographing the whole thing! Best exercise (or should I say only exercise) I've gotten before 8 in the morning in longer than I can remember.

Nighty night all. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZ

What do rabid Zombie Math Teachers do all day?

Happy Daylight Savings everyone! 

As I ramp up for a free extra hour of zombie fun,   ( aka house cleaning )  

I started thinking about how much of my time is actually dedicated to teaching. Not just the physical act of teaching; but the prep involved, the meetings about teaching and the students, the parent communication, the website development/updating, the lesson planning, professional development, transportation to and from, paper correcting, and of course plain old thinking about teaching. 

The graph above was made at graphjam.com which has probably popped up in your search results if you've ever looked at anything funny that happened to have a pop culture reference in it. The other top site is of course icanhascheezburger.com where you will find a lot of cat-related humor with extremely poor grammar. I like to paste items from both sites randomly into my Smart lessons to grab the student's attention and make them laugh (thus relieving tension). 

My pie chart makes me laugh, but also makes me want to cry. Watching pay check after pay check get wasted on heating and garbage and water bills, cable/internet bills, gas, groceries and not much else... I wonder why I keep doing this! I guess because I love it. But what I truly want to know, is am I the only one? What do other teachers' pie charts look like? Especially Language Arts teachers? 

After two attempts at assigning math essays to my classes, I can thoroughly grasp just how much time Language Arts professionals spend grading papers. If they do it carefully. It is so easy to write 10/10 on a paper, add a couple smiley faces or stars here or there, or put a check mark and your initials on your paper. But kids catch on really quick to your lack of feedback, and stop trying so hard to please you. 

So how much is your time really worth!?!? Mine, taking my salary into account and dividing my teaching-related activities into it, is about $6.50 per hour. I believe that is less than minimum wage. What, then, is the magic cycle breaker to get out of this habit? Stop caring so much about my students? Stop trying to innovate and improve my lessons? Stop attending meetings where I collaborate and vent to my coworkers? Call in sick once per week to keep up? Oh wait... writing sub plans takes twice as long as being there myself. 

The only magic answer I can think of.... drum roll... SLEEP LESS. Except for tonight of course. Gaining an extra hour of sleep will probably mean I'll just stay up an hour later. Welcome back, Zombie Math Teacher.

November Book Sale is ON!

 Coordinate Graph Art for Grades 6-8 (teacher edition, with keys included) is now on sale for $9.99!

Coordinate Graph Art: Student Edition is also on sale for $7.99! Order a set for your classroom today!

The best part to ordering in bulk through Amazon.com is the free shipping on orders over $25. Amazon is also running a 4 for 3 promotion that will automatically credit your account upon checkout. Most school districts will process a P.O. from their site so buy now while the sale is still on.

Aligns with NCTM Geometry standards in the areas of coordinate plane geometry and transformations.

How to eat your 1-2-3's

http://www.zazzle.com/eat_sleep_math_tshirt

As I paw through my sons' Halloween candy stashes, I started thinking about the many ways that I can incorporate food into classroom math lessons. Aside from my previous posts, there have got to be a lot more ideas out there that I can steal. So I googled "Math + Food" and found all sorts of goodies. Happy eating!

Oh and by the way I'm always looking for new math shirts... add this to my Christmas list, please Santa!?!? Probably a "medium" since it's Men's. Kay thanks.

Pauline's 40 Ideas for Mixing Food and Math - I clicked on this first because I read it too fast and thought it said "Paula Dean's 40 Ideas"... Oops! Still good though. Maybe with less butter on top. My favorite is the geometric solids with toothpicks and marshmallows. Great for vertices and edges too! The air can be the faces.

Vi Hart's Mathematical Food is by far the prettiest site I've been to in a while. Very good applications for musical / spatial learners. He has beautiful and tasty food applications, a blog, music clips and beadwork, and perfect for leftover Halloween treats - Sierpinski's triangle with candy corn!

Measure geometric shapes and proportions with great ideas from Miss Celliana's Files. That bagel and the cheese look scrum-diddly-umptious. And I could see students making somewhat less advanced, but still yummy versions of the cupcake.

Wondering if there are resources in print? Got some budget money left to burn? Check out FoodMaster. The goal is to integrate food science with math in a variety of settings. Current literature is for grades 3-5, but they are looking for partners interested in expanding to K-1 or middle school. We have an "Edible Classroom" student garden housed outside our school, and there are many opportunities to teach life skills here with seasonal foods.

And now for something completely different! Math Goes Pop! The tag line says "Ruminations on the Intersection Between Mathematics and Popular Culture", and that's exactly what I'm seeing so far. There is a tab specifically for Math and Food, highlighting random tidbits like pricing mistakes, combo meal combinations, and Top Chef. There are another 10+ sensational topics like "Animal Math" and "Math in the Movies" on their own tabs, to keep even a non-blogging math teacher and students intrigued for many a day.

Yummy Math has a pile of food-related ideas as well, some of which I've never seen before. Along with interdisciplinary topics, sports ideas, business math, and the very random lessons on "anytime math".

Enough food for thought. Which makes me hungry. For some pumpkin pi.

Math + Halloween = Zombie Fun

Happy Halloween everyone! 

As I search the net for free Halloween music like "Monster Mash" and might possibly pay to download "Thriller" (can't believe I don't have that one yet), it seemed appropriate to highlight some of my favorite Halloween and season-themed activities. Enjoy!

Time saver attention grabber tip: Go to Google Images and type in "Halloween Math" and you'll find cute pictures like this pumpkin that you can paste into your Smart lessons. The kids love it. And they may be fooled into thinking you actually made it ;)

Favorite cheap treat that isn't "halloweeny" enough to offend non-Halloween celebrating students: bring in suckers. They are cheap, tasty, and the rate of consumption of sugar in your class will drop off significantly for 10 minutes unless they are obnoxious enough to bite through it. The most student requests include Caramel Apple suckers, Blow Pops, Jolly Rancher suckers, but most surprising to me, Tootsie Pops! I always thought they were boring. Apparently they're making a come back.

Best middle school math activity, if the other grades don't get angry at you for stealing it: M&M color distribution analysis. We even scored our bags 1/2 off last year from Target!! Although I can't imagine any kids complaining that they got to do it more than once, and you can actually tailor it to meet many different math objectives. 

In the seventh grade MN math standards, students are expected to carry out simple data experiments, make histograms, convert data into percents out of the total, and graph in pie-chart form as well. What better way to investigate the interrelationship of all of these concepts, than by ripping open a bag of M&M's!? (fun-size of course, we don't want to get them too sugared up).

Better yet, record entire classes' worth of data in order to practice mean, median, mode and range for each color and/or each entire package. I also gave a homework extension assignment last year in which students could statistically analyze the types and quantities of Halloween candy they received. What a great way to reinforce and/or replicate the in-class investigation, without feeling like they did basically more of the same thing.

Heck of a lot more interesting than crunching meaningless worksheets' worth of random numbers, if you ask me. And tastier too!

Another branch of math you can easily relate is of course Geometry. There are endless corny jokes about "pi", in which you could carve the number or the symbol into a pumpkin and call it "Pumpkin Pi". Or maybe you want to measure the circumference and diameter of the pumpkin in order to derive or "make pi". 

In our current unit we are studying transformations in the coordinate plane and similarity. The possibilities are endless when it comes to pumpkins! Analyze the size, type, rotation/reflection of various polygons in the pumpkin's face. Rotate, dilate or translate pumpkins around the Cartesian plane. We are making "Mug Wumps" from the CMP Course 2 "Stretching & Shrinking" unit. 

While practicing the art of enlarging the Wump characters, especially around Halloween, the little guys are bound to turn up with fangs, costumes and other imposter artifacts. Just go with it! It's fun and educational, and leads to great conversations on similar versus not.

Lastly, and my personal favorite, is dressing up in some pop culture reference. My current faves are vampires and anything related to the Hunger Games. Anything that makes the students laugh (either with you or at you is fine!), but that also sparks conversations, helping both teachers and students get to know each other better.

I bought this last year along with obnoxious jingling cat-shaped bell earrings, and I think I'll wear it again. If it still fits. After all, Breaking Dawn does come out in theaters in a few weeks! YESSSS.... Go Team Nessie!

Zombie students disrespect my authoritay!

Before I begin my post, let me just pat myself on the back that the "student edition" of Coordinate Graph Art for Grades 6-8 is now available! Only $9.99 per copy on Amazon. If you have a school district interested in a classroom set, that would be willing to set up a P.O. for "CreateSpace.com", I'd be happy to offer a 20% bulk discount. Just let me know at support@mathbymandy.com.

Now onto some more troubling subject matter, which I am sure has plagued every teacher on the planet to some extent. What do you do with a student who intentionally attacks your teaching style? Or your subject matter? Or the validity of an assignment? Or the grading qualifications for an assignment?

Normally this is not something that I would take personally. I know the 7th grade math standards like the back of my hand. I've developed specific goals and objectives for everything we do in class, and I feel I have articulated the reasoning behind each assignment specifically to students, on several occasions, in words, picture, text, email, blog and Facebook entries. So how does a contrary, snarky, sarcastic piece of student work, turned in late, with no attempt at completion of the actual assignment, get under my skin so badly!?

I need some therapy here, so stick with me. Maybe by blogging about it, I'll feel better. So here's some background. We are in the beginning phases of a unit on similarity, scale change, and transformations in the coordinate plane. Many 7th graders in particular have a rough time retaining %/decimal/fraction concepts, and extra connections between ratio/rate/unit rate/slope and scale factor/dilation/transformation is crucial. Thus leading into why I insist on completing the Illuminations Paper Pool unit every year.

Although the State of Minnesota has hereby decreed that all 6th graders should now understand ratio concepts, proportional/linear relationships are still a huge part of the 7th grade standards. Whether or not students have retained a significant portion of that which was learned in 6th grade, I still feel the need to scaffold them from numerical ratios into geometric ratios, through the lens of the Paper Pool project. I highly encourage all nay-Sayers to click the link above and play around with it. You'll see what I mean really quickly.

#1. Reminder: Middle School is a time for defiance. Don't take it personally when a student calls your assignment meaningless, questions what the relevance is to real-world applications, and then further to assert that real-world assignments are pointless. My response: "Are you alive? Do you buy things? Do you look at pictures? Do you look at yourself in the mirror? Do you use Google Earth to look at your house or MapQuest to look at directions? I'm sorry, but proportional relationships DO matter."

#2. Reminder: You may have explained the goals and objectives of the lesson seven times, but your students may not be auditory processors of information. I have been getting all worked up over two particular students' defiance of my "telling of the 7th grade MN standards" several times, and how it personally relates to THEM.

While I have given the students Myers-Briggs personality inventories, learning style inventories, information processing inventories, and extensive annual and unit pre-tests, I am lazily forgetting the fact that 90% OF MY STUDENTS ARE NOT AUDITORY PROCESSORS! As I type this, I'm banging my head against the wall. DUH, you can "say" a million times what the "point" of the lesson is, but if they're not listening, it DOESN'T MATTER! Note to self... write objectives down and type them on my Smart lessons.

#3. Reminder: "Real World Applications" doesn't mean anything to students in middle school because they DON'T LIVE IN THE REAL WORLD. They live in a semi-cocooned existence, shrouded by parental supervision, religious activity (most of which is extremely helpful), strenuous athletic competition, or the opposite, total indolence. (aka. video games, Farmville, Black Opps 2, Call of Duty, you name it). What the "real world" of having a job, making money to support a family, their future career/livelihood, only has any meaning if they have actually THOUGHT about it.

I pride myself in "real world connections", but now that I've had a couple "zombie beverages" which for a Friday night, you can probably guess what they are, I am having a sort of out-of-body experience... thinking back to my days as a middle-schooler, and what mattered to me then. Was I thinking about my future? Heck no! And if I was, I was so completely lost as to what in a million possibilities I might be doing, that I couldn't possibly narrow down even one... so what benefit does a "real world assignment" really serve?

Which leads me to....

#4. Reminder: Teenagers are constantly reinventing themselves. Any time you can develop curriculum, in any branch of any subject, that connects to what they are doing at that precise moment, is time well spent. What are they interested in now? What are they reading now? What is current in the media/movies now? And are you willing as a teacher to constantly re-invent yourself to reach the Pop-Culture and Pop-Art of what is NOW??? 'Cuz let me tell you, it's a lot of WORK.

#5. Reminder: What is the gender of the student who is defying you? I am a woman, and I cannot honestly say that I have ever had a female student defy me. Why is this? Might it have something to do with the fact that we have different motivations, ways of thinking, understandings of our world, or that the majority of the educational system is run by women, while 50/50 or a minority of our "successful" students are males?

There is a constant brushing under the rug of gender issues in education. I actually got to the brink of destroying a relationship with a close colleague over the factor of gender in learning and teaching in America, and it still floats like a palpable fog over every collaborative minute I spend with the person. GENDER DOES MATTER. Especially when you are a male student, and you've had NOTHING but female teachers in your math classes for the last 5-10 years of your existence.

You start to wonder... why aren't there more MALE teachers in the world? In math? Is teaching really a valid profession, if men choose not to do it? Why should I respect my teacher? If she were really that good at math, WHY ISN'T SHE AN ENGINEER!?!?!? (like all the other men)

Which leads me to my final point...

#6. Remember: YOU LOVE YOUR JOB! It is your DUTY as a teacher to express verbally and objectively, whatever your gender, that you CHOSE this job. I myself have worked in international transportation, studied and taught Spanish, been a stay-at-home mom, considered majoring in Aerospace Engineering, only later to decide after touring the U department that it was the most BORING thing I could do with my time... but have I told this story to my students lately? No!

We forget as educators that our students want to know US just as well as any story characters in the books that they are reading. In order for us to be role models, they have to understand where we've been, where we're going, and what makes us tick, and WHY on God's green earth, we would choose such a poor paying profession to exercise our talents, with few to no opportunities for either recognition or growth. Because we love to see that passion ignited in our students, and feel like we had some small part to play in it.

Anyway I am turning into more of a zombie by the minute and I don't really know if I answered exactly why defiant students make me feel so bad as a teacher... but I think the bottom line is, if you're a student, and you're going to write a sassy rebuttal to an assignment that has been given, please remember that...

YOUR TEACHER IS A HUMAN BEING TOO.

By intentionally defying your teacher, you are stating that you think your teacher doesn't have a clue. You don't believe in his/her ability to decide what is good for you, you don't see the value in what they are trying to teach you, and above all, you are insolent and unfeeling enough to record it on paper. OUCH.

I hope that some day you regret it. Although you're probably too doped up on your own hormones to even remember that you wrote it.

Have you flipped for Flip-Class yet?

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend a fantastic workshop marketed for G/T students and teachers interested in DI. The presenter is one of the most exciting people I have met in a long time, and I wanted to give him a free plug for his upcoming training in IL on 11/10/11. Google this topic and you'll find all the registration materials you need.

Dr. Cash takes a new perspective on DI in his engaging book, and gave me lots of tidbits that I have already implemented into my curriculum to reach those various "types" of G/T kids, and various other types of equally unique learners. And he'll make you laugh from beginning to end, which is all we really want out of a day off, right!?

Anyhoo, after listening to Dr. Cash all morning, we were treated to a variety of break-out sessions, and as would make sense, I followed the math group over to the math session. I had read the brochure and wasn't quite sure what to make of it, until it began. Then my heart started pounding, my brain began racing, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since!

So what exactly does it take to get a Zombie teacher into "crazed" mode? (other than several caffeinated beverages) The newest topic to hit the educational waves... although it's so ancient in its core principles, as to be laughed at for calling it a "new idea". It's called FLIP CLASS. 

What the heck IS flip class, you may ask? Well, it's what people used to do all the time before education became an institution. It's called TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN LEARNING. Grab a book, or in this case, an online lecture, watch the lecture, interact with the materials provided, TRY YOUR BEST AS A STUDENT TO FIGURE OUT THE CONCEPT FOR YOURSELF. AT HOME. 

http://theactiveclass.com/2011/04/29/flipping-your-classroom/

When you return to class the next day, the teacher gives a warm-up or sort of pre-assessment of the topic, allows students to self-grade and self-sort into instructional groups (independent, semi-independent, direct instruction), in order to complete the homework or assignment IN CLASS. Hence why it's called the "Flip-Class" method. Because they do their instructional piece at home, and their work in class. 

The biggest benefit to home learning is that students can spend as much or as little time as they need on mastering the concept, and then come in and get the help they need (or not get the help they don't need) during class. Please click on the link above to read more... as I'm probably not explaining it very well. Maybe the "Lost" metaphor, used by our Flip-Class presenter and high school math teacher Andy Schwen, would help you too. I know that my students responded very well to it, and I was able to look through their homework papers to see their self-identification (Dharma, Smoke Monster, or Lost). 

The Dharma Initiative

Your advanced and/or 

independent learners

"This is OUR island. We know it, we live here, we can survive and we DON'T need your help". This group is for the kids that either already understood the homework concept/ objective, figured it out on their own quickly, or are very capable of managing their own learning. They sit in the back of the room and work on the homework either together or individually, and when they're done, they work on extension projects.

The Smoke Monsters

Your semi-independent learners

 "We are starting to figure out this island. If we work together and help each other out, we can probably survive on our own. We at least know to RUN AWAY from the Smoke Monster!!!" This group is for students who kind of understand the concept, but want to talk about it and try to figure it out with their neighbors before asking the teacher for help. Students in this group should sit in the middle of the room and work with 4-5 other students on homework and concept mastery.

These groups are not static. "Smoke Monsters" can discuss the flip-lesson they watched the night before, ask each other or a "Dharma Representative" for help when they get stuck, before asking the teacher. Otherwise they should be able to complete the homework/assignment relatively independently. Students may get up and switch groups at any time, if they have made a breakthrough and want to move "up", or if they hit a wall and need to move "down". Which leads me into the third group:

LOST!

For students who need 

direct instruction

"We just fell out of a plane and are walking around dazed and lost. What is this place? What is going on? Am I alive or dead? And why do I keep seeing a white unicorn running through the underbrush?" This group is for students who tried the flip-lesson and couldn't make sense of it, or were absent, or for those few learners who always need to be shown one-on-one before it "clicks".

"Lost" students meet up front, and are scaffolded through the first few problems until they get it. As soon as that light bulb goes off, they can get up quietly and go join the Smoke Monsters. After 5-10 minutes, you will probably be left with 2-3 students who may very well need guidance through the entire assignment. And that's the POINT! Everyone is getting what help they need, when AND if they need it!  Assuming there is time left, everyone reconvenes towards the end of class and discusses common problems, finishes correcting homework, and turns it in. 

No late work! No excuses! No confused parents! Students are held accountable!

Now for the buy in... think it over... check out the linked articles and blogs... I will dedicate my next few posts to debunking myths and possible concerns over the flip-class method, and also to keeping a log of how Flip-Class is going in my own classroom. My goal is to phase it in slowly... 1 lesson per week, maybe 2... we'll see how it goes.