Ms. Z

I really am going to share with you how I organized my thoughts on the many plane rides I had today—(can anyone beat 3—if you count boarding the middle one and having to deplane and find another flight to SF)

Who knows if there will ever be a part two, but I wanted to get this out ASAP for a couple of reasons. 1) To pay it forward—contributing to the generosity of “laying” work on the MTBoS that our community is so good about, 2) Committing myself to reflecting and remembering and

3) to keep the light of community glowing in my heart.

I am a kinesthetic learner, duh. Alice (@ ) says to me, “You must workout a lot.” Not really I say, I MOVE a lot. (We really do have a set of rings in our entryway that I play on EVERY day) I mention this because I love writing and love the physicality of composing my thoughts on paper. (three-quarters of a composition book filled for TMC16).

At the back of my comp book, I made few title pages:

And then I filled them up. The longest one is Currriculum/Fall Prep,

Next Longest is To Look Up (to check out), then To Share. It was delightful

to go back and read and reflect. I am re-energized and encouraged to share with

my colleagues at home, even if I struggle with feeling reluctant to share with some of

them for the pain I feel from their lack of support of me. ( AND I have all of

you backing me up) What are the titles of your pages?

PS I always have the support of my some of my colleagues and ALL of my adminstrators.

I had a little cry today. I knew I needed to go home all day, these were appreciation tears. Thanks to Sarah over at Math = Love, for the great idea. This submission is a keeper!

ABC Advice to a new class for fall: College Readiness (Math for Seniors not on the STEM track, but with an interest in keeping up their math chops--Math for Humanities Majors???)

Don't want to bore anyone to tears, AND, if you had some trials trying to differentiate some of the SMP's, here is how I see it:

SMP 7-Look for and make use of structure vs. SMP 8-Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

With some help from a very LOGICAL colleague, I have wrapped my head around "Look for and Make Use of Structure" as being about taking a big chunk and breaking it down into pieces. (This is one of my favorite SMPs--what a geek!) With Pre-Calc we are working with Polar Graphing. Looking at each piece of a polar equation and determining where to begin, what part drives the petals, the loop, and the dimple has been a lot more enjoyable and pragmatic.
We started with this hand-out: file here

after a some explores with this Desmos Activity Builder: Polar Equation Investigation.
Notice and Wonder. Can you make sense of the structure of the equation? Can you break it down by family? Are you curious what wonderment it will draw and why? If you want to alter it, can you? How much do you need to see before you can fill in the rest by yourself?
In an earlier post, I commented on how I want my students to view equations as stories. They (the equations) have families and quirks, and regularities, and some stuff that isn't so regular. It is kind of like taking apart a machine and putting it back together so that you understand how it works.

What story do these polar equations tell?

Objective: Demonstrate Mathematical Curiosity
What: Geometry Projects
Help Wanted: 25% of Final or Extra Credit?

Extra Credit means less to grade and higher quality work. 25% of Final means students have more control over their semester final and broader view for me for summative assessment.

Objective: Demonstrate mathematical curiosity

To Do: You will choose one of 5 projects to complete

Here is the beautiful file for Rolling Cups that my TA made. The rest of the files will get added, as I make them! Download all files here

I worry about being in control of all the technology in my classroom. I worry about asking students to all take out a device, because there will be a few who don't have one or don't have data to jump online. So what do you do to preserve the teachable moment when you haven't booked the the Lab or Chromebooks weeks in advanced? I take control (unfortunately) of the technology. Am I not helping when I assume that at least I am capturing the moment? My husband just opined from the other room that if I use a formative assessment to measure if they have learned what I intended then it is not a problem.

Scenario:
I thought I was being clever with this hands-on investigation of the Intersecting Chord Theorem.

It was a fail. There wasn't enough curiousity, the measurements were so all over the place that no quantitative regularity could be found to make a conjecture.

I had the students but a giant X through the front and and turn the paper over.

I asked them to make a grid with six columns and 5 rows.

Then I turned on the projector and trotted over to Geogebra.

I asked the students to make a column for BF, FD, CF, FE. Ss "Ms. Z there are 6 columns." Me: "I know, try your best to ignore them for the moment."

Nothing much interesting happened until I used the arrow tool to pull one of the points around. The students liked that. So I pulled Pt. E a bit away from Pt. D and we again wrote down the values. We did it twice more. And then I gave the students the remaining 2 columns: BFxFD and CF x FE. I then asked the students to notice and wonder. Now cool stuff was happening. I asked the STUDENTS how we could summarize this cool property. What could we call everything to make the property clear.

AND here is the kicker! I was too tired to make up my own example so I opened the textbook (can you believe it, I haven't opened that thing for months!) and just at that moment, Kelly, one of my most enthusiastic Geometry students, asked, "Really Ms. Z, I don't mean to be rude, but WHY are we learning this?" And there in front of my eyes the answer:

So I drew the shard, but before we got into the mathematics, we had such a fabulous conversation about the archaeology of the shard.

Where was it found?
What else was it found with?
Was it made of material from the area?
Was it a gift?
What kind of plate was it?
Did it have any markings on it?

I went back to the question, what kind of plate was it? I asked if there was more than one kind of plate. This usually quiet male student pipes up, "we have salad plates." (That comment made me happy!) We talked about the significance of the size of the plate, was it a platter? An offering plate?

About this point the students knew what I was on about and were begging me to draw in the chord. They had to fuss a little to remember that if the diameter it perpendicular to the chord, it bisects the chord. Was it possible to find the perpendicular bisector of the chord, sure! And every thing fit together nicely. Thanks Textbook.

We had just learned the construction for finding the center of a circle too. So I had to ask was there another way...does it matter the size of the shard?

So back to the question, did I own too much of the technology? And of course next year, I will schedule the computer lab way in advanced!

Also, my imagination went on such overdrive with the shard, that I am going to incorporate archaeology into one of the circle projects the students get to choose. When I get those more together, I will post them. What are your favorite Circle Projects?

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