http://understanding.mindtangle.net A Teacher's Journal Thu, 20 Dec 2007 06:53:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en As previously mentioned, I've been trying to decide what to do next year. Now I've made up my mind: I'm leaving the school I've been with for the past two years and going to a large (and functional) district school. This was a difficult choice in many ways, ... http://understanding.mindtangle.net/?p=243 The completely non-sexy acronym AMS DMR somehow seems like a perfect fit for this site where you can download a huge amount of math journals in the public domain. I have barely scratched the surface here, but hopefully with more eyes looking at this stuff we can unearth some ... http://understanding.mindtangle.net/?p=242 For my question of the day today, I asked: Do you think it's fair for someone to take a picture of you in public and post it on the internet? This of course was prompted by the recent street view controversy, but most students weren't aware of that. They talked about ... http://understanding.mindtangle.net/?p=241 When I took calculus in high school, my teacher was a master at creating alternate realities. Through the sheer force of his personality (and probably 20 years of practice) he drew in the class and we came out the other end knowing not only his procedures and policies but ... http://understanding.mindtangle.net/?p=240 Last week I described the review presentations that my students are doing this week. Today was one of the most wildly varying days I've ever experienced. Surprisingly, my "less able" geometry classes are the ones that did best. Students were extremely attentive to their peers, took good ... http://understanding.mindtangle.net/?p=239 Any suggestions as to what math can be done with this kind of data? The image is a screen shot from Vernier Logger Pro. You can click on it to see the whole thing. It's a graph of acceleration and height data collected on a roller coaster by some of ... http://understanding.mindtangle.net/?p=238 I just yelled at a class. I don't think I've ever really done that before. It's really down to the last little bit of school here and I'd love it if it was just over. I'm so frustrated that still, after more than 150 days of coming ... http://understanding.mindtangle.net/?p=236 With seven teaching days left before final exams, it's time for review. The big question for me was, "How can I get students to be engaged with review?" And the answer, like usual, came to me in the shower: incentives. I'm not much for the usual pizza ... http://understanding.mindtangle.net/?p=235 Algorithms seem to keep coming up. Last week, my calculus class started asking what math classes they will take next in college. This made me realize that our educational system gives kids the very strong impression that math subject have an inherent relative sequence, and that there must ... http://understanding.mindtangle.net/?p=234 With state testing done, it's time for fun! I'm doing a mini-project on tessellation this week. The pictures here are some of the best examples from last year. On the surface it looks like art class, but there are actually some interesting questions to ask even at ... http://understanding.mindtangle.net/?p=230