Reflections on fall quarter blogging...

Hmmm.  I enjoyed blogging this quarter.  As we talk about in literacy, it seems more purposeful now, and so more worthwhile. I blog to help me organize my thoughts. I blog because I've seen something cool and I want to remember it. I blog sometimes in order to try to get other's perspective on a question.  Overall, even without an audience, I have found the blogging helpful.

I have about 10 drafts of blogs yet unpublished.  I've stopped thinking about the weekly deadline for class blogs, and instead I publish things as I feel I'm finished processing the event or idea that inspired them, and am ready to share that with the world.  I like this  evolution too.  It feels more genuine to post according to my own internal measure.

At one point I thought i would include a question in each post, in order to elicit feedback.  I found that when I planned in advance to do this, it changed how I wrote the post (once again, echoes of ideas about purpose and audience from literacy class).  I didn't do that consistently though, because not everything lent itself to leaving a question on the table.  I find when reading others posts, I usually agree, but don't have much to add on.  I know too that brevity has become valued as we try to keep up with each other's blogging.  At this point, my blogging is a mix, some short, some long, some with open questions, some more reflective.  

There aren't a lot of comments on my blog.  If I am making 2 comments a week on others blogs, I am not receiving that same number back.  Maybe because of the nature of my blogs, but perhaps also because we are not all managing 2 comments a week.  I know I go in bursts with respect to commenting.   As I've suggested, I find my current style of blogging helpful and useful to me, and while I would be happy to see more feedback, that is not a driving force for me at this point.

My blog from this quarter which I think would be conducive to further conversation and ideas: 

Math foldables 

Fun in Math 

A couple blog posts where I found the discussion interesting:

Flipped classrooms 

Flipped classroom followup 

Middle school schedules...

It can be very tedious to watch the same lesson taught 6 times in a day to 8th graders.  How tedious is it to teach that lesson 6 times?  I taught a lesson 4 times one day this past week, and by the 4th time, my energy was certainly low.

In the middle school classes I've observed this past 2 months, none of the teachers mixed up their schedule of lesson plans  in order to give themselves some variety in the day, for example by teaching negative numbers this week to periods 1, 3, & 5 and decimal addition to periods 2, 4, 6 and then switching.  Some, but not all,  did have breaks in the routine where they taught an advanced class. I have been watching to see how they re-energize during the day, and how they keep the lesson fresh.  It seems hard, and having a planning break in the middle of the day helps.

It makes me wonder why schools don't rotate their schedules:  say a student has classes A, B, C, D, and E.  The school schedule could have A be first period one week, then move it to 2nd and move E to 1st, etc.  This wouldn't help with the tedium of teaching the same class over and over, but it would mean that students would get energetic, early in the day instruction in all subjects over the course of a year.





You can get used to anything, but as I have watched the same lesson being taught 6 times in a day to 8th graders, I have been struck by how tedious that can be.  I was the teacher  for a lesson given 4 times in a day this past week, and by the fourth time, my enthusiasm was low.

Fun in math...

I love the three periods I spend in 7th grade math.  The teacher uses math talk and her own personality to build a safe, friendly classroom community.  In some periods this is harder than others, but even in the most rambunctious class, there is still community in her classroom.   

Some examples of the way she makes the classroom fun and warm - these won't sound as joyful in writing as they are in person, but they truly convey a happiness to be there:

She has the kids answer her phone when it rings during class with: "Mrs. Doe's classroom.  Student speaking.  We love math!"

Good answers get a "Kiss your brain!" which she models by kissing her hand and tapping her head.

She wears a special math lab coat on test days, which has a variety of math equations written on it with permanent marker.  She wears it to bring in the good math karma.

When students don't have a pencil, they get to borrow one from her if they leave a shoe on deposit (so far the kids all treat this as silly). 

She stamps homework and worksheets with a custom rubber stamp which says "Mrs. Doe approves!"

Math foldables...

In my 7th grade math class, I've watched this week as the class has worked on little foldables of math rules to paste into their math notebooks.  The school had a funky schedule with 1/2 the classes meeting every other day because of conferences, so I had time to go home and think about the foldables before the other 1/2 of the classes did them the next day.  The exercise of making the foldables is just cutting and pasting and coloring. There was no discussion of the rules in the math book during this class session, though there was on the days before and after, and I didn't see the value of the foldables.

But then I went home and read some math teacher blogs about the foldables.  The teachers love them!  Here's a link to one teacher's math blog with foldables. I still didn't understand why though.  What math learning objective did this cutting and pasting serve?

Right-side up pic coming soon...

So, the next day in math, I went around and asked the kids.

The kids love them. They like the craftsy aspect of it.  One kid said it reminded him of elementary school, but he said it in a fond way. "But does it help with math?" I asked. They said absolutely, they helped a lot.  As they do problems, they find themselves referring to them all the time.  After class I asked the teacher and she said the same thing.  Before she started doing them, it never occurred to the kids to look back at their notes to figure out how to solve a problem.  She would remind them, but they were unconvinced.  My interpretation is that the kids value the booklets because they've created them, and so are more likely to look back at them than they are to info they've just copied from the board.

Got a kick out of this, posted in my 8th grade cooperating teacher's math class: