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Things I Need to Remember

5/11/2011

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I am obsessed.  I can admit it.  I cannot stop thinking about this math stuff.  It is haunting me.  My drives home are filled with looking for more things that I can document, video tape, grab a picture, or just wonder to myself about math.  Yesterday I was videotaping the traffic lines as I drove by (illegal in my province so I must stop!), today I noticed the sign for the over pass that said 4.6 m.  All i can think of is,"If I count the lines I know I can find the speed, or if I can measure the cars ahead of me, by knowing how tall the overpass is!"  I have caught the bug.  I want to be in summer vacation right now, not because I don't want to teach, but rather because I want to teach well so badly!

It all started when I tried Dan Meyer's graphing stories, and then cup stacking lesson.  I had some kids legitimately hooked, even though I presented them terribly.  Well let me clarify, I had one out of two classes hooked.  When I taught the cup lesson to my less hooked class I thought to myself, "Well that is it, I don't have the knack for this," and I almost wanted to stop in the middle of it, because it was a moment lost.  Then we finally started to stack the cups, and the class stopped.  A few kids were slowly inching toward the centre.  Cup after cup was stacked, and I remember vividly at least one student, as if in a trance, approaching the front of the room to watch the answer being presented.

At this point I knew I had it.  I botched a lesson slightly, that was all right.  Part of it was because of outside circumstances.  When I saw the drawing power of this final act of the "math narrative" I realised that I could do this too.

A couple weeks past by, and I didn't find any much inspiration for these lessons.  I showed the kids Vi Hart's Math Doodling, and had them draw fractals.  They loved it!  Drawing shapes, and colouring them was so addictive to them.  I had students asking for more fractals to draw.  I challenged some students to do a harder fractal, and they wanted to do it!  I had a student say, "I am so happy you introduced us to fractals!"  I had them do a mini project where they graphed the number of shapes produced at each iteration, they did it freely, easily, and they had damn good graphs too.  They could see instantly that most of these produced an exponential function (although at grade eight they only needed to tell me that it was not linear).  I felt on top of the world.

Then the anyqs challenge came up this last weekend, and I decided that I wanted to go for it.  I searched through my textbook to find a boring problem that I could zap to life.  Price questions with a base cost plus a rising cost due to quantity intrigued me, and I decided to look for weird things on amazon.com.  I found Armpit whitening cream.  I had a hook that was my own, that I had made that weekend, put together prompts, and revealed to my students.  I shared the results of that already, but I missed what has been happened after.  Yesterday a student asked me if we could do another one of "those problems," because "it was fun."  I had to ask her for a dictionary to know what that f-word was, because it had been so long since I heard those words in my math class.  Another student, who does not fair well in my class (academically), was sucked into the problem.  We were moving on to other things, and he asked me (begged me nearly), if I could refrain from showing the answer to the class, so that he could keep working.  After working an hour he still wanted to struggle through this problem!  My jaw's re constructive surgery will be occurring sometime within the next week.

And so now I am facing the reality.  I have a problem... and I want more of them.

My name is Timon, and I am a mathaholic.
2 Comments

Another Any Q's Submission

5/10/2011

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I am just having too much fun with these.  If you want the answer to the previous one, just post in the comments, and I will upload it tonight.

I want to turn this one into an Any Q type question, but I feel like it is too Mathematical to start off with, and my send students away, let me know what you think.
Picture
I love Google Trends, and if you have any ideas of classroom incorporation I would love to hear it...

Bonus:  For fun on Google Trends look up "Spark Notes," it almost makes me giddy!
2 Comments

Any Q's?

5/10/2011

1 Comment

 

Untitled from Timon Piccini on Vimeo.

Any questions?
1 Comment

Armpit Cream, and How it Turned Out!

5/9/2011

4 Comments

 
So I jumped into WCYDWT head first.  Had an idea tried it out, and man did I learn a bunch (I am not sure yet about the kids).  Highlights of the whole experience are as follows:
  • The students who were engaged were engaged to the greatest extent that I have seen in my class (in my math class at least, science usually does the trick no matter how boring I am).
  • Some students wanted to keep working on it even after I had to move on.
  • The answer became the reward to most kids!
  • There was never a point where I felt like the lesson was dragging.

Read More
4 Comments

My First Attempt (by myself) at WCYDWT

5/8/2011

4 Comments

 
So I am planning a lesson for my introduction to solving equations.  I am not totally sure how it will work, but I am going to attempt a small bit of WCYDWT.  My steps to this lesson consisted as this:
  1. I need to make a lesson for Monday.
  2. I am bored of giving the same old thing.
  3. I want to make a "Hook" question that will get kids engaged.
  4. How can I turn one of these text book problems into something engaging.

And that is what I did.  I found some interesting word problems, ones that as Dan says, take out all of the guess work, and I made it my own.  I added some humour into it, and voilà this is what I cam up with.

I will lead you into this, much the same as Dan does, by first giving you the prompt (or the question).

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What is the question here?  This is what I will ask my students.  What question is knocking on your door that you must answer?
4 Comments
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