Instead of having my students simply talk about their Spring Breaks with their new groups, I had them draw out one thing that they did for their group to guess instead (can you tell what I’m basing this idea off of? Hint: I used up all my data this past month due to it.)
Anyways, I just wanted to share these two drawings from my day’s collection of pictures…
Holy moly. Why didn’t I think of this sooner? I just created an excel template for 12 flashcards per page, where the inputs go into a table on the first worksheet and the flashcards are created on the second worksheet. This way, I don’t have to constantly try to align and rethink where the corresponding backs of each flashcard go.
It’s not perfect in that equations are a bit cumbersome. I would honestly just write in the exponents and such before I make the copies onto cardstock.
I’ve just been making class sets of useful flashcards for my Geo classes. This would be great for vocab! I created it originally for factoring perfect squares, as partner work. I’ll drop both into the Box widget, to be edited as you please. Please be careful of the “12flashcards ppg” file because it is a TEMPLATE file to be saved in your Templates folder…
1st worksheet where the data is input
2nd worksheet of the actual flashcards for print
Kind of random, but I had this assignment come up in conversation and so I went back to re-read the letter before sending it out to a friend and I was reminded of just how good it was. Of just how good he was.
It’s a letter to basketball written by Michael Jordan after his second retirement. It was published in the LA Times on April 20 of 2003. Read it. You’ll enjoy it.
Dear Basketball,
It’s been almost 28 years since the first day we met. 28 years since I saw you in the back of our garage. 28 years since my parents introduced us.
If someone would have told me then what would become of us, I’m not sure I would have believed them. I barely remembered your name.
Then I started seeing you around the neighborhood and watching you on television. I used to see you with guys down at the playground. But when my older brother started paying more attention to you, I started to wonder. Maybe you were different.
We hung out a few times. The more I got to know you, the more I liked you. And as life would have it, when I finally got really interested in you, when I was finally ready to get serious, you left me off the varsity. You told me I wasn’t good enough.
I was crushed. I was hurt. I think I even cried.
Then I wanted you more than ever. So I practiced. I hustled. I worked on my game. Passing. Dribbling. Shooting. Thinking. I ran. I did sit-ups. I did push-ups. I did pull-ups. I lifted weights. I studied you. I began to fall in love and you noticed. At least that’s what Coach Smith said.
At the time, I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. But, now I know. Coach Smith was teaching me how to love you, how to listen to you, how to understand you, how to respect you and how to appreciate you. Then it happened. That night, at the Louisiana Superdome, in the final seconds of the championship game againstGeorgetown, you found me in the corner and we danced.
Since then, you’ve become so much more than just a ball to me. You’ve become more than just a court. More than just a hoop. More than just a pair of sneakers. More than just a game.
In some respects, you’ve become my life. My passion. My motivation. My inspiration.
You’re my biggest fan and my harshest critic. You’re my dearest friend and my strongest ally. You’re my toughest competition. You’re my passport around the world and my visa into the hearts of millions.
So much has changed since the first day we met, and to a large degree, I have you to thank. So if you haven’t heard me say it before, let me say it now for the world to hear. Thank you. Thank you Basketball. Thank you for everything.
Thank you for all the players that came before me. Thank you for all the players who went into battle with me. Thank you for the championships and the rings. Thank you for the All-Star games and the Playoffs. Thank you for the last shots, the buzzer-beaters, the hard fouls, the victories and the defeats. Thank you for making me earn my keep. Thank you for #23. Thank you forNorth CarolinaandChicago. Thank you for the air and the nickname. Thank you for the moves and the hang time. Thank you for the Slam-Dunk Contest. Thank you for the will and determination, the heart and the soul, the pride and the courage. Thank you for the competitive spirit and the competition to challenge it. Thank you for the failures and the setbacks, the blessings and the applause. Thank you for the triangle. Thank you for baseball and the Barons. Thank you for forgiving me. Thank you for the assistant coaches, the trainers, and the physical therapists. Thank you for the announcers, the refs, the writers, the reporters, the broadcasters and the radio stations. Thank you for the Pistons and the Lakers, the Cavs and the Knicks, the Sixers and the Celtics. Thank you forPhoenix,Portland,SeattleandUtah. Thank you for the Wizards. Thank you for the believers and the doubters. Thank you for the education and the experience. Thank you for teaching me the game, behind, beneath, within, above and around the game… the game. Thank you for every fan who has ever called my name, put their hands together for me and my teammates, slapped me five or patted me on the back. Thank you for everything you’ve given my family. Thank you for the moon and the stars, and last but not least, thank you for Bugs and Mars.
I know I’m not the only one who loves you. I know you have loved many before me and will love many after me. But, I also know that what we had was unique. It was special. So as our relationship changes yet again, as well as relationships do, one thing is for sure.
I love you Basketball. I love everything about you and I always will. My playing days in the NBA are definitely over but our relationship will never end.
Much Love and Respect,
Michael Jordan
Pretty awesome, no? I have some of my math classes read it and write a letter to Math at the beginning of the school year. (I got the idea from some speaker about 8 years ago I can’t remember… =( ) The results and insights from their letters are pretty telling actually and I get a rare sense of their writing skills that I don’t normally get throughout the year. Maybe someone will find it useful for the end of this school year or as a midyear check…
Nothing all that brilliant in this post regarding the actual teaching of sine, cosine, and tangent… BUT, I do have a couple of resources that might be useful. If not brilliant, it was at least extremely effective. =)
I took the Prentice Hall California Geometry workbook, cut out and combined the tan, sin, and cos problems. I created flashcards with them (of 18 problems) and had them practice just setting them up with a partner. For example,
Then I gave them a worksheet with the exact same problems to actually finish. Be aware that we only did this after focusing on tangent alone for about 2 block days.
The template for the flashcards and the worksheet is in the Box widget.
As for the trig introductory lesson itself, our Geometry team has been working on adapting the CPM intro of using slope, but it needs a WHOLE LOT of tweaking Especially since our students are not used to CPM, we can’t just throw it at them…
This is coming soon…
I’ve never done a lesson on it, though I’ve mentioned in classes before. Now I wish I could have done more!!
I started by asking them questions like,
By the time they were done measuring themselves and finding all these different ratios, I told them that over the years, people have discovered one ratio that keeps coming up in nature, even in the human body. This ratio can also be found in the Fibonacci sequence.
The Fibonacci sequence is a nice place to have them discover the Golden Ratio and compare their measurements to it because it doesn’t depend on the accuracy of their measurements.
If there was time, we then went on to measuring the face and talking about how the ideal “beautiful” face is said to be in the Golden Ratio, though this varies by greater amounts. Then we talked a bit about whether a standard can be set at all or not.
What I wish I did afterwards, however, is that I really wish I had them sketch out a Golden Body by setting up ratios equal to the Golden Ratio (proportions). That would have led quite nicely into my next lesson on similar polygons… which I will post possibly tomorrow…
For now, what I’ve got of the Golden Ratio is in the Box widget.
Through someone’s else’s blog, I just read an article from 2008 by Malcolm Gladwell on teachers. Aside from learning more than I asked for on the differences of college football vs. the NFL, I really liked all that it had to say on education too. Except I found myself surprisingly… less impassioned about some ideas I used to be very impassioned about. Without even knowing it, I think having taught at two more schools in the last couple of years has affected that change.
Anyways, a few quotes from the article to comment on:
Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile.
I have to agree. EXCEPT, teaching such huge classes year in and year out is exhausting and starts to create a bad teacher from a good one.
Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.
Teacher’s training camp?! That would be kind of awesome. But I already know I wouldn’t have made it back then because teaching brought out in me qualities I never really knew I had back when I had first started. The love for the students makes a person change, seek better, reach higher. The teacher I was my first year of teaching is so starkly different from who I am today. I know I’m not the best teacher out there, but I love my profession and I’m pretty good at what I do. I would hate to have not been given this amazing opportunity b/c of such a camp. Plus, how do you simulate a real classroom? Have you heard any teacher stories of late?!
I think Gladwell says it best in the end:
But there is nothing like being an N.F.L. quarterback except being an N.F.L. quarterback. A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice.
I love that last line. In a field where prediction is not possible, there can be way too much prejudice.
Don’t judge me. I’m a teacher. ;)
I had previously written the update in the actual post on Properties of Quadrilaterals, but realized the summary sheet needed a bit of explaining.
* UPDATE: I’ve added a Properties Summary Sheet to the Box widget that I should have given them after the properties checklist as reference. If I were to re-do this activity, I would give them all 3 handouts, but only have them do the parallelograms checklist–> summary sheet on parallelograms –> practice problems on Day 1. Day 2 would be trapezoids and kites –> summary sheet –> practice problems.
I just want to also point out here that the bullets match up for pg 1, the parallelograms page. For example, the 3 bullets under rhombus that are completely blank match in shape to the bullets in parallelograms. They just have to re-copy it in.
