Training for Distance Learning in My Districts

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Training Info from My New District
3. Blaugust: My Favorite Go-To
4. Links to Other Blaugust Participants
5. A Rapoport Math Problem
6. Twenty-Five Years Ago Today
7. A Few Last Comments About the School Calendar
8. Conclusion

Introduction

This is my final summer post. It seems hard to believe that five months ago was Pi Day -- since then it's been a five-month "summer break" (or as some would put it, a five-month "spring break").

I'm not doing any of my summer projects in this post -- again, that's all done. Today's focus is on the training I have today in my new district -- the one from which I receive the most calls -- and my preparation for the new school year.

Training Info from My New District

First of all, the training I attend today is specific to secondary subbing. Earlier I was afraid that we subs would be forced to cover elementary classes -- especially if my Orange County district seeks out an elementary waiver and those are the only classes with face-to-face instruction. But by attending only the secondary training today, this guarantees that I won't have to sub in any kindergarten classes this year.

We learn that we subs may be able to cover classes from either our home computer or at a school -- this is unlike my old district, where all subbing will be at a school site. This is interesting, because my home is where my guitar and musical keyboard are.

Many students in my district recognize me for my songs, especially since I started singing more between Pi Day 2019 and Pi Day 2020. As soon as they see that I'm the sub, some of them will start expecting me to sing for them -- and with two instruments available for me, I'll be overwhelmingly tempted to play them along with my singing.

Recall from my summer music posts that I'm unable to tune the D string of my guitar properly, and thus my guitar is tuned as EACGAE. Again, this tuning anticipates some day in the (probably distant) future where I can refret my guitar to 18EDL (but of course it's now fretted to standard 12TET). Thus I wish to learn how to play songs in this tuning until I can get my guitar fixed.

If I can't figure out how to play a song in EACGAE tuning, then I will play the song on my musical keyboard instead. This keyboard is mostly working properly, except for one note -- a black key, Eb, an octave above middle C (more like a minor tenth). It will be easy for me to avoid this key if I play my songs in the keys of F, C, G, D, A major, or their relative minors.

As usual, if I'm subbing in a math class and I have a song that's relevant to the standard being covered, then I'll perform the song. I'll choose other interesting songs to perform in non-math classes.

I'll add the "music" label when I perform any songs in class, especially if I have something new to add (lyrics, tune, guitar chords) to what I posted about the song over the summer. This is, of course, in addition to my usual "subbing" label for such posts.

In today's training, we learn that Mondays are all-classes days, called "Launch Days." On Mondays, the teacher explains what the students will be doing that entire week. The other days are block days, when only three classes meet.

On Mondays, each class meets for thirty minutes of live, synchronous instruction. The rest of the week, each block is allotted an hour -- but no more than 20-30 minutes should be synchronous.

Notice that my old district -- despite its 4 x 3 plan there -- follows a similar pattern in that Mondays are also "Launch Days" (though I'm not sure whether that term will be used). In both districts, setting Monday as the Launch Day anticipates the transition to a hybrid schedule, when one cohort will meet in person Tuesday/Thursday and the other Wednesday/Friday -- while Mondays will remain as Launch Days in both districts.

In both districts, all classes complete their 240 minutes of instruction on block days (Tuesday through Friday) by lunch. After lunch, my new district will have "Academic Support Time" (and my old district will do something similar) to provide extra help to students who need it.

We also learn how to take attendance. In particular, any student who attends even a second of class will be marked present, at least for the first week of school. A more detailed plan for attendance starting the second week of class will be given then.

Whenever I begin my first day of subbing, I'll post "A Day in the Life" with full details of what the distance learning schedule looks like. After that first day, I'll only post "A Day in the Life" for all math classes and many middle school classes, as usual.

Blaugust: My Favorite Go-To

As today is the fourteenth, let's look at the 14th prompt on Shelli's list:

• My favorite go-to ____(Online resource, book, blog).  Share an idea of how you have utilized this source.

Note: I posted last year on August 14th and responded to this prompt. Therefore this counts as the reblog for today.

In the past the first online resource I'd automatically list here would be Fawn Nguyen's blog. But unfortunately, she hasn't posted since May:

http://fawnnguyen.com/gardening-and-teaching/

Let me cut-and-paste some old posts of mine where I linked to other online resources. In January 2017, back when I was still at the old charter middle school, I linked to some of my fellow middle school teachers. I'll double-check that post to see whether any of these teachers are still active bloggers -- and are still classroom teachers, not TOSA's:

22. Jonathan Newman's blog: https://hilbertshotel.wordpress.com/
His End of July post: https://hilbertshotel.wordpress.com/2020/07/31/how-i-create-math-videos/

Newman is still in Maryland -- but he's now a high school teacher. This post is about creating math videos -- which may help for the asynchronous parts of our distance lessons these days.

And that's it! Last year there were only two remaining teachers, and now there's just one.

One blog I used to link to all the time is Dan Meyer. It's still active. I used to call Dan Meyer "the King of the MTBoS," but he's since rejected the label MTBoS in favor of "I teach math":

https://blog.mrmeyer.com/
https://blog.mrmeyer.com/2020/the-1-most-requested-desmos-feature-right-now-and-what-we-could-do-instead/

At the time, Fawn Nguyen took up the MTBoS mantle, but now I wonder whether she should still be considered Queen of the MTBoS now that she's a TOSA.

Meanwhile, I've also linked to some Geometry teacher blogs since this is a Geometry blog. One of my most linked-filled posts was in January 2018. That day I was covering Lesson 9-7 of the U of Chicago text, on Making (Nets for) Surfaces. Let's see whether any links are active:

Question 26-30, the nets themselves, come from the following link:

https://www.math-drills.com/geometry/net_platonic_solids.pdf

The Math Drills link provides two nets for the dodecahedron. I chose the second one, since it more closely resembles the net in the U of Chicago text. On the other hand, their icosahedron net is very different from ours in the U of Chicago text.

I first found this link via another teacher website -- that's also inactive. Well, at list this page still exists -- in her prompt, Shelli did ask for online resources, which this is.

Later in that post, I linked to David Joyce's website. David Joyce is a Clark U (Massachusetts) professor who advocates returning to Euclid's Elements to teach Geometry. He laments that there isn't much 3D geometry in most high school classes these days outside of measurement. So I linked to Joyce's Euclid website -- particularly his Book XI, on solid geometry:

https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/toc.html
https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/bookXI/bookXI.html

Finally, that day I linked to Bizzie Lizzie/Elizabeth Landau. She now works for JPL, but as a young high school student, she wrote some songs about pi. The following link, while quite old, is to a version of her "American Pi," a parody of Don McLean's "American Pie." It's actually not my favorite version -- my favorite version is on her website that's -- you guessed it -- no longer active.

Let's continue Shelli's prompt by looking at my go-to books -- unlike websites, books aren't just going to disappear. On the last day of 2017, I blogged about several books I've read during that year:

Ogilvy, Stanley. Excursions in Number Theory

This year, of course, one of my summer projects was to read the following book:

Stewart, Ian. Calculating the Cosmos

I also wrote that the same day that I purchased the Pappas book at a library book sale (in March 2017, just after I left the old charter school), I purchased two Integrated Math I texts -- these were published by McDougall Littell and Pearson. Oh, and there's one more graphic novel I can't forget:

Ottaviani, Jim. Hawking

I read both this and another one of his other graphic novels -- the one about the Apollo 11 moon landings -- last year for the 50th anniversary.

Notice that these books probably aren't the type of book Shelli had in mind when she first came up with this prompt. Instead, she likely means a teacher book -- speaking of Fawn Nguyen, but she wrote the foreword of a teacher book -- Geoff Krall's Necessary Conditions. Indeed, Shelli herself devoted one of her Blaugust posts to this book last year.

But as you have seen, I'm not good at acquiring teacher books, either for sale or from the library. One of the few teacher books I've ever read was Harry Wong's The First Days of School -- and that was years ago, before I started this blog. I mentioned it in my last post earlier this week.

Links to Other Blaugust Participants

A number of Blaugust participants are also blogging about remote learning today. Our first link today is to "Borscht with Anna Blinstein":

http://borschtwithanna.blogspot.com/2020/08/remote-teaching-community-edition.html

I've seen Blinstein's blog before, but somehow I've never linked to it before today. She writes:

I just finished remotely teaching two one-week courses for rising 9th graders in which at least half the class was brand new to the school. Each group met for 3 hours every morning for a week and I had the luxury of creating my own curriculum that didn't have to cover any particular topics, but did need to be fun, engaging for students with a variety of math backgrounds, introduce new students to how we teach math at my school and how to learn math remotely, and most importantly, foster a sense of community.

Fortunately, Michael Pershan shared some words of wisdom about the need to build student-student connections over student-teacher connections in a remote space and this helped me rethink my original plan for each week.

I've also seen Pershan's blog before. But last year, he announced that he was no longer a blogger and that he'd post on Twitter only. I saw a few other Blaugust participants mention Pershan as well -- apparently his tweets are popular this time of year.

One thing that Blinstein mentions on her blog is "breakout rooms" -- apparently, this is the analog of group assignments in an online setting. (I have no idea yet whether the technology for "breakout rooms" exists in either of my districts.) Interestingly enough, her breakout room assignment is "Personality Coordinates," which I used on the first day of school at the old charter school -- both of us got this from the Dan Meyer blog (listed above). Since then, I've wondered whether I should have used another well-known first day assignment -- Name Tents, from the Sara VanDerWerf blog -- instead of Personality Coordinates. But according to Blinstein, Personality Coordinates work well in an online breakout room.

Another Blaugust participant who discusses remote learning is Cheryl Leung:

https://matheasyaspi.wordpress.com/2020/08/14/the-unexpected-gift-of-remote-learning/

I always remember Leung as the sixth-grade "Be Kind/Be Brave" teacher. She is definitely still teaching middle school this year:

As I have done virtual home visits to make sure that each student has what he or she needs to start school, I have been able to meet parents and to talk with them a little bit about their student.   Elementary school teachers regularly get the opportunity to see students with their parents, but it is not as common in middle school.   Seeing kids with their families has been a really nice way to start the year.

Our last blogger for today is "Tweaking for No Reason," aka Mr. Dull:

https://tweakingfornoreason.wordpress.com/2020/08/14/one-man-book-club-stealing-home/

This fits my other Blaugust topic for today -- a go-to book. But Dull's go-to book is about neither math nor teaching, but baseball, particularly in Southern California. Since I'm a SoCal blogger, I might as well link to this post as well.

A Rapoport Math Problem

Today on her Daily Epsilon of Math 2020, Rebecca Rapoport writes:

14e^(pi i/3) + 14e^(-pi i/3)

This problem is based on Euler's formula. But even though we never reached Lesson 14-7 for Shapelore, today's problem can be converted to a sum of vectors (uh, arrows) problem:

(14, 60 degrees) + (14, -60 degrees)

We use cosine and sine (uh, wheelex and wheelwhy) to convert this to:

(14 cos 60, 14 sin 60) + (14 cos 60, -14 sin 60)
= (14 cos 60 + 14 cos 60, 14 sin 60 - 14 sin 60)
= (2 * 14 * 1/2, 0)
= (14, 0)

So the desired answer is 14 -- and of course, today's date is the fourteenth. Now that we're done with summer blogging, I'll return to posting only Geometry problems from the Rapoport calendar (which today's problem sort of is, but really isn't).

Twenty-Five Years Ago Today

I mentioned August 14th, 1995 before on the blog -- it was an eventful day during my early high school Cross Country running career. Since today is the 25th anniversary of that date, I might as well reblog this incident to commemorate it:

Summer practices were held thrice a week. Mondays were for long road runs, while Wednesdays were for intervals on the track. Other types of workouts were held on Thursdays. At the end of each summer workout, the coach would give us all sodas.

One memorable workout occurred on Monday, August 14th. For the workout, the coach had planned an eight-mile road run -- four miles out, four miles back. For the first three miles, I tried to keep up with my more experienced teammates. We managed to catch every green light until we reached the three-mile mark. It was the first time that I'd ever run the length of a XC race without stopping -- though it took me about a half-hour.

I stopped to catch my breath, while the rest of the team continued to run. I decided that since I was still a novice runner, I wouldn't be able to complete the full eight-mile workout. Typically, the coach would have us run the return part of each workout along the side of the "river" (which here in Southern California really means something like "flood control channel"). This way, we'd be able to avoid red lights and run the distance without stopping.

And so I ran three miles along the river bike path back to school. But for some reason, the gate leading from the river back to the street was locked. I'd either have to run an extra mile to the next street (and yet another mile to get back) and hope the gate was unlocked, or try to climb the fence. I was too tired even to climb the fence. Instead, I decided to take a shortcut directly across the river. I remind you that this isn't a real river (like the Mississippi) -- it's only a few feet across and only a few inches deep.

But the force of this river was powerful -- once I stepped in, it's impossible even to stand up! The river swept me several miles away from the school (and in the opposite direction from where my teammates were running). I was saved only because one person driving on a bridge spotted me -- and she just happened to have a cell phone. (This was in 1995, so cell phones were rare.) A fireman was summoned, and he intercepted me one mile farther down the river.

What should I have done? Either I should have simply climbed over the gate, or perhaps waited for the teammates running the extra two miles to catch up. (I'd already run to a second gate hoping it would be open, and there was no guarantee the others would have run past the second gate if they were already climbing over the first one.)

A Few Last Comments About the School Calendar

Well, I'm giving this post the "Calendar" label, just as I did for the post earlier this week. Well, there are a few things I'd want to say about school calendars and the possible hybrid schedule.

First of all, tomorrow is Saturday, August 15th -- Assumption Day. On the Andrew Usher Calendar (which I mentioned on the blog six months ago), whenever August 15th is a Saturday, the following week (August 16th-22nd) is Leap Week.

Leap Week counts as Week 1 on the Usher Calendar, and the following week is Week 2. If the Usher Calendar is ever adopted, I'd recommend that school should start no earlier than Week 2, which is two weeks before Labor Day (always in Week 4). Of course, neither of my districts cares one bit about the Usher Calendar.

Meanwhile, I've been thinking about what I wrote about my main calendar -- the Eleven Calendar -- and hybrid schedules. In particular, I was checking out other districts to see how they might possibly divide the students into cohorts -- one cohort to attend school on Tuesday/Thursday (or whichever days) and the other cohort on other days.

Recall that one problem with the old French and Soviet Revolutionary Calendars (possible inspiration for the Hybrid Calendar) is that  they divided families -- related people would work different days and end up with no off-days in common.

I've seen a few districts announce that the hybrid cohorts would be based on last names -- students whose name starts with the same letter will attend the same days. Since siblings usually have the same surname, it means that siblings are on the same cohort.

I once read of a calendar with fourteen months, each with 26 days. (Since 14 * 26 = 364, such a calendar would require an annual blank day). Instead of 1-26, the days are labeled A-Z. Thus such a calendar would inspire schools to divide the students into cohorts based on last initial. For example, we might divide the month as 4/2/4/3/4/2/4/3 -- that is, each school week is four days, and weekends alternate between two and three days. The last initial is the middle day of a three-day weekend -- since my last name starts with W, I'd get a three-day weekend from V-X, a two-day weekend C-D, a three-day weekend I-K, and a two-day weekend P-Q. This is the same schedule as the letter directly across from W on the alphabet wheel, namely J, and so there's a total of thirteen cohorts.

I've only partly named the days on the Eleven Calendar -- Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then simply numbered the days of the week (Fourday, Fiveday, and so on). An alternative is to name the days of the week after letters in the alphabet -- the first day is Abday, the (midweek, using 3/1/3/4) day off for students starting with A or B. The second day is for students starting with C or D -- "Cdday" is not pronounceable, so maybe "Cadday" or "Codday"? Two letters per day is only 22 letters, so we can combine some rarer letters. My day off would likely be "Wxyzday." (Note: This is still a work in progress -- it is not yet an official part of the Eleven Calendar.)

Conclusion

Before today's training, I clean parts of my computer room in order to make it more presentable for the Zoom call. Cleaning the house raises dust, which causes me to sneeze -- and of course, sneezing is a coronavirus symptom.

If I need to sub from a school site (which might not be necessary in my new district but will really happen in my old district), I must be careful not to do any housecleaning the night prior, or else I'd be forced to answer "yes" to "Have you sneezed in the last 14 days?" at the school gate, meaning that I'd be turned away.

And that's a wrap for my final summer post. My next post will be on Monday, August 17th -- the first day of school in my new district. This will be Day 1, and I'll resume making Geometry posts using the digit pattern starting from that day.