Today is a minimum day, and so this counts as my monthly MTBoS blogging day for October. I will be describing today in "A Day in the Life" format:
8:00 -- I arrive on campus.
8:45 -- I've decided that minimum days will be my monthly blogging day, so you should know what the minimum day schedule is like. First, all minimum days are Mondays, which are fully distance days. As with all Mondays, it's a Late Start Day, with department meetings before school. The only difference is that school is also out early, with possible meetings after school as well.
I begin today's department meeting with the other two eighth grade teachers. By the way, both of these teachers are working fully from home. On distance Mondays, they teach a regular online lesson from home, and the rest of the week, a long-term sub watches the students as the regular teachers' lesson is projected (through Google Meet) onto the front screen.
(For some reason, I have a different arrangement -- I am a traditional long-term sub who actually teaches the class. The regular teacher's role is only to deal with all the computer software and forms to be submitted -- and he's gradually releasing responsibility to me as I become more familiar with everything.)
We discuss last week's Desmos assignment (Polygraph: Lines), and I tell the others about how last week, two guys kept bullying one girl who has opted out of hybrid and is working from home. When either was partnered with her, the two guys keep asking her insulting questions instead of genuine questions about the Desmos lines. The other teachers tell me that this sometimes happens in Desmos, and so I should make sure that the bullies are punished.
The most senior teacher shares us her plans for the second quarter and third unit on linear functions. It's possible that there will be another Desmos lesson during the unit as well as an Edpuzzles assignment.
9:20 -- The eighth grade meeting ends -- and the seventh grade meeting begins. The other seventh grade teacher is the head of the math department (while I think of the eighth grade leader as the de facto head of the Math 8 department).
We discuss the unit on multiplying and dividing rational numbers. The department head tells me about a website that she sometimes uses to help the students learn -- Quizizz.
9:45 -- First period begins. This is the first of two eighth grade classes.
We begin Lesson 3.1.1, which is on comparing functions. This is an introduction to linear functions.
During the early meeting, the three Math 8 teachers have decided that we won't try to rush through all of this lesson today. Instead, I only make it to the use of "rise" and "run" to determine the rate of change (that is, the slope) of the line.
As expected, some students are still confused here. I decide that, rather than write "change of x" and "change of y" over and over, I would abbreviate "change of" with -- you guessed it -- a delta. (I explained on the blog how as a young student, I found "delta" in a science book and then impressed my Algebra I teacher by using delta on an assignment -- and now there are Math 8 and Algebra I teachers who actually use delta to teach slope. The hope, of course, is that students will be less confused as the week goes on.
10:20 -- First period ends and second period ends. This is the first of two seventh grade classes, as well as the first of two classes with the co-teacher.
The seventh graders are moving on to division of rational numbers. This, of course, should be simple if the students have learned how to multiply signed numbers, since the rules are the same.
Some of the problems do include fractions, so the lesson name "division of rational numbers" isn't a misnomer -- there really are rational numbers in this lesson, not just integers. And so the toughest part of the lesson may really be reminding students how to divide fractions from last year. Once again, "keep, change, flip" is a way to remind students how to divide fractions.
10:55 -- Second period ends and third period begins. This is the second of two seventh grade classes.
11:30 -- Third period ends. It is now time for a short five-minute snack break.
11:35 -- Fourth period begins. This is the second of two eighth grade classes, as well as the second of two classes with the co-teacher.
12:10 -- Fourth period ends and fifth period begins. This is the Math Skills class. As usual, the students work on their 60 minutes of STMath or Dreambox for the week.
12:45 -- Fifth period ends. Sixth period is independent PE for everyone, and so my teaching day ends.
And, as it turns out, my working day ends here as well. The reason for the minimum day, of course, is staff meetings. But today's meeting is a "leadership meeting" for the department heads, and so there is no after-school meeting for me to attend.
I've said before that I will be using these monthly posts for comparisons between my new school and the old charter school. Once again, I'm breaking the habit of comparing every time I sub to the old school, but I will do it in these special posts. (Someday, I'm hoping to compare some future school where I will work someday to my current school.)
Let's start with the curriculum. I've mentioned before that both APEX and Illinois State place the seventh grade standards mostly in the naive order they appear in the Common Core -- starting with the RP standards, then the current NS standards, and then proceeding with EE, G, and SP. The department head remarks today that starting the year with RP in Unit 1 is a bit tough on the students, but we've seen the Illinois State text do the same thing.
The Illinois State text expected to cover one standard per week -- but as we already know, I didn't follow the curriculum properly. Notice that if I had, then a good estimate of when I should have covered the seventh grade standards in 2016-17 can be found by seeing when APEX teaches them in 2020-21 -- thus I should have covered integer (or rational number) operations in October 2016, just as I'm doing now in October 2020.
It's interesting to compare how I taught the Distributive Property four years ago compared to now. At the old charter school, I introduced Distributive before teaching negative numbers -- and without negatives on the test, my seventh graders found it easy, and this test was their best performance. But today, APEX only briefly mentions Distributive in Unit 2 -- the quiz on properties emphasized the Commutative and Associative Properties only, and it appears that Distributive was mentioned only to prove that the product of two negatives is positive. Now that signed multiplication has been taught, I wouldn't be surprised if a full treatment of Distributive appears in Unit 3.
Like the seventh grade curriculum, the eighth grade APEX curriculum also mostly follows the naive order of the Common Core Standards. But there is one huge deviation from that order -- the F standards on functions appear in the just-completed Unit 2. The first unit starts with NS and goes up to EE1-EE4 (on exponents), and then the current Unit 3 starts off with EE5 on linear functions.
So if we ignore Unit 2 and the F standards, then the APEX order matches the Illinois State order that I should have taught to in 2016-17. Thus I should have introduced slope by mid-October 2016 (arguably even earlier once we take out the F standards). Instead, integer operations and slope are the two big topics in Grades 7-8 that I'm covering now, but failed to teach four years ago.
I'm thinking about some of the things I used in my classes four years ago, such as the basic skills multiplication quizzes. (Recall that I'm no longer using that word I used to describe them -- I don't want that word to appear on my blog in a Google search, in any post dated October 2020 on.) My new name for the quizzes is indeed "Hero Quiz," and I'm giving Hero Quizzes in the fifth period class. Each week I choose a different number (last week was 3's since this was my third week at this school -- this week will be 4's), and I choose students at random to tell me what is 3 * 1, 3 * 2, 3 * 3, 3 * 4, and so on. The test is all oral, and so there's no need to touch paper during the pandemic.
On the other hand, my old Warm-Ups and Exit Passes (at least in the version I gave them, with the date as the answer) are too awkward to give during the virus. Oh, and speaking of the date of the answer, it's been a while since I've posted a Rebecca Rapoport problem on the blog. She did finally post some Geometry questions in October, but right now I'm not a Geometry teacher.
Still, today's Rapoport question is interesting:
Let x = my - 5. When y = 8, x = 27. What is x when y = 6?
It's easy to find m = 4 and then x = 19 -- and of course, today's date is the nineteenth. But the problem is written strangely -- we're given y and asked to find x, as if y were the input and x the output. If we were to switch x and y, the problem then becomes:
Let y = mx - 5. When x = 8, y = 27. What is y when x = 6?
Now the use of m reminds us of "slope" -- and in fact, I might have been able to give this problem as a Warm-Up or Exit Pass to my eighth graders today, as we prepare to study slope-intercept form.
Believe it or not, Fawn Nguyen, the Queen of the MTBoS, posted a second time last week. And her second post is also about Warm-Ups that can be given during the pandemic:
http://fawnnguyen.com/changing-up-popular-warm-up-routines/
As with any task, whether it’s a warm-up or a curricular task, I try to think of ways to get more student engagement, tap a different thinking modality, and just to change things up.
WODB has become a common acronym in classrooms for good reasons. (Actually, does it qualify as an acronym like NATO since I’ve never heard it pronounced as a word? Y’all are still saying Which One Doesn’t Belong, right?)
I've mentioned WODB in previous posts -- as Nguyen demonstrates in her post, any of the four choices can be defended as the one that doesn't belong. Thus it's an open-ended question -- it's a way to get students thinking about math without risking being told "You're wrong!"
This isn't just the end of the first quarter -- it's also the quarter-mark of my 12-week long-term assignment at this school. It's also the end of the Willis/Wong unit -- the first unit at my new school, where I establish classroom routines and procedures. The big task that I have before me this week is entering the quarter grades.
I'm already receiving complaints from students and some parents regarding the grades. And many of these complaints from assignments that were due before my arrival at this school, and hence were assigned by the regular teacher. To understand the reason for complaints, let's think back to something similar that happened at the old charter school.
Recall that the old PowerSchool system assigned weights to the various categories -- so for example, homework was 15% of the grade, and participation was another 15%. I don't like weighting here -- it means that a point in one category isn't worth as much as a point in another category, and it can be deceptive to the students.
Also, recall that there were some early opening activities during the first week of school in August, and I counted these as "participation." Originally, I was going to count the Illinois State STEM projects as participation, but then I found out that "tests and projects" was a PowerSchool category worth 40% -- so the STEM projects belong there, not in participation.
Fortunately, I counted the Warm-Ups and Exit Passes as participation. (I also had some "participation points," but these were flawed.) Otherwise, the only participation would have been three August assignments -- and these three assignments would've been a whopping 15% of the first trimester grade!
This is the situation I find myself in right now. There is a category called "assignments," but APEX is its own category, and so the only "assignments" were opening-week August activities. This means that a large portion of the students' grade is determined by these early assignments. From their perspective, missing one of these little five-point assignments seems inconsequential -- but because of weighting, five points could be 5% of their quarter grade. And it's even tougher on students who transferred in during the quarter -- their missing assignments, through no fault of their own, are costing them a full letter grade (or more).
Of course, there are ways to avoid this problem during the second quarter -- some of the activities the other teachers discussed during today's meeting (Edpuzzle, Quizizz) could be scored under "assignments," and so there would be something substantial in that category.
(Yes, that's a big difference between my current school and the old charter school -- here there are actual other teachers teaching the same grade level and content as I am, as opposed to being the only middle school math teacher at the old charter school.)
Let me wrap up this post with a quick comparison of classroom management, which we know is an area where I want to improve. Some rules were enforceable at the old charter school but not enforceable now (such as "attend every second of class"), while some rules are enforceable now but were irrelevant back then (such as "wear a mask"). But some rules are universal at middle schools no matter what the health situation is -- no bullying.
That Desmos bullying incident is a major point of concern. I must make sure that I enforce rules that protect students, especially "no bullying." By the time I see that group again (the fourth period cohort that meets on Thursdays), I must make sure that the bullies are punished. Otherwise, I'll be in a situation where the bullies take over the class -- and then I won't be a successful teacher.
Last week's car breakdown led to the replacement car that I bought over the weekend. An additional bill to pay (monthly car payments) must remind me of the need to keep a steady job so that I have a source of income to pay these bills. In order to set myself up for more teacher jobs, I must be successful at my current job, including both the teaching of content and classroom management.
Yes -- instead of always thinking back to the past, I must consider my future. I must think of this assignment as a stepping-stone to a permanent job, so that I can have security for myself, both during the current pandemic and beyond. When the regular teacher returns to this classroom in January, I must resume my search, both for long-term positions to complete the school year, and for full-time teaching positions for fall 2021. That's the only way to go.
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