Today I subbed in a high school self-contained special ed class. It's in my new district -- so in particular, it's not the same as the class I subbed in on Tuesday in my first OC district.
Ordinally, I don't do "A Day in the Life" for classes like this -- it's highly unrepresentative of the class I'd like to teach in someday. Then again, it's a two-day assignment -- I'll be back in this class on Monday. Yes, as we saw on Tuesday, special ed students often attend classes in-person at times when gen ed students don't -- and that includes Mondays.
Since it's a multi-day assignment. I will do "A Day in the Life today." I most likely won't do "A Day in the Life" on Monday, though.
8:00 -- As students are dropped off on campus, they begin some basic skills worksheets. Unlike Tuesday though, I don't notice any math on these worksheets.
There are three guys who attend in-person today -- usually there are four, but one is absent. There are also three girls who log in on Zoom -- one of them is celebrating her seventeenth birthday this weekend.
The aides consider taking the guys out for a walk, but but to their chagrin, the track is closed. They plan on going on the walk later this morning.
9:00 -- Snacks are served to the students. One student has forgotten his snack this morning, and so his mother comes in to drop it off.
9:45 -- The speech teacher arrives. I don't post the specific disabilities, including speech disabilities,.on the blog, but in this case the speech teacher gives a lesson to everyone, rather than pull students out. (I point out that this makes him more like the coding teacher at the old charter school.) His lesson is on common and proper nouns.
10:15 -- By now the track is open, and so the class goes on a walk. One of the aides has brought her pet dog, and some of the students chase him on the track and up the bleachers.
11:00 -- Lunch is served to the students.
12:15 -- The students watch a movie -- Disney's Lady and the Tramp. (Back on Tuesday, that class watched a Pixar film, Finding Dory.)
1:30 -- As I usually do in classes like this, I pass out some pencils and candy, even though it's not particularly near a holiday.
One of the aides takes out her ukelele and begins to play a song. (What is it with all the ukes I've been seeing in the past year -- first the one I saw in last classroom I subbed in before the pandemic, then the one the online-only girl played during my long-term, and now this instrument?)
She plays the songs "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You" and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" -- both of which are ukelele standards. She wants someone to sing along with her -- and of course, I jump right in. I have no excuse, since I've been singing songs in class most of the week!
The one day I didn't sing was Tuesday, since I don't typically perform in classes like this one. Then again, since songs are being played anyway, I can't resist singing "The Big March Song," which I perform in between the two duets.
2:30 -- The students leave one-by-one as their parents arrive. One guy gives me a high-five (or air-five), and one aide informs me that this is the biggest smile this student's given in some time. I credit the candy and song that I give him.
This ends my day. I return for the second day of this two-day assignment on Monday.
Since I see a ukelele in class today -- you guessed it! -- it's back to figuring out how to play chords using Arabic 18EDL fretting on a four-stringed uke-like instrument. Yes, it seems as if I'm finding every excuse to post the "music" label these days. (Teacher with his uke in the classroom means music tag, uke chords on wall in teacher's old room means music tag, teacher's new room with no uke in sight means music tag, online girl playing uke from home means music tag, aide with her uke even though I don't get to play it means music tag.)
So far, our hypothetical four-stringed instrument is tuned to standard uke tuning (GCEA), and we wish to play a chord for every note of the 18EDL scale on the string G.
I'm still struggling to complete the scale, though. The stumbling block for me is the green F (gu F), at the eighth fret (the last note before the octave G at the ninth fret). Most of the other chords that are reachable with my hand are dissonant. The original song that I'm trying to play here, "Another Ratio Song," has a D7 chord here -- but then again, it's based on the real G major scale that ends with F#.
Then again, I'm not likely to sing that song when I return to this classroom on Monday. I will perform some song, but I won't decide which one until Monday itself.
By the way, since this is the first time I've seen the uke played in person, I do play close attention to the position of the aide's hands. As I suspected earlier, she doesn't play any barre chords -- with only four strings, barres are unnecessary. I also notice her right hand position and how the strings are strummed.
Today is Elevenday on the Eleven Calendar. There is no eleventh resolution -- instead the focus is on the Millennium Resolutions and communication. The speech teacher is there today to enhance the students' communication skills. I, meanwhile, do try to interact as much as possible with the in-person students and aides.
I also follow the old version of the fifth resolution -- sort of. That one is about the heroes of 1955, and the movie we watch today, Lady and the Tramp, was first released in that year (although it takes place nearly half a century earlier).
Today on her Daily Epsilon on Math 2021, Rebecca Rapoport writes:
What is the maximum area that can be enclosed by 18 feet of fencing? (Round to the nearest square foot.)
Yes, that's right -- after missing Geometry for most of the month, we suddenly get three Geometry problems in a row on the calendar.
This is a Lesson 15-8 problem -- the Isoperimetric Inequality. Of all plane figures with the same perimeter, the circle has the most area. Thus we use the formulas for circle perimeter and area:
2pi r = 18
r = 9/pi
A = pi(9/pi)^2
A = 81/pi
A = 25.78 square feet
Rounding off here, the desired area is 26 square feet -- and of course, today's date is the 26th.
Let's finally get to today's Geometry activity. Last year, I posted an activity based on a district Performance Task -- but that's no fun, and it isn't pandemic-friendly.
Oh, and after I visited my old long-term classroom on Wednesday, the regular teacher finally removed me from the Canvas email list. This is good since I've been getting too many emails lately as each teacher adds me to Canvas just to sub one day for them, so I need teachers to remove me. It does mean, however, that I won't be able to keep up with what my old class is now learning -- and I'll no longer be inspired by their current assignments as examples of activities to post to the blog. (Then again, it's not as if the material from this chapter -- outside of the Distance Formula -- is taught in Math 8 anyway.)
This means it's time to return to our old standby -- Desmos. A quick search reveals the following activity on coordinate geometry, created by the math teacher Jenny White:
https://teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder/custom/5c8ebddd6cf5480c7c980318
Recall that last year's Performance Task took two days, and so I have two days to fill this year. Well, notice that this activity is listed as "Day 1" -- yes, it's indeed a two-day activity. Thus it fits perfectly into our curriculum.
There's no need for me to post any worksheets at all in this post. The complete activity for today is found at the Desmos link above. I must say thank you, Jenny White.
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