This is my monthly "Day in the Life" post for October, since today is the seventeenth. It falls on Monday, which is an all-classes day at this school. On some Mondays and Fridays, there are teacher meetings before school, but today isn't one of them. (There will be a Math III meeting on Friday morning.)
And it is definitely still DEVOLSON ("the Vortex"). After today, there are still eighteen days of school left until Veteran's Day. Let's now start "A Day in the Life":
8:30 -- First period arrives. This is the first of two Math III classes.
I usually give one quiz per chapter in Math III on DeltaMath, about midway through the chapter. And so today is the Chapter 3 Quiz. It covers equations involving absolute value, radicals, and powers.
One problem that I've had lately with Math III quizzes is that, since the entire department has agreed to give common quizzes, various curveball questions written by other teachers appear on a quiz. Often the curveball question involves something that I taught differently from the other teachers. And more often than not, it's the last lesson before the quiz or test on which the curveball question is based. So it means that instead of a review day, the day before the quiz turns into "let me reteach the previous day a new way, and rush through it, so that the students have at least a chance of getting this particular question."
Of course, this is not ideal. So I was really hoping just to get through the lessons before the quiz without any problems, especially the final lesson on power equations last Thursday. Then there would be no issues coming into today's quiz.
Last Thursday was also Parent Conferences Day. I wrote that I wouldn't do "A Day in the Life" that day, but I admit that I was tempted to post anyway because of something unusual that happened then. There was a Wi-Fi outage that day, and Internet wasn't restored until -- you guessed it! -- just minutes before the end of sixth period.
Normally I'd look at the DeltaMath or Desmos lesson before first period in order to prepare. But with no Internet, I couldn't see the lesson at all. So I had to go into that day's lesson blind -- I knew only that lesson was on power equations, but not how complicated the power equations on the quiz would be. Of course I had the students take notes in their notebooks, as there was no DeltaMath or Desmos. Most of the examples I gave were equations of the form a(x - h)^n + k = c, so that students would have to isolate the power and take the nth root of both sides (noting that if n is even then there are two real roots, whereas there's only one real root if n is odd).
The next day was Friday, and so by then I could access the lesson and quiz. I found out that while my examples were good, I needed to show the students the cases where n is a fractional exponent. And so I was forced to spend that day -- the minimum day after Parent Conferences -- rushing through yet another lesson, this time on fractional exponents, to make sure that the students get it correct. In other words, here we go again.
After looking at the stats for today's quiz on DeltaMath, I can see that the question the students struggle with the most is, just as you'd expect, the power equations. Once again, the students get a curveball question on the quiz just because last week's Wi-Fi outage ruined that day's lesson.
9:25 -- First period leaves for nutrition.
9:40 -- Second period arrives. This is the first of three Math I classes.
Today we proceed with the next lesson in the CPM text, on the standard form of a linear equation. A Desmos lesson has already been set up for today. It mentions a real life example -- the ways dimes and nickels add up to a dollar, which leads directly to a linear equation in standard form.
Last Friday was the Hero Quiz, given as Tech 55 with no computers allowed. (In hindsight, I almost wish that Thursday was the Hero Quiz, as there was no Internet anyway. But I wouldn't have wanted to devote a full block day to a Hero Quiz.) One good thing about a Friday Hero Quiz is that Monday isn't spent doing quiz corrections (since on Hero Quizzes, everyone should already have an A), and so more time can be devoted to the main lesson.
Even so, I have trouble getting through the entire lesson. Another time suck on Mondays, besides quiz corrections, is passing out the new Warm-Up/Exit Pass sheets and getting them glued into notebooks. I don't have enough glue sticks for everyone, so they must be passed around. It often takes up to a third of the period just dealing with Warm-Up sheets and notebooks.
And so I only reach the Desmos slide where the students are asked to graph .10x + .05y = 1.00 using intercepts, and not reach the slide where they convert it to slope-intercept form (hence the title of the lesson and this post). This isn't terrible, since the upcoming quiz this week focuses more on graphing lines that are already in slope-intercept form.
(You might recall from the blog that I already have a song about graphing using intercepts. That song would have fit today's lesson, but unfortunately Mondays are not singing days. So the best I can do is sing it tomorrow.)
One thing about Desmos lessons is that they're excellent at introducing a topic -- showing connections to the real world or how some equations are derived. But they take time away from actual practice. I've already dropped Desmos from Math III lessons on Mondays (that is, saving Desmos for block days only) because they forced me to rush the main lessons (thus leading to the aforementioned student angst with the Math III quizzes), and perhaps I should do the same with Math I as well. Yes, today's Desmos demonstrates why graphing with intercepts works, but the kids have really seen just that one example with the dimes and nickels -- I can't hand them an arbitrary example and count on them being able to graph it using intercepts.
10:35 -- Second period leaves. Third period is my conference.
11:40 -- Fourth period arrives. This is the second of three Math I classes.
Fourth period has always been slightly better behaved than second period, although there are still a few corners of the room where the students regularly talk through the lesson. Therefore I'm sure that more students have taken notes from the Desmos in fourth period than in second -- but still, I don't think that these kids are more capable of graphing a line using intercepts, again based on how little they've seen of the topic in today's Desmos introduction.
I'm worried about one special ed student in particular, only because he's often pulled out of class. On Friday, he was all set to take his Hero Quiz, but then he was summoned to leave. And since he's absent today, he still can't take the quiz. A few weeks ago, he started a DeltaMath quiz and then is summoned to be pulled out. Once a quiz begins, DeltaMath counts the time and then locks the student out of the system once time has run out. That day, I ended up granting him an extra point on his quiz corrections due to this unlucky timing.
12:40 -- Fourth period leaves for lunch.
1:25 -- Fifth period arrives. This is the second of two Math III classes.
A few students are concerned when they make errors that causes DeltaMath to mark them wrong. One girl is marked wrong on a power equation question with a fractional exponent when she lists both the positive and negative solutions when DeltaMath asks only for the positive solution. If I recall correctly, the exponent in question is 4/5. Technically speaking, an equation like x^(4/5) = 16 does have two real solutions, x = 32 and x = -32 -- if the numerator of the original exponent is even and the denominator is odd, then the equation may have two real solutions. But this is usually considered confusing to students, so most textbooks (and DeltaMath) only ask for the positive solution when dealing with fractional exponents -- only for n = 2 does it expect students to list both solutions.
Another student is confused because during the Warm-Up, I remind the students to check for extraneous roots for absolute value and radical equations. I point out that it's possible for both solutions to be extraneous, and so the solution set would be the empty set, which I write as an O-slash. This student asks whether this symbol means that zero is a solution to the equation, so I explained that no, it means that there is no solution at all, so they shouldn't type {0} as the solution set. Then she begins her quiz and -- you guessed it! -- she gets an equation with the unique real solution x = 0. And since I'd told her not to type {0} as the solution set, she inputs the empty set and is marked wrong. The moral of the story is that I shouldn't have used O-slash for the empty set -- instead, I should have followed DeltaMath and used empty braces, {}.
2:25 -- Fifth period leaves and sixth period arrives. This is the third of three Math I classes.
Unfortunately, many students in this class were absent on Friday -- hence they missed the Hero Quiz. I spend lots of time today handing out Hero Quizzes and checking them (as I'm supposed to grade them right away and let them know whether they got an A or less than an A). All of this took time away from the main lesson -- in other words, it was just like a quiz correction day where more time is spent redoing quizzes than learning the new material.
Of course, this wouldn't have mattered if I could have assigned the Desmos lesson to the students who weren't absent last Friday and expected them to work. But that's too much to ask of a (typically) immature class of freshmen. Many of them talk or otherwise do no work while the absent students are making up their Hero Quizzes. And so I end up rushing the Desmos lesson even more than in my second and fourth period classes.
3:20 -- Sixth period leaves, thus concluding my school day.
In my last monthly post, I mentioned how I wish to make connections with my students -- especially in my freshman classes. As of now, I'm still worried that I'm not making strong enough connections. The classes are often loud and disengaged, and I often have trouble communicating with them in such a way to motivate them to learn. Once again, I hate arguing with my students, but sometimes that's the only way I can get their attention.
Once again, I want to find better ways to communicate with my freshmen -- and get them to work well with each other as well. I'm still trying to find a way to incorporate the Promethean board into my lessons, in particular the group assignments. The board seems to work well -- the problem is that I'm not skilled enough to use it with group lessons on a regular basis.
Coming up on the horizon are the district tests. Between now and my November monthly post, I'll have given district Benchmarks in both Math I and III. Both departments (actually curriculum teams) are scrambling to cover all the necessary material before the district tests.
This concludes my monthly "Day in the Life" post for October.
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