Plans for 2012

As I do every summer over the holidays I think about the coming year and what I want to aim towards.  As I found last year, as well as setting those goals, I need to be open to what just suddenly inspires me and follow that track as well, it can take me down surprising paths.

However for now I am thinking just about from February to April - our first term. Term two will be a sabbatical term, and who knows where I will want to track after that.  I find that writing and publishing my goals helps, it makes me more accountable.  I have said it, and now I want to live it out.

At this time of the year this picture shows  how my brain feels,  getting something written helps to put some shape on things, and the picture more complete!

School goals


1. Read children's books, during school term at least one a week - leading to at least 52 in the year.

2. Encourage some of my students to join Goodreads where they can discuss books among themselves and keep track of their reading.

3. Teach students how to write once a week a reading response in the form of a letter that will provide ongoing discussion between them and me about what they are noticing in their reading. (see" Guiding Readers and Writers", Fountas and Pinnell.) My goal is to respond to each, one from each student each week. This will be rotated - 5 students per night.

4. Sharpen up my skills with conferring with reading conferences first and then writing conferences. At present I am reading "Conferring: The Keystone of  Reader's Workshop" by Patrick Allen.  I have used his form to make my conference form.

5. Use Evernote for recording notes from reading conferences.  I am not sure at this stage whether I will revert to paper and pen, which for me is a lot faster, however I like the organisation that will result with Evernote.  I have already drawn up a page for it.  I was very pleased as once I had a master done I was easily able to put a copy in each student's notebook.

Screenshot from my ipad.

6. Give my more able Maths students more control over their own learning.  So I am going to trial using a Maths Daily Five type schedule with them but modified to suit us.  Hopefully they will be able to work at what they set as their goals and I will conference them individually once a week, and meet with them in smaller groups as needed.

 I am going to give five options that they will engage in:

1) Maths problem solving and writing an explanation of how they solved it.

2) Maths with a partner - I will have some options for them, I think our Figure it Out series will be a good  beginning.

3) Maths work by self - I will have a variety of text books that they can choose to use to practise whatever they believe they need within Number and Algebra for Term One.

4) Maths using technology - I will have some digital pathways from Digistore set up for them as a start. NZ Maths have it all well set out. I will set up a wiki where the students can easily access these learning objects. This slot could also involve making Showme type videos as tutorials for others.

  

5) Maths game with one or two others.

I have another group of students who will need a lot of hands on from me, and that is where I hope to spend the majority of my time.

7.  Track and meet the commitments made for global connections.  I have already made myself a page where I can see easily what projects we are involved in, who is running them, what we need to do when and a link to the web site.  Now I am not holding it all in my head.  I need to visit the plan at least twice a week to keep on track.

8. Improve the quality of commenting on blogs in my classroom.  See my previous post. 

9. Settle into a new classroom space. Adapt it as we need, explore the possibilities of it.  Just moving to it has been a big job. Still not settled in there yet.  However I am organising it more thoroughly than I ever have before.  Organisation of things etc is not my strength - it doesn't come naturally.

What are your goals at the moment?  Do you set goals or are you more of a let's see what happens person?  Personally I think there is merit in both ways.

The Joy of New Learning!

Some of my students do the ICAS Mathematics papers with the University of New South Wales. They just like the challenge and it’s a choice for them if they want. Those that are good at Mathematics generally like to give it a go.

The following question in the Yr 7 and Yr 8 paper had the better students in my class stumped. As their teacher I was totally lost as well.  Teegan went home and asked her sister and she came back with an explanation that we couldn’t follow so being the end of term and year we left it.

However when the holidays came around it was something I wanted to find out about so I took the problem to my friend and a past Math’s teacher to help me.  Here was the problem.

35.                          4! = 4x3x2x1

                                5! = 5x4x3x2x1

                                Jess wrote the expression 20! – 19! on the board.

                                Which of the following has the same value as this expression?

(A)        1!

(B)        20

(C)        19x19!

(D)         20x19!

When first looking at it I thought maybe (A).  I was applying the only background knowledge I had which was  taking 20! – 19! =  and thinking of it as 20a – 19a =.          However having peeked at the answers I knew this wasn’t correct. I was worried by the top piece of information but I couldn’t find any pattern and in the end chose to ignore it.

                                                                   

                                                       

However now I have new information!   The ! is a special symbol, it stands for factorial. I hadn't known that. So 4! stands for 4x3x2x1.    5! as above.  6! would be 6x5x4x3x2x1.   Factorial is related to the word factor. So 6,5,4,3,2,1 are all the factors of 6!

I now had some helpful information but it took me awhile longer.  So….

20! – 19!  =  20 x (19 x 18……x1) – 19x(18x17….x1)

                  = 20 x 19! – 19!

                    = 19 x 19!          which is (C)

Factorial numbers get bigger quickly.   20! is 20 x 19!  so if we take away one 19! we have 19 x19!

20! is 20 times larger than 19!

The part in blue took me a little while to get.  Later in the day I went over it in my head and I said to my friend awhile later, “So I’m going over the factorial thing and this is what I think…

As he listened he said “I don’t think you have got this part, and he named the place where 20! is 20 times greater than 19!, so we chatted over that and finally I saw it.  Or at least I did, until I sat down to write this and then I had to go to his paper to look at the notes he had jotted down and then it came back to me.

Now to those that did Maths for high school and college this probably is a no brainer. But for me who was told in Year 10 that girls didn’t need Maths (1960’s) this was very new learning.  My love is reading and writing, however I need to teach Maths to Year 8 and I actually enjoy it too.
 

Why did I want to solve this problem?  Well firstly I was driven by the fact that I wanted to be able to teach my students about it.  That was my why.  It has no other relation to my life, and I have to say it probably has little relevance to a large part of the population.  So why would my students need it? Well obviously they are not going to get the message that girls don’t need Maths so it is a small step in the bigger picture.  Now that I knew the word factorials I was empowered to search further about them. A video on You Tube showed me a little more. 

I hadn’t seen them mentioned in Algebra at the Year 8 level but what’s the harm in going further? I was partly driven also by my need not to have my students say half way through the year “I haven’t learned anything new in Maths this year!”  Now while it wasn’t Teegan who said this, or indeed anyone in my class in 2011, I know I will get great joy in sharing my knowledge with her and the others who are ready for it.   Students who on the whole are showing through testing they are at Level 5 in the NZ curriculum but are still at primary school.

And learning for the sake of learning is actually very satisfying.  Now I need to share it in a way my students will get it, so that one day very soon they can go beyond me.  One thing I can predict is they are going to grasp this far quicker than I did.