1st- 10th Grade Social Development
2nd- 11th Grade Test Prep (ACT)
3rd- 8th Grade Algebra I
4th- Plan
5th- Algebra 1
6th- Geometry Lab
7th- Geometry
8th- Algebra Lab

I'm super pumped about this schedule!

Social Development is basically advisory or what I like to call 'mothering'. That's my heart. I would rather do that all day every day if I could! The plan for that is on Monday- Character Education, Tuesday- Sustained Silent Reading for everyone (including the teacher!), Wednesday- Test Prep, Thursday- Study Hall, Friday- Team Building/Service Projects. How fun is that?

The test prep for 11th grade is broken up among four of us: math, reading, english, science. So we will have a group of kids for 4-5 weeks and then they will rotate to a different content area. I am in love with this because it's not that much of an extra prep, kind of a mini prep. The plan is that Monday through Wednesday is test prep (not sure what that will consist of yet) then Thursday is a study hall and Friday again with the team building and service projects.

The Algebra and Geometry labs will probably be the hardest thing for me to deal with. Our instructional team is starting to plan assessments together and after that we want to move on to planning the curriculum/activities for those lab classes. We know for sure we want to incorporate probability, statistics, and measurement since those are the first things to get cut out of the normal curriculum. My heart for this class is to meet with students individually and work on skills they haven't mastered yet. We also would like to use ALEKS (or I'm leaning toward TenMarks) or some computer program a couple days of week for students to work on at their own pace. I think the first thing to do is plan a routine like we have for the social development and test prep classes. That way students and teachers know what to expect on a daily/weekly basis. And makes planning a lot simpler.

Other changes to our schedule is that the school day is extended from 3:06 to 3:20. Teachers had to stay until 3:20 anyway so now we can leave as soon as the bell rings.

In the morning, we have to be here by 7:45 and class starts at 8:03. The new schedule gives us team meeting time (vertical, instructional, student support, leadership, etc) from 7:45 to 8:15 every day. As far as teachers are concerned, we have to be there the same amount of time. We went from seven to eight periods so I'm sure some teachers have extra preps and are not happy about that! But, so far, I haven't heard any complaints.

Our lunch period is now common between middle school and high school. Remember, smallllll school. While that may cause some issues, it opens up more options for middle school students to take as 'exploratory' classes.

Another change is that all juniors/seniors will have gym first hour and all freshmen/sophomores will have gym second hour. We're kind of going on a fitness initiative. More aerobics and such because research shows that getting those endorphins pumping helps students think better. The FACS teacher will be pulling students during their gym time to create individual nutrition plans as well.


All in all, I have to say I am surprised and impressed that my administration came up with this. Of course I'm biased since I like my schedule, but I do think this is a good way to fulfill a lot of different needs that our school currently has.

The attitude and atmosphere is slowly changing and becoming more positive. Teachers have been coming up with cross-curriculum projects and new ideas. Since I've spent a lot of time complaining, I thought I would share some positive things now.

• The elementary has started an intramural basketball team for boys and girls.
• We're brainstorming ways to update, rearrange, and change the atmosphere of the library to a place people want to be.
• The history and English department are doing a joint study of the Holocaust that culminates in a trip to a Holocaust museum with a tour given by a Holocaust survivor.
• The band teacher wants to design his own band uniform with measurement help from algebra/geo students, measurement predictions from the statistics class, design/color ideas from the art classes, and mock-up patterns sewn by the FACS classes.
• I'm stealing a project from Mimi where students design their own logo and then shrink or enlarge it (to practice percents) and with the help of the art teacher, we will blow it up or shrink it and use the printing press to create an actual print of the logo.
• The fine arts department is planning a Math Olympics day where students sign up and compete for math related activities such as counting back change, doing mental math, telling time from an analog clock, etc.
• We will be using Career Cruising with students as a way to kind of build a portfolio of sorts for college/careers after school as well as a way of setting goals and recording student accomplishments.
• We've formed a Communications Committee to work on communication between administrators and teachers, teachers and parents, etc.

Pretty impressive if I do say so myself.

Effective Classroom:
-Procedures
-Mutual Respect
-Consistency
-Observant
-Flexibility
-Communication
-Accountability
-Clarity
-Discipline
-Structure

What Do You Want to Know?
-how to deal with the one problem child
-motivation
-bag of tricks
-how to deal with bullying
-managing cooperative learning and transitions
-beginning activities

Collaborative Norms
-Equity of voice
-Active listening
-Safety to share different perspectives
-Confidentiality

Come to the Edge poem

3 Characteristics of an Effective Teacher
1. Positive expectations for student success
2. Extremely good classroom manager
3. Knows how to design lessons for student mastery

Efficient is not the same as effective.

Creating Acceptance
-Make eye contact with each student 
-Call all students by preferred name (Should we call students by Mr. or Ms. since we expect them to respond to us in that manner?) 
-Move toward and stay close to learners
-"With-it-ness"

Give-one-get-one strategy. Give students a grid of nine squares. They fill in three with their own ideas. Then find another student to exchange one idea with. Keep rotating students until grid is full.

Effective teachers manage their classrooms.
Ineffective teachers discipline their classrooms.

Focus on procedures to limit dealing with behavior.

Discipline has penalties and rewards. Procedures don't.

Students Should Know:
Where to get materials
What to do when they have a question
Where to work
Where to put work
What the rules are

Rules are concerned with behavior, not academic work.

There's no reason to have a rule that's not important. If you don't enforce it, don't make it a rule.

Be firm, fair, consistent.

Teaching Procedures
1. Explain, model, demonstrate
2. Rehearse, practice
3. Review

The number one problem in the classroom is not discipline; it is the lack of routines and procedures.

Discuss inappropriate behaviors quietly, calmly, and privately as often as you can.

http://www.disciplinehelp.com Library of scenarios and how to deal with specific behaviors.

Closing the Gap Conference
Keynote Speaker- Alan November

3 Job Skills
1. Dealing with an overwhelming amount of information and being able to sift through to find what's useful and needed.
2. Global communication- being able to complete things that you can't finish on your own, working with people not in the same room
3. Self-directed- being able to work on your own efficiently without a boss.

2 Tech Tools
1. Skype
2. Screen casting tool (Jing)

Teachers should have access to any website with the complete trust that they will make the right decision. Only in the US are websites blocked.

Record people  (that children are familiar with) reading books aloud to encourage reading. Use Skype to create a 'grandparent network'.

Build a video library of tutorials made BY students, FOR students that spans the entire curriculum. Over time, show different cases/ method. Students need to see other students homework more than the teacher does. The role of the teacher is now more important than ever: all content goes through and mist be approved by teacher. Ttt

We have underestimated students willingness to work harder than the teacher. Homework is not purposeful work.

Search Google using site extensions like .gov, .k13.il.us, to limit results from quality sites. Site:

Students are going to publish content on the Internet anyway. Why not be a role model for how to publish appropriate content? They're posting crap on the Internet because they've never been taught otherwise.

The majority of students have inaccurate notes. We don't have time to check for quality.

Google and Gates are paying Khan to cover the entire American curriculum. If students can get every lecture ever needed on their phone/laptop, we no longer need to lecture. Homework becomes classwork and there is no homework. Homework needs immediate feedback or it does no good. 

We are blocking the most powerful tool ever invented for learning because of our fear of lack of control.

With Wolfram-Alpha, we no longer have to focus on mechanics. We can spend time on application.

Live demonstration of polleverywhere.com

Video of Eric Mazoir: Students at Harvard can get high scores on tests without understanding anything. This is our American curriculum. Even if NCLB completely succeeded, the nation would fail.

Students should read, write, and reflect before the lecture.

In the classroom 'flip', everyone wins. But we won't actually do it because of tradition. Students need immediate feedback and they cam get that now with clickers. We can know what kids are thinking! Students need to learn logic, reasoning, and how to think. They no longer need the teacher for transfer of knowledge. We've bought billions of dollars of technology but we haven't changed the process of learning. Who owns the learning in your classroom?

Use Google Docs to take collaborative notes. One person can't take better notes than three people working together.

Teach students to deal with content, not block it.    

Update on my trig ratio graph lesson that I blogged about here. I talked to my pre-calc teacher and he said if I wanted to do this it would be good. So it wasn't necessary and I wasted a lot of time but I still think it was a good lesson. Thanks to @approx_normal for suggesting I test this out on Excel on my own. After some trial and error, I figured out that students would get a good picture of the graph by using multiples of 3 up to 90 degrees. We kept the y window the same, going up to 1 by increments of .1.


I gave them a page with three blank graphs, one for each trig ratio. And then ta-da, I made up another investigation! The hardest part for students was figuring out how to label the graphs. Especially after we realized that the y window for the tangent graph needed to go from 0 to 20 by 2s. (Note: I didn't change that yet so if you use it, that's something you need to look for.)

Then once I got them started on calculating the degrees, it was pretty much smooth sailing. The next stumbling block was when it came to predictions. I had them draw a curve through all the dots. 


After using the line to predict certain trig values, I wanted them to use the calculator. But, they just wanted to try it by typing in sin(42). I probably should have shown them how to graph the trig functions on the calculator earlier. But, after they graphed the function, I had them hit trace and type in the necessary angle measure.


To sum things up, I made a Powerpoint with pictures of trig graphs from real life scenarios. The first slide is a graphic organizer which we used to take notes about nonlinear, nonquadratic, discrete, and continuous. I briefly introduced the concept of asymptotes as well.

For homework, students answered the reflection questions on the back about their process. And to be honest, the answers weren't that great. But then again, neither was the assignment.

I got this game off of the ilovemath.org wiki but I had to change some of the problems since we hadn't done all of that yet. It's a review game based on the 'win a fish' carnival game.

Original Directions:
Remember the game at the fair where you try to toss a ball in a fish bowl and if so, you take home the fish?  Same kind of concept.

My "fish pond" is made from the lid of the copier paper box. I then taped down some plastic cups. Since I needed 3 different colors, I took overhead pens and went around the inside top part of the cup (red, black, and red). I filled the lid full of cups trying to not have any spaces. I just put tape on the bottom of the cups. I have a ping pong too.

Students are in groups. I take turns asking groups for a problem. Everyone works the problem. Each group shows me 1 answer. One point for correct answer, extra points are gained by getting the ping pong ball in a cup.

I have the lid of cups on a desk and another desk in front of that. The students stand behind a line that is about 2 or 3 feet away. I ask that they toss the ping pong ball so that it hits the first desk and bounces it in to the cups. If it bounces out, no points, if it gets stuck on top of all of the cups, no points.

My Take:
I didn't give any points for the right answer. I put colored post-it flags inside the cups that were worth different points. But I also noticed there were yellow, green, and blue plastic cups at Wal-Mart so I will be picking some of those up soon.


In the picture above, I ran out of cups AND they were out of the right size so I filled the rest with small cups. I don't know if that made it harder or easier but it's what I'm working with. So then the students win different points depending on what color they win.

The students like this game because they think it will be so easy and they will be great at it. The truth is, they suck. They complain that our desks are slanted and that throws off their ability to bounce but I just make fun of them and play on. And if you haven't already made the connection, students refer to this as beer pong. I originally called it fish pong and now I call it nothing, I just bring out the box.

I made my own game for similar triangles and one for trig ratio practice.