Computer Science Week 1

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This is the first year I have ever taught computer science!  I took my fair share of computer science classes in college but that was a long time ago!  My school sent me to an AP Institute this summer which was great and really helped me start to conceptualize how I wanted my course to …

AP Stat Week 1

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I love teaching AP Statistics.  I love the content, but it’s also the course I’ve taught the longest.  I feel like it’s the class I teach the best.  In AP Statistics I often impress myself, in other classes that is less often the case :). This year in AP Statistics I’m trying to move towards …

A new year!

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We are wrapping up our first week of school today.  I want to take some time and reflect on how it’s gone and remind future me why I did things the way I did. I got some new tables this year.  They’re round.  They’re great.  When the math teacher gets round tables everyone talks about …

Academic “Hot Spots”

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Lately, in the spirit of the new year, I have been trying to get my life in order. I like to think I have good ideas, but I have terrible follow through, partially because I am *so* profoundly disorganized. I’m one of those folks who has stacks of papers all over their classroom, often loses …

Differentiated Testing

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This idea was presented at the last NCCTM conference. I didn’t go to the session, but one of my colleagues did. He has agreed to collude with me on my idea for interactive notebooks next semester if I will collude with him on this project. I actually really like the idea, and I’m thinking about …

First Day of School!

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Today was my first day of school! It went pretty well. I tried something new, this year, and rather than diving right into the specific course curriculum, I taught a general course on Polya’s problem solving methods. I pulled some problems from “What’s Math Got to do With It” and gave my students a handout …

Discrete Math . . .

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Drives me crazy. The math is not the issue. I like the math, and, frankly, it’s not that hard. What drives me crazy is how few coping skills the students in that class really have. That became starkly apparent when I assigned this project. They have been working on it in class the last few …

Exploring Function

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after spending six weeks pulling teeth with my precalculus students trying to get them to actually think about functions, rather than just parotting phrases like “domain is input, range is output,” we top everything off with this project. The whole idea of this project is to get students to analyze the graphs of functions, discussing …

Function

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It always amazes me how my students get all the way to precalculus with such an underdeveloped sense of function. I often hear teacher’s complain about how their students can’t deal with fractions, or solve equations, but I find it much more alarming that they don’t have a basic understanding of domain, range, and function. …