Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Legion Teachers:sharing ideas and epiphanies

You met this post in the MMB's I am in a meeting... thread... AND NOW IT'S IN A THREAD OF ITS OWN! Imagine this post busting out a la Giant-Size X-men #1. --Mod Teeds

Hoping for ideas. SO many creative people around here.

I'm gathering that in addition to parents, we have quite a few in the teacher/trainer category around here.

Just wondering where some of you parents/teachers/trainere get your ideas. Feel free to share experiences too.

I'll share one that changed me. I had an upcoming parent meeting for a kid that was continually off the hanger, disrespectful, almost no background in subject and sent to the Dean countless times. Sometimes you have to wonder if the parents have interest one in their kids' schoolwork. About what I expected. Tatted up. Knuckles tagged. This guy could break me. I braced for the worst. First words out of Dad's mouth, "we don't know what to do for our boy."


Books and covers.

The man was near tears and I was about to join him. I was all ready for the "teacher's don't do shit" routine and he comes out with, ""we don't know what to do for our boy." That Father and Mother made me realize, with one exception as long as I've been teaching here in my old neighborhood, no parent has accused me of not trying. No parent did not support me in my efforts to help their kid learn either Math or personal discipline.

You couldn't ask for better people to work for. The Admin on the other hand....



Problem based exercises, good for parents and teachers. Phillips Exeter makes theirs freely available, at least in Math. If you have a kid, really into Math, I recommend them.

For project based learning, sorry, I'm too limited by space and resources to do anything other than what I can do on paper. I search popular magazines for "math" words and then see if I can turn those into Lesson Plans. National Geographic and Business Insider Website are great sources.

Anyone heard of TED lectures? Science teacher in the building turned me on to those. Love those.

Still Teeds, even when I'm LYL. TD or LYL fine too. Lardy is the only one who calls me Deb, and sometimes I don't think he remembers that he's Lardy, so you needn't pay him no never mind.

I'm not a math teacher. I have a friend who is a foreign language teacher for the middle grades, so I get her perspective on work life of a public school teacher. She's getting a lot of mandates concerning student-centered learning -- including how desks should be arranged. She thinks that foreign languages and math have the hardest row to hoe in meeting these guidelines while teaching the core concepts.

I'm interested in hearing new ideas for teaching math, which seems to me like the least flexible subject.

Your friend already has those ideas!!!


If I were Principal, I'd tell your friend to get toot-suite over to the Math Dept. More-so than even the English teacher, a second language teacher is trained to teach Math Language.


So MUCH of what I put into my worksheets comes from my Peace Corps experience teaching ESL. "Reading" those gibberish symbols holds back a lot of Math-phobes. Changing problems described by words, into symbols that can be manipulated is a language skill. Most teachers are giving their kids problems and showing them how to "do" them but not teaching them how to "read" them. English is read left to right. Math is not. The fun of a story is to interpret it in your own way and maybe compare and contrast that with the intended way. The fun of Math is knowing there is only ONE interpretation and finding it.

In MY Opinion:

Designing Math Lessons should be like that "Whose Line is it Anyway" game. You pick a concept to teach, limit the resources (or not), then have people go at it to see who can come up with the most interesting lesson plan. I'd love to do that but can't get any colleagues interested. Art teachers, Music teachers, Foreign Language teachers, even other Math teaches... are all going to come up with different ways to teach a Math concept if given the go ahead to do so. That's the kind of teaching environment I wish we had at my school.



If your friend has any one REALLY effective or favorite lesson plan or class exercise, I'd love to see if I could change it into a Math lesson plan. Heck post it here and let us all have a go.

I L-U-V that shit, taking a really hard (okay, I can't do really hard) PhD level Math concept and seeing if I can turn it into a high school freshman level lesson plan or taking something from some other subject and seeing if I can turn it into a Math lesson. Love that stuff.



I REALLY could use some ideas from Art, Music and Foreign Language.

"Least Flexible"

Do you realize, Origami has "rules?" Origami is becoming HUGE!!!! Origami is a mathematical process.

We agree, Math has a very distinct box (inflexible). The idea is to be as creative as possible, within that box. I've had kids solve problems in such unexpected (and more efficient) ways because they took some off-hand thing I said weeks before and applied it to a problem I gave that day. Even a teacher can slip into "see-one-do-one" and stop looking at old problems with new light.

Math is the science of thinking by rules but the chaotic mind wants to create meaning. It wants to do what "looks" right as opposed to what the Language of Math says is permitted. Algebra is really only addition, repeated addition (multiplication), repeated multiply (exponentiation) and Order of Operations. Like ANY art, Math is guided by restricted resources (rules). Working within these rules, the goal is to create the most amazing patterns that you can create. The goal of a Math PhD is to discover NEW rules that do not violate the old rules. Algebra, Topology (Geometry) are studies of patterns.


Teaching Math is about training the mind to focus on what is permitted (by Math, not by life) as opposed to the billions of things not permitted. The trick to teaching Math is to make that stay within the box an interesting one.

What game is interesting, without rules?

Post a Math "topic" and let's brainstorm. Let's play a little "Whose Line is it Anyways."

MATH TOPIC 1: Basic geometry -- proofs. What's this whole thing about listing all the rules for why A is a right angle when you can SEE it's a right angle? It has the little square and everything!

For PROOFS:

I'd use social network examples in the early days of geometry class.

There's Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (although you might have to explain who Kevin Bacon is, or find a reasonable substitute). You could also adapt some real-life aspects of the students' life (either completely true or assigned to certain people). Example: Jo moved here a year ago but wants to borrow a yearbook from (one of the feeder elementary schools). She doesn't really know who went to what school, and she figures someone wouldn't lend a stranger their yearbook but maybe a friend of a friend. How does she go about it?

With stuff like Facebook, there's the whole thing with friends, friends of friends, etc.

^ These are all a little rough and don't quite get into the WHY of proofs, but are about seeing relationships and taking steps.

Wait, A isn't a right angle. C is. j/k Having the square does presume the result. You're correct.

Those are terrific ideas. Geometry teaching uses "nets." Around here, the family trees have so many loops and connections, the kids have to be expert at the 6 degrees thing. It would so work on proofs, which are building connections between rules. Being that, I think I can make that work with equation solving? Have to ponder.


For Geometry, my go to guy is Geogebra. You can do the proofs on this and even add animation and explanations....

If you've heard of Geometer's Sketchpad, Geogebra does many similar things and it's a free (but not open source) program. Geogebra has gathered quite a following of one-uppers

If YOU ARE A PARENT or teacher or like Math, download this immediately!

http://www.geogebra.org/cms/en/download/

Click on "Help" to get to tutorials. This is an Educator driven venture so the help facilities are the best I've ever seen.


It can be intimidating if you look at what others have done with it but if you download and install it or use the webstart option, and just run through the tutorial, you'll be hooked.

A big thing now is to use it for art. I've used the animation and trace features to make a pretty butterfly.

Speaking of "yearbooks" --

Take pictures of all those pictures your students like to draw of you on the individual and wall whiteboards*. At the end of the year, make a collage or photo mosaic. Print out, with "Mr. BB's Advice for Math and/or Life" on the back.


*for any inappropriate ones, it's documentation to go with the writeup to the Dean!

I am fascinated with discovering and creating patterns. In my art I like to create boundaries and restrictions and see what I can develop within them. If back in high school I had understood math the way you just described it, I probably would have been more excited about it. I was always a pretty good math student...my high school algebra teacher encouraged me to major in math in college...but I just never enjoyed it that much.

Man, wish I'd thought of that years ago. I'm the last person on Earth not to have a cell phone thingy but the kids do take pictures of them. I never thought to collect the ones done on the board.

In the days before summer break, the kids get to write/draw on the board. We break out the COLOR chalk, yeah bhoy!

It always looks amazing as they weave in and out of each other's drawings. The only rules, school appropriate, you cannot hog and you cannot erase someone else's and we do take photos of that, along with what few students are still coming to school, lol.

You would probably like topology. 3D printers are all the rage now as if they are new. A college colleague of mine, well someone I looked up to because he took time out of his day to come to my high school class and give the best lecture ever using only what they already knew, learned from a friend about programmable milling machines. He programmed milling machines to create beautiful stone or wood sculptures based upon math patterns. One sculpture, based on a topology called a "knot" just pulled the stress out of the body, simply by holding it in your hand. He's passed now but I'm wondering if he shouldn't get more credit. His "hobby" pre-dated 3-D printers by 3-4 decades.

The lesson plan I've put off writing too long. As late as the early 60s, Math people claimed the only way to make a laser laze was to use a structure with a regular structure, what is named after a Mathematician, a Penrose tiling (Tesselation is the word your kids would know), only in 3D. Physicists said, hold your ponies, we've found an compound (Manganse something or other) that is semi-regular that lazes quite fine. It's a really difficult structure to make, and we discovered it. Go away Math people.


About a decade ago or so, a couple grad students in Math were walking in one of the Stan countries, looked up at a Mosgue and said, "no way."

Somewhere between 600 and 900 AD, Muslim artists had already discovered the semi-regular pattern.

Artists>Physicist>Math types.

I believe it was the Physicists, won the Nobel. The structure is used in flexible solar collectors.

New structure, also based upon a tesselation, the most efficient hexagon, recently discovered. The one atom thick graphene. Two dimensional fabric and it's STRONG.

You might enjoy playing around with that Geogebra program.

Oh, two more "Mathy" drawing programs, which are a lot of fun.

Google Sketch-up.

POVray, is free and you can make Pixar level animations and graphics or just nice art.

http://www.povray.org/

http://hof.povray.org/

Have your classes find a solution. How best to transfer images from multiple students' devices to Mr. BB, taking into account any rules the school may have (or you personally hold) concerning e-communication between students and teachers?

Don't tell them why. If they persist, say that it's for your parole officer -- documentation that you're really going to work every day.

If you have a group that doesn't want anyone up in their business, or is entirely TOO MUCH up in each others' businesses, I thought of a few other options.

Make it about YOU.
Given: Mr. BB has a marinara-looking stain on his tie.
Prove: Mr. BB had a meatball sub for lunch today

Then make up various "rules" such as "Mr. BB loves meatball sandwiches" and "The sandwich shop only delivers on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday" and so on, as well as unrelated statements. You could hand these out 1 or 2 to a student and let it get loud as everyone shares their pieces, or maybe slightly less loud by giving the whole list of rules to small groups. Or, hell, let the students make up the statements! They may conclude that you had chicken salad and someone threw their sub at you in the teachers' lounge, or that it's not a stain just an ugly tie -- but that's how the meatball rolls, am I C?


Make it about navigating the school. (This might be particularly apt if these students were around during all the renovations.)
How to get from here to there with various (lighthearted) obstacles. Think of Hogwarts, where certain stairways would disappear on certain days.

I wanna be in BB's & Teeds' class!

I hear you have to know somebody who knows somebody to get in....

Speaking of knowing people: I emailed my FL teacher friend and asked her just what you (BB) asked: any one REALLY effective or favorite lesson plan or class exercise? Guess what? She likes individual whiteboards, and her students do too.

And here's a tip probably a lot of people can use: instead of actual whiteboards, she gives her students sheet protectors with a piece of tagboard in them. (I did a quick check on the internet and while this doesn't seem to be a new idea, *I'd* never heard of it.) And here's a pro tip: used (not new) dryer sheets make good erasers, with the bonus of freshening up stinky classrooms.

I'll have to try that dryer sheet trick. This is my first experience with whiteboards. The blue really sticks. I took a bucket and squeegee in but that's a mess

The "game" you mention is a logic one. I'm still pondering. To be interesting, the "rules" have to make somewhat sense without being so obvious. For example, we wouldn't want the connection between a tie staing (lol, what are ties) and what I ate to be too direct. We want it more like a Rube Goldberg. They can be if-then implications but also "and" or "or." From that, logic can be done.

Unfortunately, logic isn't part of the Freshman Core Curriculum. Kind of stupid really. Just like a simple course in Cognitive processes should be required in early education. We rely too much on a kids natural ability (or not) to learn as opposed to teaching them how to learn. I try to incorporate some of these how to learn ideas in my lessons but I've not had time to do it to the point that they are obvious. I'm still relying on their inherent abilities and trying only to tear down the walls built by lack of self-confidense, so the weaker students can access those abilities.

I've always used garden variety liquid cleaners (Windex or 409) and paper towels to clean whiteboards of the stuff erasing doesn't get. Works great.

Isn't it time this thread got a comic cover!



This bonus cover is also seasonally appropriate!

Poor Mrs Grundy goes home at night and cries her heart out. She looks at the picture of her lost, true love. The love that she gave up to pursue her dream of teaching.

Patsy trying the old "punch yourself unconscious" trick to avoid culpability.

Incidentally, why is Veronica praying to the Pumpkin God in the cover above?

lol

That'll look good on the wall.

What about this one?