Trying to find math inside everything else

Archive for September, 2016

Day in the Life: First Day

The day I signed up for in the DITL project was the 5th, but this month that was Labor Day. So I figured I’d write up both.

Monday, September 5th (Labor Day)

I woke up at 930. Not exactly a getting-ready-for-the-school-year time, but not, like, noon, so it’s fine. I roll up and get started on some chores – laundry and dishes. While the laundry goes I work on the blog post I wrote about teaching Integration first. Thinking through the post helped me solidify how I wanted to start the year in Calculus, so that was productive.

Laundry, however, took much longer than it should’ve because one person decided to split a single washer load into all three dryers and hog them for an hour. That gave me some time to start working on captioning the photos from my August trip. All the chores were done and we were ready to go around 1215. We grabbed some lunch and headed to the apartment of a friend of my boyfriend. There we played some video games (including the hilarious Ultimate Chicken Horse, a game where you lay traps that everyone has to race past and over to get to the finish, and the creepy Push Me Pull You). Then we played some board games (Coup Rebellion, Tokaido, and Alhambra). Around 730 we went for dinner at a nearby Japanese restaurant. Then the BF and I went home to get some rest for the big day tomorrow.

Tuesday, September 6th (First Day Teachers Report)

I had my alarm set for 7, but I woke up at 630 because I couldn’t sleep anymore. Anxious? Trepidation? Excitement? Who knows.

After getting frustrated with Facebook a bit because of the aforementioned subtitling, I got ready and caught a ride with my BF so I could get there by 8. There were bagels and fruit and tons of people excited to see each other. It made me miss my old LAD coworkers, as we’re all scattered to the winds after fleeing our previous school. I settled into a table in the library and found two more teachers new to the school. Of course, I’ve been here for 15 days over the summer working as the programmer, so I know some people fairly well, but there’s still so many new faces. And this school is over twice as big as my old one! So it’s a little overwhelming.

Around 830 my principal (who is also new to the school) does an introduction and talks a little bit about the instructional focus for the year. Then she introduced some key people like the APs, as well as the new teacher (there are 7 of us out of the 71 teachers on staff). After that the programming team and the guidance counselors were dismissed while the rest of the staff stayed for other procedures, announcements, and PD.

My coworker Luke, who was the programmer last year and has been working with me on it all summer, and I went down to our office and started to work on the final touches of the schedule  (as when I had left on Friday evening all the students had schedules).

Or so we thought.

I was working on mapping course codes (tying one class to another) and Luke was replying to some emails. But then we got more emails. And more. We had to send out a list of students without full programs to the guidance office so they could tell us what classes to give them. We had a teacher who didn’t have a schedule (because she is retiring in a month) in need of one. We had sudden changes in who was teaching certain classes that needed to be accommodated.

Around 1015, the meeting upstairs was on break, and so we started to get a lot of teachers popping into the programming office to make their requests in person. Often they were the results of typos, or information we didn’t know before (such as, say, Chemistry needing to be in a certain room for labs), or new students arriving that had to change classes around.

Around 11 I went and delivered the newest, most up to date teacher schedules I had to the meeting, as they were going to do a run-through of a school day to make sure no one was teaching the wrong amount or in two places at once (or two classes in the same place at once). Of course, lots of confusion and issues arose from that. I sent out a staff email to collect all of those issues and began hammering them out.

At 12 the school’s food services provided food for all the staff and faculty members in the cafeteria. Luke and I headed down and got some – it was pretty good for school food (though I felt the same way last year, too). I sat at a table with some people I hadn’t met yet and we chatted a little bit. But by 1230 it was back to programming.

By this time I finally got back to work on those mappings I had barely started in the morning. I finished those around 2 and did some final checks on the student schedules, but found out that a lot of changes made that day have caused overcrowding issues that we’d have to resolve. On top of that, the AP of Special Education came in to request the schedules of all of her students, so she could check they had the right services. I got those printed out and waited for her changes, as those would have a big effect.

Around 3 I noticed a big problem with the schedules of about 30 9th graders, so I had to really work on how to solve that problem, considering everything was so tight and locked up for most of the school’s schedule by now. During that time we were getting changes from the AP of SPED, throwing even more disorder into the process and I watched those “Students Partially Schedules” counter tick up higher and higher. Around 430 the AP who’s been in charge of programming came in and we ordered some sushi as a snack. By 530 we finally finished those SPED changes, and now had to make everything work again.

By 715 we were starting to hit a roadblock. 1120 students were fully scheduled, but 12 remained and we were just running out of spaces in the classes they needed. Luke and I took a short dinner break to Trader Joe’s, and I informed my trivia team that I would not be making it to trivia tonight.

Armed with a burrito and an egg salad, we set back into figuring out these final few students. We also worked on closing gaps that students may have had in there schedules. We tried a lot of different changes and were unsuccessful with many of them, but finally, at 945, every student was scheduled! We did some saving and tidying up and left the school at 10.

I walked to the subway (the bus is faster/shorter but I’d been sitting all day and needed the walk) and got home around 1115. Notice how I didn’t do anything with setting up my classroom or planning my courses! Luckily we have one more day before students arrive – I hope I can get some work in them.

1) Teachers make a lot of decisions throughout the day. Sometimes we make so many it feels overwhelming. When you think about today, what is a decision/teacher move you made that you are proud of? What is one you are worried wasn’t ideal?

There were some choices I made about the PE schedule that made most of the PE department angry. Part of it is because what I thought they wanted was not what they actually wanted. It should be mostly a solvable problem, though. I hope.

2) Every person’s life is full of highs and lows. Share with us some of what that is like for a teacher. What are you looking forward to? What has been a challenge for you lately?

Since I’m starting at a new school, I’m looking forward to a fresh start in a new environment. And in a new building, like, literally new, built 7 years ago. My old school was built 150 years ago and felt like it. The challenge has come with not feeling like I’m prepared to teach because I’ve spent so much time with programming.

3) We are reminded constantly of how relational teaching is. As teachers we work to build relationships with our coworkers and students. Describe a relational moment you had with someone recently.

Working with my coworker and AP over the summer I’ve been initiated into many of the in-jokes of the office and of the school, which has helped me feel more belonging for the school.

4) Teachers are always working on improving, and often have specific goals for things to work on throughout a year. What is a goal you have for the year?

My major goal is to be more kind – and to have students see that. I’ve always care about my students and how they are doing, but I’m not always sure they pick up on that.

5) What else happened this month that you would like to share?

Well, I traveled in August, which was nice. The 40 hours of plane rides and 10 hours of train rides were the only times I did prep work!

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day in the life

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Integration First

Last year I went to a PD at Math for America that was about approaching calculus from a geometric point of view. The presenter mentioned during it that, historically, the idea of the integral was developed first, followed by the derivative, and then the limit. Yet in many calculus courses, they are taught in the exact reverse order. I decided that, should I teach calc again in the fall, I’d do integration first.

Well, school is rapidly approaching, and so I’ve been thinking about it again. I did so searching and found this intense forum discussion (oh, old Internet), which pointed me in the direction of the Apostol’s Calculus 1 textbook, which starts off with integrals. The post also had a bunch of arguments about why I shouldn’t do it. One of the notable arguments was that in order to fully teach integration (including u-substitution and integration by parts), you need differentiation. But I actually view that as a benefit, not a downside, because it forces a more spiraled approach. I can start with integrals, then go to differentiation, and then tie them together.

In general, I feel like area is a much more approachable subject than slope. My years of teaching Algebra I to 9th graders certainly seems to support that claim. But I also think it’s easier to understand the linearity of integration than the linearity of slope. “If you add together two functions, the area under the new function is the sum of the areas under the old functions” seems much more evidently true than “If you add together two functions, the slope of the tangent line for each point of the new function is equal to the sum of the slopes of the tangent lines at the same points on the old functions.”

Of course, Jonathan has already worked to restructure his calculus course, and I plan on taking a number of cues from his more spiraled sequence – but still with integrals first.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

Q1 (Intro to Integrals) – (Sam’s Abstract Functions, Area Under Stepwise Functions/Definite Integrals, Properties of Integrals, Riemann Sums, Area Under a Curve, Power Rule for Integrals, Trig Integrals, some applications)

Q2 (Intro to Derivatives) – (Average vs Instantaneous RoC, Tangent/Secant Lines, Power Rule, Trig Derivatives, some applications)

Q3 (Fundamental Theorem) – FTC, Chain Rule/u-substitution, Product Rule/Quotient Rule/Integration by Parts, Curve Sketching/Shape of a Graph)

Q4 (More Applications) – Related Rates, Optimization, Volume, etc

How does that sound?

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Calculus, math

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