Year #4: 3 Weeks in.

I would have never survived the ‘mess’ known as the the last three weeks if I was in my first year. The newbie in the Math department is hanging on by a thread. Since the ‘mess’ is caused by circumstances and computer systems beyond my control, I’ve trying to focus on the positives.

So far, the following has made me utterly happy:

1. Strongest crop of freshman girls I’ve ever seen. I usually struggle to reach this group but those that are placed right are kicking ass and taking names. The whole early development trend does have its perk when you’re teaching a certain level of abstraction in Geometry to 13 – 15 year olds.
2. An intern who is on the same page as I am. After the craptastic experience last semester with ‘Bob’, the university gave me two of their all-stars for the fall. The first one is proactive, smart, thinks about her instruction and has the same mannerism as I do in dealing with freshman.
3. Title 1 money = enough calculators for each kid to have an Nspire + a wireless Navigator system. It’s been awesome for geometry constructions and I’m about to crank it up with my Stat kids.
4. AP Computer Science. Awesomeness. The level of kids I have is insane. Only one had any programming experience but they’re eating it up. On the last assignment, I let them chose any math topic to program in as we explored the .Math() class. I received programs that: determined if you had the ambiguous case using the law of sines, added logs not in base 10 or e, and finally the one attempted to generalize the chain rule of calculus (this didn’t quite work due to not knowing user input).
5. Only having 3 preps and not being a full time coach. I have a life.

It has been a good three weeks teaching wise. Once I get the right kids in my Geometry classes, things should really take off.

The LaTeX Template – Version 1.0.0

A Major Work in Progress!  But this should help simplify my life during the next year and automate some of the documents I would need to create as I shift towards Standards Based Grading.

Some information about getting started with LaTeX is is here.

All of the following is built for my file structure which looks like this:

Geometry
- Unit #01
--Template

Each of the files in the template zip MUST go inside the template directory. This will help the build process use all of the templates and make it easier to keep track of what’s been updated. Template.tex is read-only, so you HAVE to save it. Save it as whateveryournamingconvention.tex inside the Unit folder and outside the unit folder.

YOUR DOCUMENT SHOULD NEVER BE INSIDE THE TEMPLATE FOLDER!!

Follow this rule and it should work.

There are two files you should edit. To keep things simple on this first post, I’m going to assume you typed up your list of standards in a word processor and we WILL NOT include the standards list.

Again,  we need to open template.tex in your TeX editor of choice. Again, save it as something in the Unit directory.

Ignore all of this code

The line for the typing code is because I teach computer science, you can delete those two lines if you have zero need to every include code in your documents.

Now we get to where the important stuff.

Questions!

That code sets up your question environment, we can now create our questions. To start a question, we insert \tq{} with the standard inside of the {}.

An example would be:

That’s it. All that has to be done to type a question, mathematics is a wee bit more complicated but the Art of Problem Solving (or the comments) will get you through any of your math questions.

I would put a

after each question, this will evenly distribute the spacing on the page.

Likewise a

will force a new page.

Rinse and repeat as many times as you need to create your assessment.

The final part of the template:

does a couple of things. First it ends the questions with the \questions and then creates the scoring table for you.

The scoring table comes in two forms using two different input documents, horizontal (t.hgradetable) or vertical (t.vgradetable). Choose the one you want. If you want it on a separate page, put a \pagebreak before it.

The default format for the gradetable is right aligned on bottom of the last page WITH questions of the assessment. Play with the code and see what you can make it do.

There is a little bit of code left:

Which will input a standards list, leave that commented out for now. The \end{document} is important, you won’t be able to build the file without it.

LaTeX like most languages is best learned by getting your hands dirty. Play around with the template and the exams to see what you can come up with.

Examples:

• Example 1 – PDF | TeX
• Example 2 – PDF | TeX

Remember,  you must build the .tex files twice!

There will be a lot more commentary / explanations here as I get the documentation together.

Temporarily Distracted

The impending school year has me trying to clean up all of my Standards Based Grading documents in a hurry.

I’ve been spending entirely too much time programming LaTEX macros, creating templates and trying to streamline the process as much as possible. I’ve got a good framework that automatically creates a grading grid and I’m working on putting the student checklist on autopilot as well.

Either way, I’m still here and will be sharing my resources after cleaning the code. The templates will make my and anybody who’s inclined to work with LaTeX workload way easier.

First days if school series has been put on a temporary hold….

Five Fun Filled Days of Fluff – Day #1

There are a whole bunch of things that I do horribly at the beginning of each school year.  Failing to go over my syllabus,  starting hard content on day one,  assigning homework (gasp!) quickly come to mind.  I pretty much launch right into the content.

However,   I spend about 1/2  of the period doing fluffy team building activities with each class.  The activities help immensely in teaching the students to play nice and contribute to group work,  class discussion and in finding their classroom voice.  The activities attempt to build an atmosphere where students learn to embrace their natural curiosity.

This year I’m spreading the activities over the first five days of school (2 weeks on our block schedule) and saving a few of my ‘go-to’ activities when I sense the kids are starting to get snippy with one another.    Most of my kids come from different cultural / socioeconomic backgrounds and a few different middle schools send students our way. I’ve found doing these activities really cut out any inherit cliques forming in the class and levels the playing field.

Spending class time on these activities has definitely payed off.

Day #1 – Tie Your Shoes

Idea:  Give instructions to a blindfolded partner such that they can properly tie their shoes.

Materials:   Blindfolds, extra pairs of shoes (my kids wear a lot of flip flops)

Setup:

1. Pair students off.
2. Each student ties their shoes and then writes instructions for how they did it.
3. Blindfold one from each pair.
4. Have the non-blindfolded student read off their directions.
5. Laugh at how badly some of the shoes end up tied.
6. Switch.  Laugh even louder.
7. Take a moment to refine your instructions.
8. Rinse and repeat.
9. Switch with another group and see if you can understand their instructions.

Why it works:

Students should know how to do this,  BUT they’ve never had to explain it to any one else.   Becoming effective communicators is a skill they need practice with.   It also plants the seed that different methods producing the same result (tied shoes) are completely acceptable.

I’ve found this activity to be a great help in stressing the importance of clear instructions.   Last year ,my Geometry kids referenced this activity non-stop as we were learning to write proofs.  The importance of the order in which things come seemed to hit home with the freshman.

There’s something about that shared sense of helplessness* / laughing at yourself that helps the kids start to bond early.

*I really butcher things my partner to get the kids laughing at me.  Being apart of the experience is key to being included in their community.

Up Next:  Day #2 – Create a shape

Standards Based Grading – Grading Scale Revisited

Grading scales for SBG was a hot topic in the twitter sphere today, most likely  inspired by MizT’s Post.

My thoughts:

‘Completing’ a standard  equates to scoring  75% (3 out of 4).  If a student meets standards and does nothing else,  they end up with a 60 (75% of 80%) in my class.

While I believe that student mastery of standards is important,  I also believe in the application / extension* and usefulness of mathematics.   This all gets lumped into the remaining 20% of a students grade.

In Short Form:

• Standards = 80%
• Applications / Extensions* = 20%

The applications / extension phase overlaps into my standards grading as students can max out with a 4 on any given standard.  This is considered  awesome as the student went above and beyond, earning themselves a 4 on the performance indicator.  This works phenomenally well in a honors classroom. 

I’ve found this setup allows me to differentiate between the kids that don’t have an idea of what’s going on (and usually lower application scores) from those that are cream of the crop (and have high extension scores).  This is my way of appropriately slotting (however good or bad) the students final numerical grade properly for GPA and class rank.  However,  the way to get a high scores is to know the content (ala SBG) and be able to apply it.

Historically, a student’s standard score has bee within +/- five points of their application score. However,  a student could meet standard on everything and only be able to ‘apply’ it half the time and still pass my class.   No student has pulled off this stunt, but the possibility of this happening bothers me.

Would I use this system in all classrooms?

Probably not.  Chances are I would remove the exceeds standard category in a low level class and use the application scores to reward those who go above and beyond.

*by application / extension  I really mean wickedly awesome problems that involve a whole host of standards that I can’t break down into individual performance indicators.