The parabola thing

My innovative lesson idea has been a monumental failure.

To spice up working with parabolas and quadratic equations, I built a set of vertical posts, and had students work in groups to measure length and height of various points on the parabola created by a string hanging between the posts. The students loved it, said it was a lot more fun than usual, etc. The following day, I used a Keynote presentation (which is like PowerPoint, but made my Apple) to demonstrate how to translate the data table, so that the vertex was centered at (0,0). That was a bit of a conceptual struggle, but kind of came together okay.

Today, the real suckage began. Trying to model the actual data, and find a coefficient that would fit the general y=ax^2 form. 2nd period did relatively okay with it, getting at least to where at least one person in each group was able to find their a-parameter. But I couldn't help but feeling like I was making the whole thing sort of mystic (nobody asked "why are we just lopping off bx+c?", but in my heart, it hurt a lot to say "let's just work on this bit, y=ax^2"...) And there's no homework tied into the project, and the work that I grabbed out of the book to have homework for homework's sake was way out of reach, and ended up confusing people horribly (and probably wiped out what gains were made earlier).

So, the upshot is: the plan of the nifty fun activity itself, I do okay (though, I have to admit, I wouldn't have wanted to use the measurement lesson as my NBPTS video for group work-- not enough questions and answers involved in the project). Now I need to also plan around the activity: homework, extension, assessment.

But, if it weren't hard, I wouldn't love doing it.

Meeting

One of my frustrations with my colleagues, my fellow teachers, is our eagerness to find external sources for our failures-- I've just finished a meeting with a fellow from "downtown", who was here to basically bust our chops for our poor attendance rate. He made some good points (including a few of my traditions resonant points, like "if you don't LOVE teaching, GET OUT!") and he made a couple of challenging and provocative comments, most of which were hard-edged but well-plqced (mostly, that it's part of our job to motivate students to be here.)

One of our faculty commented on the outrageous foul-ups related to the new district-wide student tracking system. She challenged the district to pwn up to the problems that have resulted from the implementation of this new system, and to apoligize for it. A fair request, I think. Unfortunately, our "downtown" man brushed it off. Far worse, our faculty by and large took that oppurtunity to write off everything he had said, and lay all the blame for poor attendance on "things beyond our control." Because it's easier to say, "I can't reach these kids" than to try to reach them.

A couple of times in this meeting, especially as my colleagues were speaking out, I came back to my friend John's persistent comment: there are two kinds of energy that we rountinely encounter: heat and light. In any conversation, we are capable of contributing either: we can illuminate the subject with our comments, or we can inflame the conversation. It's rare that both will result in the outcome one desires.

We need a better plan.

Calculus is going quite well: today the full class did its first presentations (small groups: draw an arbitrary curve, and choose 5 points, equally spaced along the independent axis. Estimate the slope at each point, and explain your methods. 2 groups used tangent lines, and 3 used nearby points on the curve. I could definitely have gotten more out of the discussion of how similar the results are, in either case, and might even have used this as the time to discuss precision-- but there'll be plenty more opportunities for a discussion of precision-- I just have to decide when to do it, and why...)
Awesomely, yesterday's discussion of infinity ran over an hour, and was incredibly good. I made a good choice about 10 minutes in: there was a lot of chatter, talking over the designated speaker, and I tried to quiet it down a couple of times-- but then I realized that most if not all of that chatter was ABOUT the topic at hand. So, I gave them some time to talk internally, within their tables, about the concept (with the focus question: "What is the opposite of infinity?") Then we called everyone back together, and got the whole-class conversation started again. Good modification, I thought. I also took a couple of minutes at the end of class to talk to the students who didn't participate as fully, to warn some that I was going to be drawing them in next time, and to apologize to others for not getting to them. Note to self: follow up on this in the next discussion.
It was also a first attempt at video taping. Sound quality may be okay-- I'll need to rip it into my Mac, and see from there. I wasn't able to get the whole room at once, though I might be able to do so by mounting the camera above the TV. Most likely, I'll need a videographer, though.
As I'm looking over the video, it occurs to me that I still want to be more careful about my questioning strategy, and particularly about how I communicate where I'm going with things. There was an example where I wanted to use photons as an example of quantized (not divisible to infinitely small units), but nobody seemed confident in recalling what that word meant-- it was appropriate to abandon that one, but I should probably have said, "Okay, since you guys don't know that one, I'll scrap that example-- let me go with this, instead..."

My junior level classes, though, are starting to really, really suck. Quadratic equations, I think, turns out to be one of those subjects that just isn't useful, and doesn't belong in my curriculum. So, I really need to develop a better plan for getting to the big ideas (graphing non-linear functions and manipulating polynomials). I'd love to get into some project-oriented stuff (which Fireworks doesn't really do much of)-- maybe tracing strings on chart paper, and finding the equation to fit them-- or at least using it to create points. Possibly an application: stringing wires over a road, so that they hang at a certain height. We could build a physical model, and measure heights, and apply them to equations. Done in Lego?

Alternatively, it may be time to dump quadratics, and focus instead on polynomials in general (how to add, subtract, multiply and divide...)

Perhaps tomorrow I'll do that: some Key to Algebra stuff, focusing on basic operations with polynomials, and then next week get into the project.

Thoughts on the shutdown

On balance, I think I'm very proud of our students for both the idea and the execution of yesterday's walkout. I do not think that our school is unique in the scheduling problems (I've heard anecdotes, from various sources, about problems in most of the high schools in the district; it sounds like a lot has to do with how clever and plentiful the administrative staff of a given school are. We had a crisis in our scheduling role last year, so we're pretty badly hosed now, but other schools are still hosed, to some degree or another, too).

Our administration continues to proclaim that we're doing our best to resolve matters, and getting things fixed as quickly as possible. I actually completely and totally believe that-- but I also believe that our best is simply not good enough.

I was talking to a student yesterday after the walkout was over-- he was pleased that there had been a lot of press coverage on the scene. I commented that I suspect that reporters who cover the education beat have known that there's a problem for the last month, but you can only get so much out of the CEO's comments (we know there's a problem, it's a new system, we're working to resolve it). Yesterday, along comes an opportunity to put 300 kids with banners and signs on camera-- that's gold, baby...


What makes me sad is that our administration missed an opportunity to really make something positive from this: knowing that this was coming (the flyers were out there by 7:30 am, stating the plan to start the walkout at 9:50) the principal's response was to threaten and cajole, trying to prevent the walkout (a plan that was practically guaranteed to fail). A more decisive and progressive plan might have been, for example, to publicize that the penalty for participating in the walkout would be an in-school suspension (this is entirely supported by the student code of conduct), immediately following the demonstration, to be held in the auditorium. The content of the suspension would be a dialog between administration and students. I'd have gotten up and said, "Today, you executed your rights to demonstrate, despite it being prohibited by the rules of this school. Now, what's your next step? I can't fix this today, I can't even tell you exactly when it'll be fixed. I can tell you that we've put x man-hours into it, and that I'm as frustrated as you are. You've shined a light today on problems that exist throughout the district-- now how can we work together, as students and staff, to make sure that it gets fixed?"

Code red

Wells is on a "code red" lockdown, this time to deal with a student protest: about half the student body is on the street in front of the school, with banners and signs, protesting the prolonged scheduling problems.

I am deeply ambivalent about the situation. More thoughts as I'm able to process them.

Still waiting...

While things look, in the background, like they might be starting to sort out, in terms of schedules and rosters, I'm still waiting for a significant chunk of my student body to arrive. This, in the middle of the 5th week. Yeesh. Well, we'll see what we can get done in the time we have...

Today's calculus class was a hodge-podge of limits and continuity. Went pretty well. For homework, I assigned an oral presentation, to be delivered in two days: In the fields of finance, engineering or medicine, choose some specialization and report on it. Yes, very open-ended.

Also, I'm about to start my first class-related email group!

Notes: Jasmine didn't have today's homework (1-2, #11-13). Rick only had about half of it. Kim, Sadick and Yesenia looked like they rocked it. Present solutions tomorrow.