Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Day 5: Circle. Triangle. Square.



AP CSA


I certainly only needed 1.5 days for the ASCII project.  Students who finished early watched their videos and took notes.  I am really concerned that students are already apathetic to their note taking.  I am going to need to make those expectations more clear. 

While students should be processing while watching the videos, and the notes are supposed to support that, I don't know if that is happening based on what I see in class.  We will see tomorrow when we start the mini labs and do the first worksheet on the content. 


AP CS P


I was able to split the hour into two parts - half of it we did circle-triangle-square and the other half we did an intro to binary.  Tomorrow I am going to have them make the flippy do and then do a bit of practice converting between binary and decimal before we go onto using the net simulator tomorrow.

It is tough to teach this class with 37 students - I didn't get to monitor students like I would have liked.  The key to this lesson for me is picking out several students' solutions, having them model it under the doc cam, and then let students predict what comes next in the set of patterns.



Concepts of Advanced Algebra


Today we did 2 dot talks and then went into our Harkness style discussion.  Overall, I felt like students did well.  Some students were still "acting" like A students (but in a sarcastic manner).  They did self-assess and I haven't had a chance to look at their grades.  

BUT my feeling is that we are going to need to re-calibrate.  Doing one thing to contribute to the team isn't enough to give yourself an A.  I need to make sure the students who give themselves As really earn it.  I talked about how getting an "A" doesn't mean you have all the right answers - it just means that you are working toward a solution in a productive way.

After we were done on the boards, we re-capped the excersizes.  Students were told that anything they put on their paper they could use as notes on the test.  That motivated the engagement at the end of class.



One Good Thing

I LOVE the circle-triangle-square lesson.  It is so cool to see what students come up with!

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