D49-52: Back on the A train

This week we are back to the grind from Thanksgiving.  Admittedly the few weeks leading up to the break were rough, thus the lack of follow through but I am back on the A game, for the most part... 

CSA

On day 49I wanted to ease students back into CS.  We did a harkness problem up on the board about making a multiplication grid.  It required nested for loops which I never taught explicitly to students, but they acted like it was NBD.  

For the harkness problem, stopped the class at one point, asked them to identify who was furthest away from the person holding the marker, and then asked that person (the person farthest away) to be the scribe.  I noticed there were some people who were being left out a bit, this brought them literally to the center of the problem. 

On day 50 we started a set of labs.  Quiz on Day 52.  I am not giving re-takes on this quiz because we start arrays next which are so important that I don't want old material to take precedence.

CSP

On day XX we did the data visualizations exercise which I printed and collected from students.  On day YY we watched the human face of big data.  I think I might do it differently next year and have students respond to a thinking prompt after each section and then collect that.  This year some students didn't pay attention so I am giving them a quiz on the material and giving them the video to watch at home.  

Concepts

We started our financial math unit.  Twitter totally came through with a lot of great resources 

One Good Thing

I got drinks with another teacher after school today.  I find these one-on-one conversations with other teachers really wonderful.