- I went to Mexico for day of the dead
- I have been spending a lot of time on grad classes
Too much time on grad classes. In fact, I should be doing that now, but I missed writing so I am just going to take the time out to do that. I am diving in with where I left off.
AP CSP
We started and finished unit 3. We started on 10/16 and I essentially did all pair programming which was good. My first hour is still super blah. There are a lot of still-asleep-students still in their dream land. Second hour is just more awake.
Students had 4 days to work on their projects which felt about right. I think I would add one more day before they start their projects just to do some more challenging programming tasks next time, but overall it is going well. There is a lot of creativity there.
I was tempted to add a traditional assessment here but I think I will wait until students learn how for loops actually work.
AP CSA
We are just doing while loops now. That transition seemed pretty smooth. We did the unplugged activities on the board today which went well. Unplugged >> plugged.
Geometry
OH MAN. So much has happened in geometry. We had students do a desmos project. It was a little depressing. The number of students who looked at me like "What the h are we doing?" was crazy.
Then I went to Mexico. Then I got an email from a student that rubbed me the wrong way. Then I had an uber ride. And I told my Uber driver all about it! It was a long ride. Bottom line, the desmos project was a "soft skills" project. I was not asking them to do heavy math at all. It asked them to be creative. It asked them to CREATE. And students wanted to be told what to do.
It was frustrating.
SO... for a warm up the next day I put down the definition of "hard skills" and "soft skills" and did a round robin around the room for soft skills vs hard skills. I told them that most of their frustrations were around "soft skills" - I can help them find the slope, but I cannot tell them where to put a line - that is on them. It is a soft skill to be able to create things. We were practicing those skills. Those, by the way, are the skills that get people fired or promoted - not the hard skills.
That helped a bit so when students approached me they would ask for help and I would tell them "that's a soft skill question" if they got whiny about being asked to be creative.
So... finished that. Next year I think I need student helpers to help me in class since the lines got long and I asked the same 6 questions OVER AND OVER.
Now, today we are on to parallel lines and transversals. We went over definitions and theorems for corresponding angles. Then I asked students to make an observation about alternate interior angles and they said they were congruent. In pairs, they needed to come up with an argument as to why they are congruent. And...
Two students did it! Maybe more, but 2 students told me their argument and then I wrote it cleverly on the board in a 2-column proof format.
I did the enthusiastic "check-it-out" thing and then said "This student just proved that this was true!!" Then a student said "WAIT! Are we doing proofs?!?!? This isn't the proof unit, is it?!"
The whole class seemed to groan. Apparently this wasn't their first time hearing about proofs. I tried to comfort them by explaining, that we just did one without too much trouble. Some students said "It is just like explaining your work" or "So it is just giving reasons for what you're doing?" So, some of the students are ok with it. We did one more "proof" in the hour but it went WAY smoother than when we used to start with algebraic proofs. I am glad we re-arranged the units now. It seems to make logical sense.
One Good Thing
We are voting on hats and hood policies in my school. I hope the hats win!!!
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