Maybe this is news to you, or maybe it is not, but Fawn Nguyen has a really nice blog about math teaching and miscellanies.
I am kind of a blog junkie, and have always been. To me, what type of content makes a teaching blog nice? --Specific discussion about activities, and why they structure them as such. Honestly, I am too concrete a thinker (and am generally too busy) to read abstract, philosophical discussions that do not give specific illustrations. Personally, I also appreciate it when bloggers don't complain continuously about the same thing, because I believe that we all have our reasons to be negative, so there is no reason to dump our own negativity onto others. I think it's a nice rule of thumb to say that if you point out that something doesn't work or isn't ideal (which is fair to do from time to time), that you must offer a concrete alternative that could be feasible and more effective. Our school admin mentioned this in the beginning of the year as a general courtesy to keep at staff meetings; I try to keep that courtesy online as well. On the receiving side, I definitely recognize teaching blogs that leave me with a heavy feeling, versus teaching blogs that make me feel inspired and happy.
Fawn's blog is specific, positive, and it also shares some personal tidbits, which is also nice. I personally enjoy it when someone's blog goes a little bit beyond the teaching and shares a little about their own lives, because if I care about their teaching, inevitably I start caring about their lives as well...
Another blog that I also think is very nice (but that has been around now for a little while now, actually) is Amy Gruen's Square Root of Negative One Teach Math. Amy's blog is not pretentious and is altogether lovely, and her love for her students shines through effortlessly.
Also, the awesome Tina Cardone is as fun online as she is in person!
Enjoy! If your affinity for blogs matches mine (in terms of what type of content you prefer), I would love it if you could comment and leave me with a few suggestions of new blogs to follow.
Showing posts with label blogs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogs. Show all posts
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Friday, July 2, 2010
Sharing Teaching Materials Online
Since summer is slow, I have been putting myself to work looking around the web at other math teachers' blogs, to see if there are ideas that I can adopt for my own class. I've spent three full days doing this, and although I am nearing the point of temporary saturation, it has definitely helped to put a bunch of ideas in my head.
One thing I think I am going to try to do a better job with is in sharing my teaching material on this blog. Already, all of my lessons are digitized (you wouldn't expect anything less, would you?) except for the few extremely brilliant things I found in resource books, such as the 3-d spatial puzzles that I had spun into a multi-day computer project.
I have to be careful though, because ultimately this is not a teaching blog. I mention a good amount of teaching in here, because -- well, I am a teacher and I love my job. But for me, my experience as a teacher is intrinsically tied (for now, anyway) with my experience living abroad. So, for now, I have no plans of forking off a separate blog for just teaching materials. But, what it means is that, when I do discuss teaching, I'll try to be more thorough and to provide digital examples of my work. And I'll file all of those entries under the tag math stuff, for easier retrieval. (In fact, if you go back and look at the older entries, you will notice that I have already updated them to contain some screenshots of my older work! I am committed to this...) It is indeed possible that in the future, I would want to create a comprehensive digital portfolio of the blogs I read, the bookmarks I keep, the blog entries that I write, along with my favorite digitized lessons. But, I don't see that happening before we settle back in the States, because I'm already having a hard time keeping up with the maintenance of one blog, let alone two!
Anyway, a running list of ideas for teaching about circles (some of these might be too difficult for 9th-graders, but I thought I'd jot them down anyway):
Am I leaving out any good ones that are immediately obvious? The exciting thing is that I can teach basically everything related to circles using these examples. The obvious drawback (as always) is that it would take a long time to get through all of these activities, for just one unit! Sometimes I wish we had unlimited amounts of time.
*By the way, you might have noticed that I really like this guy Dan. He's awesome! He has re-inspired me to look at how I am teaching every topic more critically. Don't over-scaffold and think you're helping the kids; guide their thinking so that they can figure out what questions to ask and what type of data to collect! Love. It.
One thing I think I am going to try to do a better job with is in sharing my teaching material on this blog. Already, all of my lessons are digitized (you wouldn't expect anything less, would you?) except for the few extremely brilliant things I found in resource books, such as the 3-d spatial puzzles that I had spun into a multi-day computer project.
I have to be careful though, because ultimately this is not a teaching blog. I mention a good amount of teaching in here, because -- well, I am a teacher and I love my job. But for me, my experience as a teacher is intrinsically tied (for now, anyway) with my experience living abroad. So, for now, I have no plans of forking off a separate blog for just teaching materials. But, what it means is that, when I do discuss teaching, I'll try to be more thorough and to provide digital examples of my work. And I'll file all of those entries under the tag math stuff, for easier retrieval. (In fact, if you go back and look at the older entries, you will notice that I have already updated them to contain some screenshots of my older work! I am committed to this...) It is indeed possible that in the future, I would want to create a comprehensive digital portfolio of the blogs I read, the bookmarks I keep, the blog entries that I write, along with my favorite digitized lessons. But, I don't see that happening before we settle back in the States, because I'm already having a hard time keeping up with the maintenance of one blog, let alone two!
Anyway, a running list of ideas for teaching about circles (some of these might be too difficult for 9th-graders, but I thought I'd jot them down anyway):
- Take a motion-blurred picture of a fan, and using the shutter speed (and the picture) to figure out how many times the fan blades revolve in a minute while on different settings. Inspired by Dan's post about tennis ball dropping freeze-frame lesson.
- Discuss how we can measure the amount of material it takes to build a basketball and baseball, and using the discussion to highlight the difference between surface area (rubber of basketball) and volume (filling inside baseball) of a sphere. Courtesy of Ms. Cookie!
- If you stand at different latitudes on the surface of the Earth, how fast are you traveling at each location, as the Earth rotates about itself? (Alternately, if the ozone layer hole stays relatively constant in its location relative to Australia, then how fast must the ozone layer be traveling near that part of the world?)
- Taking a picture of a circular lawn and developing a lesson around how much fertilizer you would need, how long it takes for you to walk around the lawn, how long for you to mow the lawn, etc. Dan's post for how to do this correctly.
- If you slide a beverage glass on the floor, it always comes back to where it started after making a circle. Why? Which glasses make a bigger circle (and how much bigger)? Another of Dan's popular posts.*
- Circular probability - dartboard, Wheel of Fortune, etc. (This is very project-worthy.)
- Wheels, distance traveled/pedaled, and gear ratio. How do bikes work?
- Clock hands - how far (in degrees or distance) do they travel in a given amount of hours + minutes?
- Intensity of radiation as a function of distance from source.
- Circular mirrors (ie. Christmas ornaments) and their tangent lines. Where do you have to stand in order to see your friend reflected in the Christmas ornament?
Am I leaving out any good ones that are immediately obvious? The exciting thing is that I can teach basically everything related to circles using these examples. The obvious drawback (as always) is that it would take a long time to get through all of these activities, for just one unit! Sometimes I wish we had unlimited amounts of time.
*By the way, you might have noticed that I really like this guy Dan. He's awesome! He has re-inspired me to look at how I am teaching every topic more critically. Don't over-scaffold and think you're helping the kids; guide their thinking so that they can figure out what questions to ask and what type of data to collect! Love. It.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Movies and Down Time
Geoff and I have been watching a lot of movies, because he has recently cut back (ie. temporarily stopped) drinking, in hopes of getting back on track with a healthier lifestyle before Christmas. As a result, neither of us has been too excited about hanging out at bars the last couple of weeks. Instead, over the weekend, we went to the movie theatre twice and watched Julie and Julia and Unglorious Bastards.
Unglorious Bastards was an excellent film about the Nazi occupation of France (set during WWII, but it's actually historically inaccurate, so it doesn't matter). The entire film kept us on the edge of our seats, and the plot twists were clever and intricate. To add to the experience, much of the movie was spoken in either German or French, and Geoff and I had to rely on our ability to read the Spanish subtitles to follow the plot. Fortunately, reading is always easier than listening, and we were actually fairly surprised by our ability to follow most of the film! (Our Spanish is getting better, for sure, but when native speakers begin to speak fast, we still have trouble understanding sometimes. Thus, watching dubbed movies is still very challenging.)
Julie and Julia is a much slower film. It got me thinking, however, about the blogosphere. I used to read various blogs written by friends. Over the years, as everyone got busier, the frequency of both their writing and my reading of their blogs had waned. Once in a while, I still go through short phases where I would follow blogs of some random teachers or swing dancers, to keep me in the loop of what others with similar interests are finding and exploring. But, there is nothing out there that really keeps my interest consistently as a reader. I would, however, be interested in reading in real time about someone else's ambitious undertaking of a task, similar to what Julie had set out to do in the movie. Are you familiar with some such blog? (Google seemed to fail me in finding anything of interest. But then again, I couldn't think of good keywords to use to help filter out the bloggers who blog mostly about their careers.)
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Anyway, as for my own life, things are going slowly. School has almost slowed to a halt, with kids taking midterms and teachers grading only idly before the holidays. I'm looking forward to having a few days off between school and going back to the States to unwind, read some books, watch some Law and Order, and maybe even get a haircut. :)
Unglorious Bastards was an excellent film about the Nazi occupation of France (set during WWII, but it's actually historically inaccurate, so it doesn't matter). The entire film kept us on the edge of our seats, and the plot twists were clever and intricate. To add to the experience, much of the movie was spoken in either German or French, and Geoff and I had to rely on our ability to read the Spanish subtitles to follow the plot. Fortunately, reading is always easier than listening, and we were actually fairly surprised by our ability to follow most of the film! (Our Spanish is getting better, for sure, but when native speakers begin to speak fast, we still have trouble understanding sometimes. Thus, watching dubbed movies is still very challenging.)
Julie and Julia is a much slower film. It got me thinking, however, about the blogosphere. I used to read various blogs written by friends. Over the years, as everyone got busier, the frequency of both their writing and my reading of their blogs had waned. Once in a while, I still go through short phases where I would follow blogs of some random teachers or swing dancers, to keep me in the loop of what others with similar interests are finding and exploring. But, there is nothing out there that really keeps my interest consistently as a reader. I would, however, be interested in reading in real time about someone else's ambitious undertaking of a task, similar to what Julie had set out to do in the movie. Are you familiar with some such blog? (Google seemed to fail me in finding anything of interest. But then again, I couldn't think of good keywords to use to help filter out the bloggers who blog mostly about their careers.)
-------------
Anyway, as for my own life, things are going slowly. School has almost slowed to a halt, with kids taking midterms and teachers grading only idly before the holidays. I'm looking forward to having a few days off between school and going back to the States to unwind, read some books, watch some Law and Order, and maybe even get a haircut. :)
Sunday, March 29, 2009
What brought me here
I began my first blog in 2001. I blogged when I didn't yet know that there was a coined term for it, before I knew that there were websites devoted to blogging. Over the years, I have tried blogging in various forms, via various sites, and have generally written prolifically. I have shared, from time to time, excruciating details about my personal life, and -- like all bloggers -- have reaped both tremendous rewards and some consequences from it. Recently, it has dwindled into writing only for my good friends (ie. not open to public), and then almost not writing at all. Life has caught up with me, and I am no longer diligent in the same way I had been for years.
...The truth is, I miss it. I miss distilling my feelings into a few lines, or a few words. I miss having a good story and being able to write it down for myself to come back to, in the future. I miss being able to tell my story, without imposing it on someone else. True, I could keep a private journal, but I am a mess when it comes to backing up my own files, or keeping track of my personal physical belongings. (As Geoff could attest to.) So, keeping it on a website somewhere is my lazy way of keeping a dumping ground. Not to mention that it is always nice for me to read about and catch up on other people's lives, so it seems only fair that I do so in return. :)
Soon, I will be moving to El Salvador, for two years! Now seems as good a time as any to start writing again. The other blogs that I semi-regularly update will still serve their purposes, but this one will be public and focus on Geoff's and my adventure in Central America. So, stay tuned!
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The name of the blog comes from a Jack Johnson song, called "Breakdown." It sounds cheesy, but I think that in a few years, I will still love this song for the beautiful sentiment that it embodies. Most of us run the courses of our lives, and never discover what lies outside of the train tracks until that train breaks down. May my life always be a broken old train, so that I can meet the people I was never meant to meet, and experience the life that was never meant to be mine.
...The truth is, I miss it. I miss distilling my feelings into a few lines, or a few words. I miss having a good story and being able to write it down for myself to come back to, in the future. I miss being able to tell my story, without imposing it on someone else. True, I could keep a private journal, but I am a mess when it comes to backing up my own files, or keeping track of my personal physical belongings. (As Geoff could attest to.) So, keeping it on a website somewhere is my lazy way of keeping a dumping ground. Not to mention that it is always nice for me to read about and catch up on other people's lives, so it seems only fair that I do so in return. :)
Soon, I will be moving to El Salvador, for two years! Now seems as good a time as any to start writing again. The other blogs that I semi-regularly update will still serve their purposes, but this one will be public and focus on Geoff's and my adventure in Central America. So, stay tuned!
---------------
The name of the blog comes from a Jack Johnson song, called "Breakdown." It sounds cheesy, but I think that in a few years, I will still love this song for the beautiful sentiment that it embodies. Most of us run the courses of our lives, and never discover what lies outside of the train tracks until that train breaks down. May my life always be a broken old train, so that I can meet the people I was never meant to meet, and experience the life that was never meant to be mine.
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