Day Zero

Well lots more to do... still trying to pinpoint some of the things I want to try different this year.  As usual lots of great ideas that I have seen on the net, but refining them to fit me is always the challenge.   Anyhow, I have decided to arrange my room in groups of 3.  Here are a couple of photos showing how I labelled the desks, and how the room is arranged.  I have a total of 24 desks in groups of 3, plus one big table at the back of the room for another 3.  But my two PreAP Algebra II classes are packed, I have 32 in one and 35 in the other, so I have 3 groups of 3 sitting at each of 3 lab pods.

There are 12 pods, with each pod of 3 desks labelled with a number (A through L) as well as 1-3 for the desk position. Also I used different colors, but made 2 pods the same color.  That way if I decide to have two pods work together, I can tell them to work with the same color.

Here is a few of a portion of my room.

By the way one last thing I have done for years is that I arrange my room alphabetically BY FIRST NAME not last name.  This helps me remember their names.  As I can look at a particular part of the room, and know what part of the alphabet their name should start with.  A little different but it works for me.

Day Negative 2

Well it's Monday (Day - Negative 2)  Day 1 with kiddos is Thursday.  Time to panic (just kidding).  I've decided to rearrange my class room into groups of 3 instead of 4.  I think I read somewhere that this was slightly better, it probably was in the "Make It Stick" book.  Unfortunately I don't remember exactly where.  Anyhow, I kind of like it, because of the type of desks I have the 4th desk was always a bit tough to get into.    One another note, I'm in the process of trying to set up my new toy - the TI Navigator for the nspire.  I'm hoping to use this some for some of the additional quizzing I hope to do this year.  I have to admit, I'm really impressed with reading "Make It Stick" and hoping I can hone in some of the ideas to use in the classroom.  We shall see...

Hmm.... not sure why this isn't in my 180 Blog.  I guess I'm not clicking on something right.  Hopefully I will figure that out.

FIRST Robotics - Recycle Rush - The Rush is over! and the Teflon Moment.

After 6+ weeks of building our robot is now complete.  I hope to upload some photos and videos later, but just suffice to say, very tired. Need lots of rest, and looking forward to competition.  Also as you will see when I do show the video.  You will see sometimes some of your best designs are well thought about with lots of work, effort, and thought, and other time you get lucky and have what I call a "Teflon Moment"  the accidental discovery.  We had one of those that more than tripled our scoring capability.  I hope to reveal the Teflon Moment soon.

Introducing Logs by Inverse not Definition

Well as you can probably notice by the long dry spell, I haven't quite got into the Blogging thing yet.  Anyhow as I was introducing logs this week, I had kind of a "eureka" moment on how to introduce them.  In the past I sort of done the typical textbook approach here is the definition, now lets use it.  I took a slightly different approach in hopes of getting the kids to appreciate why we have logs.  I'm not sure how much they appreciated it, but I felt like it was a better way to introduce them than just stating the definition.  So here it goes....

I started off by talking about how to find an inverse for a function.   This is something we did earlier in the year.  So here are a couple of examples showing the process I use.  Write as y=, switch y & x variable, then solve for y..

s

Then I asked what operation did we have to use to find the inverse of the function for multiplying.  The answer was obviously division, and to find the inverse of the subtraction function became addition.  So they were able to see these as "inverse" operations to find the inverse functions.

Then we looked at 

Again, I' not sure how much the students appreciated this, but I like the idea of claiming we needed to have an "inverse" operator so we define the log to get this new operator.

After writing this I did happen to look in two other textbooks from different publishers than the one I am stuck with, both of them seem to do an approach similar to what I just showed.  So my approach isn't novel, but just another nail in the coffin that my textbook is pretty bad.