Great Summer

For the first time in years I can say I have had a great summer.  I taught summer school, went on long walks with my wife, read a ton of books, indulged in my gaming hobbies, and procrastinated.  

School starts on Tuesday with our PD days and I have effectively done nothing to get ready other than read.  I am almost finished with a book called Necessary Conditions (which I learned about through MTBOS) and Amanda Palmer's book the Art of Asking.  Both of these books are amazing! They both talk about safe spaces and genuine questioning, how to connect with your audience as a community you are a part of.  Amanda is making sense to the musicians in me and Geoff Krall is making the math teacher in me hug the world again.  

I don't have anything monumental to share. While I am looking at a couple of routines to introduce this year as well as continue to refine my notebooks, my most pressing question there is if I should still struggle with a first generation smartboard or try rocketbooks for notes.  The  focus will be on my one year trigonometry class since it is not under curriculum adoption.  That class as it stands is just pre-calculus class in reverse order, which would not be a problem if it were not the next class in the sequence.  Should I break away and just go super deep into trig and leave all the things the students will cover in pre-calc out or should I continue a more exposure based course?  Is this something the district or my department would wag a finger at?

For the blog, there will be schedule for posting I just need to see what nights I will be staying at school.  The next post will be Sunday, the plan is to have some pictures and things to show for these last few days of summer.

Blaugust Post #1

A new start (blog) and a new (school) year.

My goal with this blog is to help me organize my ideas as well as share the ideas I find and use from all the amazing people I have followed for years.  This is here to be a resource and reflection place for me. 

The first thing I wanted to tackle before I get back to school is homework.  My district got a new books for 2 of the classes I will be teaching this year, so I want to have a strong personal strategy before I go in to prep.  My beliefs are that the way homework is currently done in problem sets and worksheets is not very valuable to me or the students.  That doesn't mean that practice is not valuable or necessary, I just am not a fan of the methods I have adopted.

I want to students to be the captains of their own journey in my class but I still need them to get to the same place.  A part of me wants to get rid of homework all together but I think that would cause waves in the school unless the whole department can get on board.  So I do have some constraints on what I can do.

First, there needs to be some practice or research done outside of class time.  And due to department policy it needs to something will be graded.  Now I have enjoyed looking at some of the ideas presented by druin and also at pythagoras was a nerd, because I think these would fit most easily into what my department currently has and allow me to stay sane.

Second, the homework needs to be something that the students do.  Here is the magical unicorn for all teachers.  How do I make sure the students are the ones doing the work, not other students and not the web? Right now I have one idea and that is to make students content creators.  To have the students produce a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly piece of media.  Podcast, Vlog, Blog, Instagram feed or something that would tackle topics they pick from the standards and concepts we go over and then have that be publicly available.

My question is how do I create a one time rubric that would address these different media and stress that the math teaching and learning?

What issues will I run into?

How can I stay organized with a bunch of different media coming at me and still give timely feedback?