The Best of I Want to Teach Forever: January 2009

I've been making a lot of little changes to the site recently. I hope you find the new color scheme easier to read than the original version, and that you can find what you need easily on the sidebar.

In December I made it my goal to start trying to post at least once per day, and I've been very successful so far. That also means there's a lot you may have missed if you're not checking in frequently.

So now you can expect "best of" posts at the end of the month as a way to catch up quickly. First, my 5 best posts this month:

1. 52 Teachers, 52 Lessons Project (1/5) The first few weeks of this community writing project have already exceeded my expectations. I can't wait to see what the other 49 teachers will contribute! You can use the 52 teachers 52 lessons tag to conveniently get all of the entries in one place.
2. New Spring Semester Student Survey (1/6)
   
3. Linear Equations Formula Book (1/12)
   
4. 3 Ways to Use Microcredit to Invest Your Students (1/20)
5. Project Idea: Transformations of Exponential and Logarithmic Functions (1/28)
   

I share a lot of links to the best resources I find as well. Here's my 5 favorites of the month:

1. Three Free Tools for Creating, Editing and Reading PDFs (1/3)
2. Psychology Today Talks Social Networking Issues (1/9)
3. Detroit, Boston and the Great Single-Sex School Debate (1/18)
   
4. Stress Relief: Better Living Through Tetris (1/22) Talk about taking your own advice: Now that I've found this, I can't stop playing it. What does that say about how traumatized I am after school each day?
   
5. 15 Engaging High School Math Activities (1/25)
   

If you enjoy this site, the best ways to support it are to subscribe to my RSS feed, become a Follower (click "Follow this blog" on the sidebar), and to share links on your blog or favorite social bookmarking site (click the "Share" button below for a quick and easy way to do so).

Today is also the one year anniversary of the publishing of my book, Ten Cheap Lessons: Easy, Engaging Ideas for the Secondary Classroom!! You can find it at lulu.com as well as other fine retailers.

Thank you for reading and your contributions! The fact that I can contribute something to this profession that has given me so much is so fulfilling.

Tell Your Math Students: Mathematicians Have the Best Jobs in America

There's lots of good answers you can give when your students ask, "When am I going to use this in the real world?" Now you can arm yourself with the best possible answer: a recent study says mathematicians have the best job in America!

There's a lot of jobs in the field, they make almost $100k a year, and it's about as low stress as you can get. Not to mention, most of the other "best jobs in America" cited by the study require a lot of math skills.

Math is where it's at, baby, there's no way around it.

LaTeX Equation Editor = Stronger, Faster, Better Than Microsoft Equation Editor

I can't remember where I found this, but financial engineering company Sitmo has created a simple, powerful LaTeX Equation Editor that you can use on their website, add to your website or iGoogle homepage.

After writing your equation, you can download it as an image or create a permanent link to it with one click. There's no software to download or messing around with clunky user interfaces (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Equation Editor!).



This is a great example of what Web 2.0 can do for math teachers. Enjoy!

LaTeX Equation Editor

Carnival of Education. A Day At School is up!

The Reading Workshop has posted the 208th Carnival of Education, with a clever A Day at School theme. It includes this week's entry in the 52 Teachers, 52 Lessons project as I am continuing to recruit more teachers to contribute. Enjoy!

Read My Guest Post on Learn Me Good

Mister Teacher of the venerable Learn Me Good put out a call for guest bloggers in December, and I was happy to share my thoughts with a wider audience.

Read my post, Wii wants to teach and let me know what you think.

Project Idea: Transformations of Exponential and Logarithmic Functions

I assumed when I started teaching Algebra II that since the students were older and more mature that I wouldn't need to do a lot of the kinds of engaging lessons I always needed for my Algebra I students. I wasn't wrong, but I wasn't completely right either. It's all a matter of degrees.

I still need to engage my older students with innovative lessons, projects and games. In this case, we'd been studying transformations of exponential and logarithmic functions for two weeks, so I decided to use a final project as a final assessment.

The project was quite straightforward: Choose either exponential or logarithmic functions and make 1-5 posters of the five transformations we studied in class. I did ask them to show examples and to include something to make it easy to understand and memorable, but otherwise it was open ended. The five transformations are:

1. Vertical translation
2. Horizontal translation
3. Vertical stretch or compression
4. Horizontal stretch or compression
5. Reflection

Each transformation has two possibilities, which really means there are ten in all. As usual, I didn't have poster board, so I made do with some large paper I found in our supply closet. Here's what they came up with:

This project is an adaptation of Idea #1: The Mini-Poster from my book Ten Cheap Lessons: Easy, Engaging Ideas for Every Secondary Classroom.

52 Teachers, 52 Lessons #3: Smile

This week's entry comes to us from Tammy Gilmore. Check out how she uses blogs with her students (after you read her advice):

Twenty years ago, my first superintendent and mentor Jerrell Lillard gave me the best advice that I have ever received: "Be firm, fair, and consistent." Over the years, I have had several opportunities to share that phrase with friends, peers, student interns, mentees, and that person I greet in the mirror every morning...maybe that person more than anyone else!

This advice transcends three school districts, hundreds of teachers, and thousands of students, advice that has literally stood the test of time. This advice gained me many friends and, if nothing else, the respect all teachers so-justly deserve.

Forget that age-old advice, "Don't smile until Christmas." Do smile! Just smile as you gently, but firmly lead, guide, and teach the future of our great country.

Tammy Gillmore, NBCT
English/Journalism Teacher
Batesville High School
Blog: Treasure Chest of Thoughts

Thank you Tammy! I also need to thank Joel of So You Want to Teach?, who has set up another place to follow the progress of this project and encouraged more teachers to participate.

Read more about this project here or add the 52 teachers 52 lessons tag to your favorites. Email your entries to teachforeverATgmailDOTcom. Week 4 will be posted next Monday, February 2.

15 Engaging High School Math Activities

We've been reviewing for quarterly finals this week, and I was looking for a fun, engaging activity for reviewing slope with my Algebra I students. My research turned up a site called simply High School Math Activities, which has 15 great ideas covering all different levels of HS math.

I used activity #8, Sloping Letters, as a homework assignment. Basically, students use lines with positive, negative, zero and undefined slopes to describe letters of the alphabet and in turn decode a message. As suggested on the site, I then asked students to create their own message using the same "slope code". My students seemed to enjoy it better than your average assignment.

Looking at the other ideas, I can't wait to use the Graphing Project and Using Trig to Calculate Pi with my Algebra II students next quarter. We'll be studying quadratics in Algebra I soon, so the Acceleration Due to Gravity activity will fit in great. Towards the end of the year, as we try to prep students for Geometry the following year, the Pop Can Assignment sounds like fun too.

It's so rare to find any website with so many great, straightforward lesson ideas in one place. I'll be digging into this one for quite a while.

High School Math Activities

Lesson Idea: Significant Figures Made Easy

Thanks to Joel's promotion of the 52 Teachers, 52 Lessons project over at So You Want to Teach?, I received this cool interactive presentation/lesson idea about significant figures. This is definitely the first chemistry lesson I've shared, but since many teachers come here searching for lessons based on the 5E instructional model, it should be very helpful to a lot of people.

Significant Figures Made Easy

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: 5e framework)

Thanks to Virginia, who teaches Chemistry, Physics and Honors Chemistry in Texas for sharing.

Rigorous, Honors-Level Textbook Question

Diane sent me the following question, which I thought I would post to solicit more suggestions:

I teach in Northbridge, MA and we are in the middle of a textbook debate. For many years, we have been teaching our Algebra I and II Honors classes using Dolciani, Graham, Swanson and Charron (ISBN: 0395535891 and 0395535921). We have found these books to be quite good at preparing our students, especially those who will go on to AP Calc. These books, however, are quite outdated (i.e. ,copyright 1992, not online, no electronic resources, etc.) Two years ago, the district purchased the 2007 McDougal Littell series for Algebra I, II and Geometry. In our district, Algebra I and II can be taken either at the middle school or the high school. The middle school has made the switch to teach entirely out of the new series of books. At the high school, we are reluctant to make the switch because the new books are not a difficult and rigorous as the old. The are great for the college prep level but not for the honors level.

I don't know if you are familiar with either of these books but my question to you is this: Do you know of a newer book that is appropriate for the honors level students? I have done some research and am not finding anything quite as rigorous. I am fine with making the switch to the new text if I could supplement with the old but most assignments that I would want to give would be 25% from the new book and 75% from the old. This to me is not supplementing with the old but rather supplementing with the new.

I told her that my old school district had gone through textbook adoption two years ago, and that most of the books were very similar, including the 2007 McDougal Littell books. If she dug deeper into the supplemental materials including with the newer book, they tend to have more challenging versions of the same assignments available (not to mention extensions and projects).

The other option I gave her was Key Curriculum Press textbooks, which were the only ones we never seriously considered. They seemed far too rigorous for the majority of our students, but for upper level honors classes, it might be a great option.

I'm hoping the wisdom of the crowd can give Diane a few more options to bring back to her district. Leave your suggestions in the comments. Thank you!

Stress Relief: Better Living Through Tetris

Apparently playing video games can be much more than a mere stress reliever. Lifehacker reports that scientists have found Tetris can prevent your brain from storing bad memories if played right after a traumatic event. There were a few times last week I could have used this!

Best of all, you can play Tetris online for free. Enjoy!

This Week's Carnival of Education is up!

This week's Carnival of Education: Virtual Inaugural Balls Edition is up at Teacher in a Strange Land. Monday's entry into the 52 Teachers, 52 Lesson Project is featured, but I wanted to share two other Carnival highlights:

1. I'm planning on introducing trigonometry to my Algebra II students soon, so Right on the Left Coast's hilarious student-made video on the subject has got me pumped.
2. My interest was piqued by this explanation of the Australian school year on Teaching Challenges. I've always wondered why American schools haven't experimented with anything like this. The charter school I work for has a student population with absolutely dismal attendance, due in part to longer school days and a longer school year based around traditional school calendars. Of all the innovations we could install to really get these kids to come to school, the Australian model should be at the top of our list.

As always, you can submit to future editions via the COE submission form or browse past and future hosts at the main COE site. Enjoy!