Scribbles

Building a community that matters - Day two of bringing writing into the math classroom

The most valuable learning occurs in classrooms where a sense of community exists. An effective class is more than a collection of individuals spending 55 minutes in the same space at regular intervals. Learning is a social process that works best in a community setting and that through community, learning can grow. (Bickford and Wright)

Community encourages rich learning because of the interactions among many individuals, not limited to the two way exchange of ideas or information that is often the case when students fail to form a community.

A real community exists only when its members interact in a meaningful way that deepens their understanding of each other. Community requires meaningful interaction and deepened understanding, two things that can occur as a result of writing and sharing, particularly informal writing.

Robert Yagelski explains that as we wright, we become connected to that moment and other moments we may be trying to describe and indeed to all those other selves who may somehow figure into our writing, including potential readers.

Scribbles instead of journals:

Stevi Quate and John McDermott add that specific practices that contribute to community building: communities share a common purpose, participate in routines and rituals unique to the group and follow norms of behavior. It is the informal writing and the sharing of the informal writing that facilitates all of these activities.

Create a sense of purpose

My students view writing as a way to be judged and not as a way to learn and express ideas. By shifting the writing from an evaluation to a tool for learning, writing becomes a way to discover. When my students share the writing, the purpose becomes more apparent.

Inquiry rather than research:

Things like what does it mean to you? when have you used it?

When students share their response they quickly learn that they are not the only one.

If I give the students a comic strip about a particular misconception in mathematics, I can ask them to write a letter to the character in the comic strip to explain how to fix the misconception.

When students write on a daily basis, it helps to develop them as writers. Writing like any other sport is an activity that becomes better with practice.

What about having an author's chair where students can sit and share their writing?

What about a walk and write where instead of students writing at their desks, they go in groups maybe around the campus and write.

Provide a prompt to give them something to focus on. This should inspire ideas and not restrict their ideas to limited responses.

Informal writing journals can be called Scribbles. Maybe the shift in terminology will help them with their writing and and sharing.

Provide a prompt to give them something to focus on. This should inspire ideas and not restrict their ideas to limited responses.

My first memory about writing

I was very young when I was reading through my baby book. My mom had written things about my firsts: my first words, first meal and the first career choice. From a very young age, I wanted to be a writer. It is probably not surprising due to having a mother that was a writer.

I was in elementary school and kept a journal. This diary was given to me by my mother in an effort to encourage my interest in writing. At first, I really didn't know what to write. It felt awkward and forced. I didn't understand what I needed to do. Because my mother was a natural writer, she did not understand how to encourage me to write. She thought that by providing the materials to write then I would just naturally take to it.

My first writings were very crude. One word sentences, just like that of my students today. My mom could not understand that I didn't understand what to do. I began playing with words as I played with my stuffed toys and Lincoln Logs. I would put words together and take them apart. Play with how they sounded together. I didn’t know what I was doing. All I knew is that each time I played with the words, it sounded different. The meaning changed. I found this interesting.

I continued playing with words into my adulthood. I found that I could say things better on paper than I could when speaking. I was extremely shy and did not like to talk or draw attention to myself, but when I wrote, I felt more powerful and secure.

My greatest accomplishment was when I applied for a writing position with Focus on the Family. This interview process consisted of three writing pieces. The first two were very easy as I didn’t expect for it to go anywhere. The final writing piece was nerve wrecking. I got the job! Working for Focus on the Family allowed me to write about what I knew best - life with five kids. It was this success that made me finally feel like I was a writer. I continued writing and was able to publish a few things.

I need to remember how I felt as I was a child and know that my students feel the same way. If I am going to implement writing into my math lessons as I feel it is important to prepare my students for the real world, then I need to nurture this new way of thinking for them.

Bringing Writing to Mathematics

I am involved in the San Joaquin Valley Writing Project #SJVWP this summer. I am looking forward to this course and implementing writing in my mathematics classroom. I have been including some chemistry and physics in my lessons. As a former homeschool parent/educator, I have discovered that including as many subjects together made the learning and teaching more interesting and applicable to real life as well as making the lessons more understandable and memorable.

Think about the process of writing a draft of your essay. What emotions do you feel? What attitudes do you have about writing? What do you believe about writing?

There are different emotions when writing. When I really get into the grove, I feel empowered. I love to write and have always loved the experience of playing with words. A part of me goes into the work and I am able to settle thoughts and come to conclusions. My attitude is difficult to really pinpoint. I guess if I were to lean one way or the other, it would be a little bit of uncertainty and a bit of physical release. I believe that writing has the power to make us better people and document history and reading is the same: it brings history to life and educates us as well.

• Pre 1970s - rhetoric - composition studies were not yet a field.
• 1970 study of cognition in relation to writing yielded rich information/ideas about the writing process (Donald Murray "Teach Writing as a Process not a Product")
• Not isolated: reading and writing work together - and writing is a tool for learning and discovery (meaning that writing can support learning in any content area)
• The writing process is an important component of composition pedagogy - but not when it is reduced to a formula or series of steps
• Writing process cognitive acts successful writers make (Flower and Hayes)

Categories:

• Prewriting: making an outline, analyzing free-writing material, word wall, KWL chart, think-pair share, annotate a text for re-write, research, mind maps, story boards, use of journals, quick writes, reading a story relating to writing a story.
• Draft: address a counter argument, write an introduction, red light/green light activity: circle the beginnings of sentences of a draft in green and the ending of sentences in red. Adjust punctuation if necessary.
• Revision: Explode the moment - take a section and expand, engage in peer responses, cut and paste/rearrange sections, direct instruction on grammar, edit draft, cut up a paragraph into sentence strips and rearrange them.
• Publication: submit story to writing competition, read a draft in the author's chair, blog, read aloud to class, create anthology of written work, read picture book to audience.

How do we help Ss transition from the draft process to the revision part.

Free-writing is not necessarily draft.

Teaching Ss to collaborate is preparing them for the work force.

Composition Theory - The study of writing

• Read and annotate: underline, write questions, engage with the descriptions of different approaches to writing instruction
• In a small group discuss what you noticed, liked, had questions about
• individually which approach do you feel reflects how you feel writing should be taught
• what would you need to do in your instruction to reflect this approach? What could you change and/or add to your teaching?
• What questions do you have about teaching writing?

Writing and Cognition: 

• Writing as a process: voice to their thinking
• Expressionism: ideas, thoughts, lives through writing
• Writing as Decision Making: arguments, time to reflect
• Genre Theory:analysis of genre conventions in ways that develop deep understandings of how texts are constructed.
• Critical Literacy/Social Constructivist: specific cultural and historical contexts

Help Ss to develop a tool kit for writing

StoryCorps

Frank Curre - Tattooed on your soul

• On December 7, 1941, thousands were killed when the Japanese bombed the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor in Oahu, Hawaii.
• Frank Curre was still a teenager then. He had enlisted just the year before and ended up at Pearl Harbor aboard the U.S.S. Tennessee.
• At StoryCorps, Frank remembered how he got from his Texas hometown to an island in the Pacific Ocean.

It was early in the morning, just before 8 am on December 7, 1941. There was the sounds of Japanese fighter planes overhead. The pains of my stomach were becoming more unbearable. I could not stand it anymore. I could no longer walk and yet for two hours I heard the bombing. It was devastating. I was devastated. I did not know if I would survive to birth this child that was obviously on its way without concern of the bombing of our naval base in Honolulu. Soon the barrage was over and my child peaked her head out of the home she has resided in this past nine months. What did I bring her into? I later found out that there were 20 American vessels, eight battle ships and more than 300 planes as well as more than 2000 Americans died.

Integers

The word comes from the Latin language (which isn't a language we use today) which means whole. So this must indicate that an integer is a whole number. If it is a whole number, then it is not a fraction or a decimal.

A whole number is any number including zero and any number that is greater than zero and does not have any fractional part.

[ 0, 1, 2, 3, ...]

Counting numbers are just like the whole number but these numbers don't include the zero. It would be just like you are counting 1, 2, 3,  and so on.

[ 1, 2, 3, ...]

The integers are whole numbers, but they include positive and negative numbers as well as the zero.

[ ..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, ... ]

My students have been having problems with integers. We have tried temperatures, sea level, checkbook and now the red and yellow counters to help explain the ins and outs of integers. I am looking for more ideas to help explain this concept.

Google Classroom - Setting up my class

This is my first year being able to use Google Classroom.

I was teaching Algebra 1 and 2. I was amazed at how easy it was to get started. Our school was already a Google Apps school so all I needed to do was to type in the search bar: classroom.google.com and hit enter. Bazinga! I was there.

At the top of the page next to my school email, I saw this little plus sign and just clicked on that. It gave me an option to join a class or create a class.

Well since I was creating this class for my students I chose to create a class. My students were told to join the class and I gave them a code. This option made it very easy for my students and less work for me. I just made the code available for them. I will go into that later.

This is where I titled my class. For the first time that I was not very creative and just titled them very simply. Maybe this year coming up I will come up with something more clever (note the first screenshot-not very original). 

For the sake of this post, I created a class that I plan to use for next year. If I think of a catchy class name, it is easy enough to change. 

The top right corner underneath my email address I have the option of selecting a theme and upload a photo. It is here that I was able to personalize my classroom at least a bit. 

In the bottom left corner is the class code I mentioned that I give to my students. I wrote the code on the white board for the students. Once they signed up, the classroom was automatically when they signed in with their school email. 

This was so simple and I had a couple hundred students signed up in the amount of time that it took to read this post.

Three things we did that worked in the math classroom.

This year was a good year. I think I learned more than the students learned. There were a number of things we did right as a classroom, but I want to mention the three things that I think made the biggest difference. These are as follows:

Make the classroom a safe place to make mistakes. We would celebrate the mistakes we made in math so that students would not fear making a mistake. I would make mistakes and instead of trying to play it off, I embraced the mistake and thanked the students for noticing them. It was hard at first because I was suppose to be the teacher and teachers are not suppose to make mistakes, right? When I was cleaning out my classroom for the summer, I had a student come by the classroom and was looking around the empty room. He turned to me and told me that he liked the classroom the way it was. It was homey and relaxing and a fun place to hang out. I never felt that way about any classroom I had ever been a part of.

Another thing we did right was instead of concentrating on the correct answer, we paid attention to the process. How did they get that answer, regardless if it was right or wrong. My highest students were not use to having to explain their thinking and this step was really the most difficult for them. They would give me the answer and say something like, I just did it in my head. The students that were not use to getting the answer correct were the ones that tended to excel in this step. They could tell me everything they did to get to the answer and often I would find that they were just off due to a computational error. This was a big boost to their ego when they realized that they were on the right track and just missed the answer because of a small error. This was an easy fix.

The third thing we did right was we got rid of homework. The students were so extremely excited that we were not going to assign any homework. As the semester moved on, I found that the students were doing work at home and were asking me if they can work on this at home. Of course, I made everything available for them to work on at home as well as the classroom.

I know that there were many things teachers are doing to make a difference in their classrooms. I would love to hear ideas that makes your year a good year.

Coming to a close

This year is coming to a close and I believe that I learned more about math and teaching than I have ever learned before. I had the opportunity at lunch today to meet with some of my co-workers and we had an awesome professional development time over some amazing tacos. What amazed me was the number of students that participated in this casual professional development. We discussed how we could better reach our students and what would help to engage them to be more successful.

The seniors in my class have been processed out of school and will not be back until graduation. The underclassmen are nervous about passing the final and passing the class. Some students are content with just passing and others are anxious about not receiving 100% in the class.

I have had the pleasure of working with 250 students this year. I have some students that have challenged my patience and others that have motivated me to be a better teacher. They have been at so many different levels of proficiency and reaching them all has been an interesting journey.

I have been teaching Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 but the majority of my students have not been prepared for my class. The biggest concern is how do I fill in the holes. If they don't understand the basics before they come to high school, then they are not going to be able to understand what to do with the more difficult concepts.

So many of the students walked into class already afraid of math and thinking that is hard. My goal has been to make the math classroom a place where it is okay to make mistakes and that the mistakes are learning experiences. I love being in a classroom that is the gateway to all learning. #bestsubjectever #juli3<3smath