Category Archives: Math

Math meets Art meets Mission

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Have you seen the beautiful art created by my PreCalculus students hanging in the Inner Court for the Winton Arts Fest?  I asked the students to reflect on what defines a Carondelet or DLS student, using the schools’ mission statements as well as their own experience.  They then created a picture that exemplified their chosen aspect of the community using only graphs of the Algebraic functions covered throughout the year.  They utilized Desmos and Geogebra to create these creative and beautiful mathematical pieces of art.


They are hanging in the corner nearest to room 2. Please take a look at their work as well as their reflections. Some are touching and insightful, others challenge us to do better as a community. I love that this project used the power of Math and functions (yes, they are so much more than just formulas!) to visually communicate their deep and personal connections to our community.



Here’s a sneak peek of a few:




One group even made me out of graphs of functions and wrote words that I will cherish forever.  Doesn’t get much better than that!







Odyssey of the Mind Update: We failed and it was awesome!

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Odyssey of the Mind was this past Saturday and our inaugural team of five did amazing!  Everything they planned was executed perfectly. It went as well as we could have hoped for.  Yet, we lost big time, I mean BIG.  Our competition blew us out of the water.  Even more surprising, we still advanced to the State tournament.  Have I hooked you to keep reading?

In the Math department we make a big deal about celebrating mistakes and failure, because that’s when you really learn.  Our first attempt at this Odyssey competition was a perfect example of this.  Our first failure came when we had to weigh in our structure.  The structure had to weigh less than 15g and there was a 5 point penalty for every .1g over.  At weigh-in our structure weighed 15.6g.  That was a 30 point penalty.  Ouch.  Instead of just penalizing our team, the judges were amazing and started a dialogue about what the team might do to correct this error.  It was raining that day and the girls talked about how the damp air might have made the structure heavier.  From this they got the idea that they might be able to dry it out with a bathroom hand-dryer.  One of our team-members ran over to the nearest bathroom but unfortunately there was only a paper-towel dispenser.  The judges continued to press.  What else could we do to lower our weight?  While they didn’t feel they could remove any pieces without compromises the integrity of the structure, another member thought that they could perhaps shave off a layer of the pieces.  They spent 20 minutes in a corner shaving and got the structure down to 15.2g.  Much better!  I loved the learning that happened in this exchange. 

Then came the performance.  Their competitors went immediately before us.  I decided to watch it.  The girls decided to pass as they had to perform right after.  Let me tell you about this team we were up against:  they were clearly a well-oiled Odyssey success team.  Their set was sparkly and glittery and full of motorized parts and blinking lights.  While we built a low-resolution “lacrosse stick” to toss our structure, they built an air rocket!  Here’s a still shot from our performance.  I love it’s raw quality but in contrast to our competitor, it didn’t match up. 

But what was most devastating was when it came time for them to test the weight of the structure.  My jaw kept dropping as they put on more and more weight.  Their structure held 655 lbs!  I’m still amazed by this.  How much did our structure hold, you ask?  60 lbs.  Here is Olivia testing our structure for strength:

While they obviously killed us with the weight held, we actually beat them at the Spontaneous problem component of the competition.  We also tied them for style.  Our girls talked to the judges a lot at the end and understand better now how to build a stronger structure (apparently our main flaw was in the glue used.  And the girls were already buzzing with ideas for new designs that would be stronger as well).  Again, look at all of this learning from our failure! 

Obviously, they took first place and we took second (yes, there were only two teams in our division).  By default, we both advance to the state tournament.  Another team might decide to just pass given this initial defeat, but not our girls.  Even though we only have three weeks until the state tournament on March 30th, our girls are going for it.  They’re determined to build a stronger structure and beef up their performance to get more points and give that other team a run for their money.   When faced with failure, they’re choosing to learn from it instead of accepting defeat.  Look forward to another follow-up post after the State tournament!

Here’s a link to their performance. 

Twitter for Professional Development

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Back in October the Algebra team was invited to present at a Taste of TMC (Twitter Math Chat) mini conference hosted at Seven Hills School.  I was excited to have a “dress rehearsal” for our presentation that we would be doing at the California Mathematics Council in December.  What I didn’t realize was that in addition to practicing our presentation, I also learned about a whole world of professional development amongst math teachers on Twitter. The two teachers who put on this conference were active participants in Twitter education chats and many participants of the conference knew each other virtually and were meeting in person for the first time.   

I learned about popular hashtags math teachers use on Twitter when they are sharing lesson plans, questions they have for other math educators, or problems they are trying to solve in class.  I started devoting 10 minutes a day to professional development on Twitter.  I would follow certain hashtags and engage in discussions with other teachers.  I would get so many ideas for how I could improve my teaching and lessons I could try.  I never would have thought Twitter could provide so much (free!) professional development.

A lot of our Algebra program is based on research done by Jo Boaler so I was excited to follow her.  When I would post about something we have done in Algebra that was inspired by her work or one of her suggested lessons I always tagged her, never expecting her to read all of the posts she’s tagged in every day.  I also followed YouCubed.org which is the nonprofit she co-created with Cathy Williams at Stanford University to “inspire, educate, and empower teachers of mathematics” while also sharing out the latest research on how students learn mathematics.

After tagging both Jo and YouCubed quite a few times on Twitter I finally got their attention!  Jo emailed me (!!!!) and asked me to fill out a survey providing more information on what we are doing at Carondelet.  I immediately filled it out but then didn’t hear anything in response.  I soon forgot about the survey.  In January I got another email from Jo and Cathy asking if Cathy could come observe our program.  Cathy’s visit provided us with some much needed validation that we are on the right track with our Algebra program and despite the resistance we should keep moving forward.

Cathy went back and shared with Jo what she observed and we were invited to be members of a panel discussion at their Mathematics Leadership Summit at Stanford University this past month.  Cathy shared out with the participants from all over the United States, Canada, Australia, and Scotland about our program and then invited myself and Kristina Levesque up to the stage to answer questions about our program.

After our panel discussion we were able to make connections with other educators who are also on a similar journey to improving math instruction for their students and schools.  We heard a lot of encouragement and excitement about our program and that while it sounds different from what other schools are doing, it could be adapted to meet the individual needs of other schools who are wanting to create a change.  Jo is also wanting to learn more about our program and will be visiting us in April.  

What amazes me is that all of these connections are from using social media for a few minutes a day to connect with others.  It has made me realize that there are so many resources available to us and it doesn’t have to be through a conference (although those are great too!).

That’s your job, Mrs. Jain!

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When I give a Math test, I generally don’t answer questions.  Why?  Because students are really good at tricking their teachers into doing problems for them.  We, as teachers, care about our students so when a student comes up really struggling, “I just don’t know where to start” or “I don’t understand why my answer isn’t working”, it’s really tempting to show them how to start or to find their mistake for them.  And this creates a really slippery slope.  There’s all sorts of factors (relationship with student, type of student (did they do their homework?), student’s emotional level (are they crying?) ) that can bias the amount of help we give one student compared to another.  To make my life simple, and to keep things objective and fair, I follow a simple rule that I don’t offer any help to anyone on a test.  I also do this to honor the integrity of the test.  A test should measure what the student knows, on her own, without me scaffolding and guiding the way. 

I do, however, let students ask as many questions as they want.  They just know to not expect an answer from me.  I find that just the process of speaking their question out loud helps many of them to find their way.  For others, they’re hoping I’ll accidentally crack and answer their question but I try really hard not to.  For example, if a student comes up and says, “I got an answer of 2 but when I plug it back in, it doesn’t work.  I don’t know why.”,  I’ll might say, “Awesome, you realized you made a mistake!  Your brain just grew!  Now, go try to find and correct your mistake.”  This celebrates the struggle involved in learning and hopefully gives them the pep talk they need to solve their own problems.  To be honest though, they mostly walk away annoyed.  Some persevere through it, others just give up.

Yesterday, one of my more (shall we say outgoing?) students was coming up regularly with questions and returning to her seat loudly annoyed that I wouldn’t help her.  Twice she exclaimed, “It’s your job to teach me, Mrs. Jain!” as she returned to her seat.  It was with humor, but there was truth to it too.  It’s still bothering me today which is why I’m writing this post.  I’m thinking about what Jess said in our department meeting yesterday that our students are getting quite bold, and saying that out loud in class, albeit with humor, feels quite bold and bordering on inappropriate.  Do you ever feel like the students think we’re their employees?

I gently told her that I am teaching her, I’m teaching her how to figure things out on her own,  how to apply the skills we learned in class to problems on her own.  Self-reliance and resourcefulness are such important skills.  I won’t always be there with her and we as teachers will not always be there with our students as they encounter problems in the world outside Carondelet.  I’m thinking about all of the pushback that we’re receiving with our new Algebra program surrounding how (if) we’re teaching.  How can we get students to understand that the best way to teach them, and the best way for them to learn, is if we give them the skills to figure things out on their own instead of giving them (showing them) the path to the right answer? 

The coolest (pun intended!) piecewise function that I ever did see! (But didn’t have time to explore).

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In Precalculus we’re covering trigonometric functions (sin, cos, etc).  These functions are periodic in nature (meaning their pattern repeats over time) and can be used to model all sorts of real life scenarios that do the same.  I was planning to do a challenge problem today in class from the book that uses these functions to model ocean tides.  See book problem:

While it’s a fine problem, I had an experience over the weekend that has made me change course (I love when this happens!).  I was shopping at a store with my family that had a sign in the window, “Open 24 hours.”  My 6 year old daughter asked what that meant and I tried to explain to her that there are 24 hours in a day and that the store never closes.  She then asked when does the 24 hours start, which is such an interesting question!, and I was trying to explain that you can start and stop the 24 hours wherever you want:  from 3am to 3am, from 10pm to 10pm, etc. and I realized (because I’ve got trig on my brain) that it’s a lot like a sine or cosine function.  And from there, a much cooler problem was born.  I decided to share this story with my Precalculus students and do our own trigonometric curve modeling to data that is periodic over a 24 hour period:  weather/temperature data. 

I decided to do as little of the problem setup as I could, based in part by a fabulous Ted Talk by Dan Meyer.  I also genuinely prefer class activities that feel less like a perfectly set-up textbook problem and more like a messy, real-life scenario.  I planned to have them collect temperature data for Walnut Creek (via weather.com) over a 24 hour period and to start with a graph of the points. 

Here’s what we came up with:

I asked the students to comment on how this looked like a trig function and how it didn’t.  Let’s start with the ways it looks like a trig function.  Here’s where the math skills kicked in.  We used our knowledge of transformations to build a trigonometric function that matched these observations made by the students:

  • It looked like the cosine function (see small graph on left) shifted over 4 units.  
  • The period was 24 hours (i.e. how long before the pattern repeats)
  • The amplitude was larger (i.e. the difference from average temperature to the maximum or minimum temperature)
  • The average temperature was 49.5 degrees (and they realized they could average the maximum and minimum to find this).  
We incorporated all of these facts to get this beautiful function and curve:
Then we checked a few points to see how well the curve fit our data.  This is where it got interesting.  In some places, the curve did not fit our data well at all.  That’s when we talked again about the ways in which the data did not look sinusoidal:
  • A student spoke up, qualifying that what she was trying to say was hard to explain, that the graph wasn’t balanced.  (Side note:  Isn’t great when our students have to struggle to communicate what they see?  Instead of me directing them with my own language and they then repeating, it was awesome to leave the question open ended and force them to have to develop their own language).  She was absolutely right.  The temperature cooled down much more quickly when the sun was out than overnight.  This is an instance where are data was not sinusoidal. 
  • We also talked about the fact that sinusoidal functions perfectly repeat over time and that doesn’t happen with weather data.  The high one day is not necessarily the high the next day.  
What I had wanted to do, but we ran out of time because the discussion up to this point was so rich, was share what I found when I did a quick google search for whether weather data is really sinusoidal.  I found this little gem.  It’s basically the coolest application of a piecewise function I’ve ever seen!
“Although using hourly weather data offers the greatest accuracy for estimating growing degree-day values, daily maximum and minimum temperature data are often used to estimate these values by approximating the diurnal temperature trends. This paper presents a new empirical model for estimating the hourly mean temperature. The model describes the diurnal variation using a sine function from the minimum temperature at sunrise until the maximum temperature is reached, another sine function from the maximum temperature until sunset, and a square-root function from then until sunrise the next morning. “  Full Article Here.  

I did share this with them and we talked very briefly about the fact that weather data is sinusoidal, but it’s more complicated than that.  Temperature varies in three distinct pieces:  sinusoidal from sunrise to high temperature, a different sinusoidal model from high temperature to sunset and then a third piece to cover from sunset to sunrise that is modeled by a square root function.  It pains me that I couldn’t spend another day on this project.  This year we’ve covered piecewise functions and square root functions they have all of the skills to build this very realistic non-cookie-cutter model.  

And, perhaps this is a topic for a future blog/discussion:  how do we make time for these unexpected projects that require time when we work in a system with courses with already full scope and sequences?  Can (should) we swap quality for quantity?  My own bias tells me that doing deep, complicated projects like these will have a lasting impact, both on their retention of the specific skill (in this case trigonometric functions) but also on their perspective of the world around them.  The perspective that math can model the world around them, but it’s often not simple, often requires more than one equation/formula/function, and often it’s not something that can be solved in a 45 or even 80 minute period.  

Exam Review Success!

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It’s that time of year again when we are wrapping up our courses and expecting our students to be reviewing and solidifying all of the material we covered in preparation for the semester final exam. At this point, we as teachers are really burnt out and it’s so tempting to just provide free periods and a review packet. That’s what I did last year, and the results weren’t pretty. I really underestimated my student’s ability to self-motivate and handle a large body of information all at once.  They’re as burnt out as we are and with the flexibility of free periods, many wasted the periods or used them really ineffectively.

This year I was determined to push myself to try something different and to not leave my students to handle review on their own.  I wanted them to have to complete tasks and achieve a certain mastery goal per chapter, before moving on to a new chapter. In talking casually with Kristina Levesque, she mentioned that she had used a passport style of review before and this idea really resonated with me.  I want my students to feel that learning math is a journey, an experience, so what better analogy to this is the idea of having a passport to document their journey back through the chapters we’ve covered.

I created a passport with a combination of three components each chapter:  [1] Make a Chapter-specific study guide, [2] Correct any errors on the chapter test, and [3] do an online review problem component.  [In AP Statistics there was an added component to do an online free response problem per chapter]. I gave them a full week class periods and no additional homework to complete the passport with a due date of Friday December 14th.  

Here’s a little more on each component:

[1] Study Guide:  Each day I offered an optional workshop of a review of a chapter we had covered.  If they wanted to attend the workshop, they could write down what I said and call that their study guide.  These workshops were quite brief, however, and most students found success making their own study guide beforehand and then filling in any gaps covered in my workshop.  I put the to-be-covered topics on the board at the beginning of class with the time my workshop would start.




[2] Test Corrections:  While some teachers require their students to correct tests upon their return, I’ve never been organized enough to coordinate that.  But, I think this ended up being a blessing in disguise! It was so great to watch students go back to old tests and wrestle with their errors, with the not being fresh in their mind.  Another neat (frustrating?) component was that if a student had lost their test, I gave them a blank test to do again.  I told them this was like losing their parking garage ticket: they have to pay full price. But, as I told them, think of how lucky they are to get to do all of that practice!

[3] Online practice:  This was probably my favorite component.  There are so many great online platforms and I was able to find different ones to meet the needs of all of my different classes.  In PreCalculus, I used MyMathLab which we use anyway as a homework supplement. This program had pre-made Chapter posttests which I was able to edit based on what we had covered.  In AP Statistics, I used Kahn Academy which has instruction, quizzes and tests already made for our course topics. I assigned the topic tests for each of our topics. In Algebra 2 I made my own quizzes using GoFormative.com, a super easy (and free!) platform to create auto-gradable quizzes and practice.

What I like about all three of these is that they all promote a growth mindset: students are given immediate feedback (and in some cases hints) and they can try as many times as they’d like until they achieve mastery (which for me was around 70-80% depending on the course).



What I love about this passport system is that it motivates all types of students.  I told them that I would enter a test grade based on how far they get through the passport.  If they did it all on time, they get a 100% test grade. If they don’t get very far, they could get as low as a 50% test grade added in right at the end of the semester.  Those with high or low semester averages had a reason to complete the passport on time.

I know we’re too busy to be visiting each other’s classrooms in this final push, but I wish you could see the energy and focus of my students as they use these class periods so productively.  They have pride as they ask me to sign off on their achievements. They’re coming in during lunch, after school and yesterday my x block was hopping with students learning from their mistakes and trying to solidify their knowledge of Algebra 2 concepts.  I’ve never seen them work so hard!

I plan to give them a survey after the exam to see how they liked this process.  I also want to see how their exam grades are related to their progress on the passport.  I’ll follow up here with those results. For now, even though I’m exhausted and every period is super busy as I balance giving brief chapter reviews and check off each student one by one, I feel like I’m finally serving my students and giving them a really tangible way to do final exam studying which can otherwise be really daunting.  And hopefully, if this all worked the way it was supposed to, they’ll simply have to review their already gathered materials from the passport experience the night before their exam. They’ll come in feeling rested and ready. Stay tuned!

Why Use a Textbook Problem When You Can Create Your Own Problem Live in the Classroom?

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I have a new prep this year, PreCalculus, which has been an absolute joy to teach.  Many days, however, I’m only a step ahead of my students in terms of planning (and reteaching myself) the material.  Yesterday, I was using my 1st period prep to prepare my 3rd period lesson (nothing like living on the edge!).  And I came to this problem in the book:

While I could have just presented and solved this textbook problem, I realized it would be much more fun to actually do this as a mini-experiment in class.  I walked into class with a beaker full of hot water and a thermometer sticking out.  I didn’t tell them what it was for but I told them that while I was teaching other content, every five minutes someone had to come up, check the temperature and record the time and temperature. 

When it came time to learn about Newton’s Law of Cooling, I showed them the formula and told them our task was to plot our data and use Newton’s formula to model the cooling represented by our data.  It was a total risk.  I had no idea if it would work (since I had no time to try this myself) but I believed it should work and went for it. 

Here is our work developing the equation.  We knew the starting temperature from the first read of our data (78 degrees celsius), used the thermostat on the wall to get the room temperature (with having to convert to celsius!) and were left with needing to figure out k, which is the rate of decay or cooling.  The textbook problem provided it in their problem, but we had a real live example and no one was providing us with the cooling rate.  What could we do?  The students expertly realized we could use and plug in one of our data points to solve for k.  We used (29, 46) [By the way, this just means the temperature was 49 degrees celsius 29 minutes after we started recorded] to solve for our missing parameter, k. 

Then came the moment of truth:  Did the equation fit our points?  We plugged it in and (drumroll….):

An awesome fit!  We talked about why some points were a little off from the general trend of the cooling (maybe someone read the thermometer wrong–it wasn’t digital, or maybe the heat went on or there was a breeze that caused the water to cool more quickly or slowly).  Such great rich conversation from our mini-experiment.  And, I hope that they’ll remember Newton’s Law of Cooling much more now having a tangible memory/experience with it, as opposed to just one of the many problems Mrs. Jain explained on the board. 

Growth Mindset: It’s working!

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I’m knee-deep in writing college letters of recommendation right now, and while I’ve been somewhat dreading writing these because I just feel so strapped for time, All.The.Time, I’m surprisingly really enjoying this experience because I’m so inspired by what our girls have to say about Math and Learning in their Naviance profiles (these are a gift, by the way, College Counseling, thank you!).  And, I just can’t keep these messages to myself.  They’re too good that they have to be shared.

I worked really hard last year (and continue this year) to insert healthy doses of challenge and growth mindset into my Algebra 2 with Trigonometry class (Junior/Advanced Sophomores).  And if you read any of my blogs last year, you know I was met with an equally (healthy?) amount of resistance.  So reading these comments makes it all worth it:

I am most proud of achieving a growth mindset. This was a new concept that was introduced to me throughout this class. Math has never been my favorite subject, primarily because it’s so black and white. However, I learned from this class that it doesn’t have to be. Like I said earlier, I learned it’s okay to not get the right answer all the time. Every time I made a mistake, I learned from it and my brain grew instead of me just getting frustrated with myself because I couldn’t get the right answer. I used to have a fixed mindset about math, but after taking this class I have grown to really like it because it taught me to look at math differently. Math can be fun and creative and thought provoking, it doesn’t just have to be simply going through the motions to get the right answer. My growth mindset that I learned in math class is something I have also applied to my other classes, and has changed my outlook on learning and school as a whole.

My favorite academic memory of this class was learning about growth mindset. I can say that I have learned a lot more than just math in a math class and it has helped me outside of the classroom as well. I think that having a positive attitude toward situations will help you to be successful in any situation. I love that some of the valuable life lessons I have learned came from my math class. We started out with learning how to perfect the growth mindset in our math problems but could later apply it to our daily life as well.  The thing that I am most proud of achieving in your class was perfecting the growth mindset. As we know, it was my favorite thing about the class. So technically, I was proud of each individual thing that I did in the class because every time I had the opportunity to improve, I would count that as an accomplishment.


I am most proud of achieving a growth mindset. Having a growth mindset was a major theme in this class and it really helped me learn information on my own. At first, it was hard because I was always used to teachers feeding me information, but after this class, I am able to understand information on my own.


I am most proud of always pushing myself in your class. Math is not a subject that comes easy for me, and I have always had to work hard to achieve a good grade in my math classes. However, I took every challenge test that was offered and I came in for extra help whenever I could. I also worked efficiently with my classmates to solve problems during group work periods and expanded my critical thinking skills by solving difficult problems. Throughout the year, I feel that I truly embraced struggle because I learned that making mistakes was okay. It is how I grew from my mistakes that helped me absorb the material.  I also learned that when there is a difficult task I am faced with, I should not get overwhelmed an give up, but rather embrace the challenge and grit it out.


My favorite part about this class was how you were so into growth mindset and gritting it out. I was so used to the same types of math classes all my life so hearing how you had new innovative ideas for the class made me really excited. The growth mindset Ted Talk’s were super interesting in class and I never thought I would watch a Ted Talk in math class. They showed me that it’s really beneficial to challenge myself and to be confident in the capabilities of my mind.


An experience that stretched me the most in your class would be when we were assigned with a Performance Task. These performance tasks were meant to be perceived with a growth mindset. The idea of the task was to try and fail. Although I would get frustrated whenever I was not able to get the answer, the idea of having a growth mindset pushed me to keep trying until I finally solve the problem. This stretched me the most in this class, because I was able to realize that if you push your mind and believe you can achieve something, it can happen.

The road to changing the way our girls learn can be quite bumpy, but reading these comments and knowing that these girls are leaving with such confidence in themselves and their capabilities makes it all worth it.

Statistics: Vehicle for Interdisciplinary Study and Service

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I love teaching AP Statistics.  What I love even more is doing Statistics.  When we came to the end of the first (of four) units in this course, Descriptive Statistics, I was looking for a way to let my students practice the Statistics we had learned.  Last year we created and administered a silly little survey about how the start of school was going for Carondelet and DLS students.  This survey certainly served it’s purpose and added an element of fun. 

This year, I wanted to do something different.  Having been a pretty bad member of the Sr. Clare Dunn Forum planning committee (I think I’ve missed every meeting this year) I thought there might be a way for me to make up for that, and a way to connect my students to this school-wide event.  I reached out to Kristy Schow with my idea and asked her what would be useful to know about our school community ahead of the forum.  Here’s her response:

1. Why does the criminal justice system need reform? Does it need reform? In what ways?
2. Is meaningful reform possible in our political/economic/social climate? Why/why not? What type of reform is most meaningful/beneficial?
3. Are there alternatives to prison? What are they? When are they appropriate?
4. What are the social impacts of imprisonment and the economic impacts?
5. What injustices do we see in our prison system and our criminal justice system? What is the solution?

While these questions were great, they were too broad and open-ended to put on a survey.  And what I love about this is that this is exactly what happens with real research every day.  A researcher (Kristy) wants to know information about a group of people and it’s the job of the Statistician (my students) to flesh out the needed information and operationalize them into concrete variables with categories or numerical responses.  In one 45 minute period I divided my class into five groups and gave each group one of the questions above.  Their job was to turn the one broad question into 3-4 survey questions.  At the same time, they had to think of any important demographic/background variables needed on our survey.  Here‘s what they came up with. 

We posted the survey to Schoology and within a week had over 500 responses!  They spent the next 2-3 weeks analyzing the results, using Minitab Statistical software, and building a report and poster to summarize their findings. 

Today we hung our posters in the inner-court, contributing to the impressive museum that the planning committee has created. 

We hope you can visit and see what our community thinks about prison reform and how these beliefs trend based on gender, political views and other demographics.

Today was a win for me.  Allowing my students to see that Statistics is a math tool with far reaching potential (most people don’t see Math and Social Studies as a natural pairing) is an important lesson.  I hope it might pique some of their career interests and help them see the flexibility, and the power, of Math.  I also love that there was a service component to this project.  While we could have come up with our own topic on which to survey students, it was much more rich to act as consultants, work with Kristy’s broad themes and create a survey that actually served others.  This was a great example of school work being the total opposite of busy work.  The work they created, in a class, served to educate our community on an important, relevant and timely topic.

What other ways can we create school-wide events where we as teachers can create projects that allow us to collaborate and serve the school?

We loved Fun Friday, but what did our students think?

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If you read Lesley’s post, you know that we had our first Fun Friday in the Math Department.  If you ask any math teacher, they’ll tell you it was a great success.  The problem was just the right difficulty, enough to challenge them but not so inaccessible that they couldn’t solve it.  And the problem was fun!  They got to play with blocks and use their hands.  There were no formulas nor any calculations.  There were no textbook problems or worksheets.  And the skills required to solve the problem were not traditionally taught in any of our courses:  in other words, no one was handicapped by not yet having learned a particular math concept based on their current course. 

But, what did our students think?  We surveyed the students after and ended up with 451 responses.  Here are the highlights:

I.  Was it fun?  [How was Fun Friday for you?  1=I hated it. 10 = I loved it.]  Look at that beautifully left-skewed graph.  More students loved it than hated it.  That’s a great start for our first of the year! 

2.  But was it math?  [How much was this task a good use of Math class time?  1= Not at all.  10 = Very much.]

 [How much did the task feel like Math?  1= Not at all.  10 = Very much.]

 
Notice that quite a few answered some low responses.  We’ve got some work to do here.  Our students are really good at “doing school.”  Unfortunately, when we are tied to textbooks and curriculum, that can sometimes make them think that math is just something you find in a textbook.  We’ve got work to do to connect the math we teach in our classrooms to the wider world.  And to let our students realize that math is about problem-solving and strategy and that not all math problems or tasks have formulas and numbers.  
3.  How did they like being with students from other classes?  [How did you like being in a mixed group? 1= Hated it.  10 = Loved it.].  For us, this was the most important component of Fun Friday.  Sure, the problem is what they’re focused on but what they did together, the problem-solving, collaboration, sharing of perspectives and expertise is really what we we’re after with these department-wide activities.  It was unclear how students would respond to having to work with students from different courses but it’s promising to see that more liked it than hated it.  

Overall, the first Fun Friday was a huge success.  The kids liked it and this data supports what I hear every Thursday in my classroom, “Is tomorrow another Fun Friday?!?  Please!”  Now that we have their buy-in to participate, this is our opportunity to shift how they think about Math.  We want students to leave Carondelet as well-practiced problem solvers.  Yes, they’ll have learned many skills in their four years here.  But more importantly, we want them to leave with the confidence and resourcefulness to know they can research and solve any problem that comes their way.  And that Math mindset and strategy can be used to solve any problem, even those without numbers.