My Harvard Math for Teaching Thesis: Complete! And ready to share… March 20, 2011

After many many years of jumping through many many hoops, I am finally graduating with my MA in Mathematics for Teaching in May.  My thesis, Negative Number Misconceptions in High School: An Intervention Using the ZeroSum Ruler is right now at the printers being printed and bound.  I don’t know about you, but that instantaneous feeling of relief after taking a final exam or passing in a final paper stopped hitting me sometime in college.  So now, I’m just feeling a bit burnt out.  OK, completely burnt out.  But I’m sure it will hit me soon since it kind of needs to; I need to now get in a post-Bach program to get my Initial teaching license.  I like to do things backwards.

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So here it is for download!  For all to read!  Or maybe to just glance.  In my study, the ZeroSum ruler proved effective in reducing eleventh grade error on integer addition and subtraction problems (especially with negative integers).  If I wasn’t so burnt out, I’d want to test it with younger kids.  Imagine how our world would be if my eleventh graders actually mastered integers when they learned them in, and only in, 7th grade.  But that’s in my thesis.]

 

Small Schools, SUPERSIZED Classrooms: Thanks a bunch, Bill Gates September 3, 2010

School for Boston Public School teachers starts on Tuesday.  The kids come back Wednesday.  Three chairs at a table, eight tables, I have 24 seats in my classroom.  The class size limit in Boston is 31 per class.  -

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37 students + 24 seats = success.  Solve for HOW.

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So that I could get an idea of who I’ll be seeing on a daily basis and when, since I had many of the students I’ll have this year two years ago when they were 9th graders, I went onto mybps.com to download my class lists.  This will be the first year that all students get electives after four years of none (Thanks again, Bill Gates.  My students thank you too for the opportunity to go to a small school where they get to know each other so well that they fight like siblings and miss out on things like art, music, and… computer classes.  But to have computer classes would mean we’d need computers, so thanks for dropping the ball on that one, too.  “Good looks” as my kids would say, only I say it to you sarcastically, you mad scientist, you!)

 

side: What’s the difference between a real scientist and a computer scientist?  Real scientists can admit when they’re wrong and try, try, try again until they get it right.   You can’t Ctrl/Alt/Delete this one, Bill.

 

Anyway, so I downloaded my class lists and I see the following:

 

Math elective, period 3:            37 students

Algebra 2, period 4:                33 students

Algebra 2, period 5:                25 students

Algebra 2, period 6:                24 students

 

By my schedule, you can see I’m a math teacher.  As hard as calculus was, I got through it.  I even got through a java programming class that sucked 15 pounds out of my body.  But I just can’t seem to do the following problem:

 

37 students + 24 seats = success.  Solve for HOW.

 

I appreciate any and all suggestions on how to pull this one off.  These are the kinds of things people forget about us teachers.  We “get summers off”, we “only work 6 hours a day”, we “have tons of vacations”, we are “failing our kids”.  But no one ever comments on how we’re sometimes set up to fail before we even begin. 

 

I’m scared for Wednesday, not because I don’t think I can teach 37 kids at a time but because I don’t know how to choose who gets a seat and who sits on the floor.

 

3,000 denied diplomas because of MCAS – The Boston Globe June 20, 2010

 

Thank you, Mom and Dad, for popping me out in 1977 so I could take art and law my senior year, get class ranked, take the SATs, go to college, graduate college, go to grad school, and become a productive member of society.  Thank you for having me when there was still money for electives in high school and the SATs were the big exam.  Thank you for bringing me into the World when a 12th grade semi-diverse education- not a 10th grade one measured by four MCAS exams- was the goal of high school.  For all of this, I am forever in your debt.  I love you SO MUCH!!!

3,000 denied diplomas because of MCAS – The Boston Globe.  <– Boston Globe article for anyone with a tough stomach.

 

Office Space Poetry June 12, 2010

  

Back when I was working as an environmental scientist/hydrogeologist (yes, I know that’s not a word but it was my job title for 3 years), and had time to sip my iced coffee while browsing the net until I woke up around 11AM, I wrote a poem:

  

Am I doomed to Live my Life

As Everyday Joe

Excited for daily lunch break?

Or am I to find my

True Calling-

To which so few awake?

  

I remember thinking that monitoring contaminated soil and groundwater extracted from underneath gas stations across Massachusetts was not what I had dreamed of doing when I was a kid.  But what had I dreamed of doing as a kid?  My Mom had told me that “I’d better think of something else” when I told her I wanted to be a singer and my high school biology teacher had told me “they don’t make any money” when I told him I wanted to be a marine biologist.  Turns out, I can’t sing and deep water terrifies me.  So what had I wanted to do when I was a kid and there was a world of possibilities I could work towards?  How did I end up with so much oily soil under my broken fingernails?

  

Turns out, I had no dreams as a kid, or at least none that I can remember.  There was one reoccurring dream or walking and jumping off a pier into darkness, but that doesn’t count.  Nor do I know what it meant.  But I digress. 

  

  

When I got asked to go part-time or get laid off from my environmental job and I gleefully chose to be laid off, and the quickest job to find was substitute teacher in the Boston Public Schools, I didn’t think anything of it.  But somewhere along the way, probably after getting a full-time position a year later, I remembered all the times I forced my brother to sit in front of my small chalkboard so that I could play teacher.  It would always end in him crying to Mom that he didn’t want to play school anymore and me rationalizing that I was really just helping him, but it was something that could be considered a Life dream being played out. 

  

Back when my job title wasn’t a word and I had time to slack off at work, my poem hung on my blue padded cubicle wall for me to stare at everyday.  I’m no poet, so where had it come from?  It’s funny how Life works.

  

I still wait for lunch break because it comes after teaching 160 straight minutes, but I no longer have time to sit back with an iced coffee and ponder what I should be doing with my Life.  There is no time to think.  There’s only time to Do.

 

I like it that way.

 

One More to Graduate. Make that 50.000001% June 7, 2010

With a graduation rate in the US hovering at 50%, getting every kid to graduate from high school should be our #1 prority.  Alex wasn’t a student of mine but he took precalculus in my classroom during my off period. Because our school is a small school, classrooms are shared. One day, Alex asked to use my computer to work on his credit recovery for the Algebra 2 class he had failed the year before. I let him use it, and sat with him as he worked on the problems. I taught Algebra 2 that year so it seemed only natural I help him.  Alex needed to get through just this one course to graduate high school. 

 

Before I knew it, I was helping Alex every day during my off period, and when the school year began to wear down, Alex began staying in my room all day working to get through the program. The program was difficult; much of the material isn’t covered in the Boston Algebra 2 curriculum. It started to become clear that Alex was exceptionally smart, but the program involved a lot of difficult work that would give even m top Algebra 2 students difficulty.

 

On Thursday June 3, 2010, Alex and I stayed at school until 10:30 PM when the custodian politely asked us when we’d be leaving. The credit recovery program deadline was at midnight and we weren’t going to be done. We were on section 10.5 and had to get to 11.11, and it was clear there wasn’t’ enough time. Alex was devastated. I was devastated. After all that time, we were defeated. Worst of all, there were errors in the program that had wrong answers as correct answers and not achieving a 75% or better on each mini quiz (there were approximately 20 in each section) meant we couldn’t move on to the next subsection.

 

The next day was field day. As I was waiting in my classroom for our bus to come, the director of credit recovery came to tell me he’d give Alex another day because he had gotten so far in the program. He had been given another chance! WE had been given another chance! Hard work does pay off! I called the phone number I found in the office fir Alex and told him to come in immediately to continue working.

 

Because I wasn’t allowed to stay behind from the field day trip, I asked another teacher to work with Alex. Alex began working again at 9AM. When I returned from field day at 1:30, Alex had gotten through just one more subsection. I was so exhausted from staying so late the night before, from field day, and just from a week of work in general, that the thought of staying late on a Friday almost brought me to tears. Still, we had to take the chance. I had to be there for Alex. He was so close to graduating that I couldn’t give up. We worked from 1:30PM to 5PM and got to section 11.5 when we ran into the advanced probability questions. Probability has never been strength of mine. I can do problems that involve using formulas, but these problems were less “marbles in a bag” or even “out of 10 people, you need to choose a president, vp, and secretary” and more “If Monty Hall opens one of the doors with a goat…” We were on section 11.5, we needed to get to 11.11, and we were stuck. I was stuck. I felt like a failure. We had been given another chance and it seemed we were defeated again. Alex wasn’t going to graduate because I couldn’t grasp that the Monty Hall probability is 2/3.

 

I couldn’t imagine what Alex’s weekend looked like. If I felt defeated, he must have felt devastated. If I felt frustrated, he must have felt destroyed. To get that close and have it count for nothing.

 

Then came Monday June 7, 2010, two day before graduating seniors were scheduled to sign out of high school forever. I was concentrating on final exam review for my juniors when the credit recovery director came back in. He has overridden the last half of chapter 11 so that Alex could take the final exam. I immediately called the phone number I had for Alex and left a message for him to come in. I had assumed Alex wasn’t in school, but he was. Maybe Alex had ore hope that I did. About 3 hours after seeing the director of credit recovery, Alex was at my door. He took the final exam. He was graduating. I called his mom to let her know, as I promised I would. I had never heard a parent so excited. It was then that it was reaffirmed in my mind and heart that hard work, as painful as it often is, always pays off. Thanks Alex.

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UPDATE:  Alex was shot and killed on September 3, 2011 on his way to a barber shop in Boston.  

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YouTube… BLOCKED. Learning Today… BLOCKED! June 6, 2010

 

Sure, there are a lot of videos on YouTube that we don’t want kids watching at school.  But there are a countless videos on the site that can teach in 3 minutes what it would take a teacher a week to teach.  Our kids are visual learners, learning through video is most effective.  

 

For teachers like me who use their LCD projectors extensively to reach our visual learners, having access to YouTube in school would be extremely helpful.  This year, I could have shown videos on solving systems of equations, finding the equations of circles, solving triangles with the trigonometric ratios, and this says nothing of how much I used YouTube myself to get through my graduate Java and Calculus classes! 

 

But because someone made the executive decision that all of YouTube should be banned from everyone within the walls of BPS, I have to hope that TeacherTube- the ungroomed toenail of YouTube- has a video on the topic I am looking for, and moreover, has their search feature organized in way that a search for “algebra” doesn’t bring up “Mrs. Valentine’s Kindergarten field trip to the Museum of Science”.  TeacherTube is not YouTube, it never will be, and it’s a real shame that teachers in BPS cannot log into YouTube to access its wide range of useful educational videos. 

 

In any case, I have posted videos on TeacherTube at the ridiculously long address: http://www.teachertube.com/members/viewProfile.php?user=Shanadonohue

 

They can be watched in school, even if they take 5 minutes to load.  There’s also one other option that[sometimes] allows you to convert YouTube videos to video files to save onto your computer and then show in class.  I stress, though, that it SOMETIMES works:  http://www.forinside.com/  In fact, it’s not even working now.  Blah!  Maybe this one works: http://www.zamzar.com/url/

 

UNBLOCK YouTube!!!  Please!!

 

 

 

calculators KILL negatives! (uh, raised to even exponents, that is:) May 17, 2010

 

What’s negative 2 to the fourth power?  16?  -16?  If you put “-2^4″ into the TI-83, you get -16.  But we know that (-2)(-2) = 4 and (-2)(-2) = 4, and (4)(4) = 16.  So why does the calculator give us -16?

 

This post is no doubt for the high schooler and not for someone addicted to the )( buttons on the calculator like I am.  I parenthesize.  It comes from a fear that something will go negative that should be positive.  I have reminded my students more times than I can count to parenthesize, so many times, in fact, that I am more than sure that most tune me out as soon as they hear the first syllable.  But still the negative raised to an even number sneaks past the best of ‘em.

 

The evil negative base reared its ugly head again today when I graded papers on the geometric sequence an = a1 • r^(n-1) where:

an = the value of the nth term

a1 = first term’s value

r = ratio of change (ie “doubling” would be 2)

n = the terms placement (ie: 5th term would be n = 5)

 

“Find a7 if a1 = 5 and r = -2.”  The answer I or course got more than the correct answer was ” -320″.  What should the answer be?  “320″.  The problem should be written out first as: 5(-2)^(7-1) to make the process clear.

 

At least no one gave -1,000,000 as an answer.  There’s still hope!