Middle School predicts your future… right? January 16, 2011

The very interesting Middle School Friends Are Critical For Future Success by Rick Nuaert is a discussion on how important a student’s middle school years are to his or her future.  If you’re well adjusted by middle school then your future is bright.  If you’re hanging with the wrong crowd in sixth grade, you can expect to be a bum at age 30.  Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but is the jist of the article.  Worth checking out. 

-

The article does beg the question of why middle school is always a person’s most hated years.  I’ve never in my life heard someone say that their best years were spent in sixth through eighth grade.  People point to high school, others point to college, some even point to when they were a small kid (me) when they define their best years.  Never have I heard someone say, “I was in my prime in middle school”  It just doesn’t happen.  We all suffered through them, some more than others, but we were all completely miserable.

-

So how can we make a kid’s middle school years less destructive, given that we now know how influential they are?  How important really are those high-stakes, anxiety-ridden State exams?  If a kid’s socially formative years are in middle school, maybe we shouldn’t be imprinting them as failures or setting them up to lose sleep.  Maybe instead we should think about what’s really important – teaching kids how to react to stress and how to build strong friendships with good people, helping kids discover a creative outlet, impressing on our kids how great it is to LEARN and not just to pass exams – instead of filling them with fear and hatred of school. 

-

Were you forced to take a State exam?  Aren’t you successful anyway?  Well, think about how much more successful you’d be if you hadn’t stood in that parking lot drinking Night Train before your first middle school dance and gotten caught with that joint by Ms. Sutherland who didn’t call your house because she was drunk herself.  Imagine if your parents had just taken you ice skating instead.

-

But I digress.  Whether or not I subscribe to Rick Nauert is still up for debate even in my mind, but it does present an interesting angle on the torturous middle school years. 

-

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 “doublling” 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 gthe 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!

 

overkilling negatives? May 8, 2010

 

I know the ruler seems a bit overkill for a simple subject like adding positives and negatives, but I teach 11th grade in Boston and it’s the biggest stumbling block for even my students taking my advanced algebra class.

 

The problem is that kids are taught a “noun-verb” way of solving problems like “-12 + 7″. They are told to find -12 (noun, static number) and count up 7 spaces (verb, movement) to the right to see what number they land on. This is fine in a classroom with a number line taped to the desk, but it doesn’t teach the kids how to think about the numbers and a lot of kids will get this problem, and ones like it, wrong. It only gets worse with “x + 12 = 7 (solve for x)” or “y + 12x = 7x + 3 (solve for y)”. It’s the same problem over and over again, just disguised.

 

The problem with the number line and the “noun-verb” way of solving is that it’s not the way we think. It’s not even the way we are taught in school to solve these problems. In the Boston 7th grade curriculum is a book called “Accentuate the Negative” where the very first page of text has a caption over a kid’s head that reads something along the lines of “I owe my dad $4. I have -$4″. So this business of “owing” comes into play very early.

 

If I owed you $12 (-12) and I only paid you back 7 (+7), how much would I still owe you? Asked like this, it’s a simple problem. You’d count up from 7 until you got to 12, knowing that the answer would be in “owe”, or negative. In school however, the kids are told to start at -12 and count up 7 spaces. This is completely backwards from how we think.

 

So to get to my ruler…. The ZeroSum ruler allows a kid to find -12, find 7, fold the ruler in half and count the space between the two numbers’ absolute values. This is what we do when we are finding out how much someone owes us, and this is really the way we think. In time, and to answer your question about what a kid would do with numbers beyond -25 and +25, a kid would start to see the relationship between positives and negatives and that if you “owe” more than you “pay” (if the negative is further away from break even (zero) than the positive) then the answer will take a negative sign. But it’s really the space between the absolute values we are counting.