Week 3 - "Mr. Alonso, how do I improve my grade?"

a. The most surprising (and exciting, and exhausting) thing from this week was on Thursday when my teacher informed me that he would not be coming in because his son woke up very sick. He asked me if I could handle covering the lesson on 45-45-90 triangles for all of the Geometry classes, as well as catching up one hour on a couple of problems they missed from the previous day. I told him that I would be glad to do so. By the end of the day, I was more tired than I had been in a long time, but that feeling was tempered by the sense of reward I got from knowing I taught my first full day of classes.
b. One of my goals was to improve my understanding of an inquiry based lesson, so this week I got to see the fruit of all the labor my students put into their projects, and give them the opportunity to make corrections on their work after receiving feedback. The project went in as a test grade, and many students were not happy with their grades. My teacher made me the person they consulted about improvements. I asked them to actually do any missing parts (the most basic way to improve their grade) and, if they had done part of it, I asked them to go back and reflect on their work, writing a self-critique and explaining the applicable math concepts in more depth. Anyone who wanted to improve their grade had to submit a few sentences of reflection/math work in writing. I have graded all of the ones that have been turned in. My teacher and I had some interesting conversations on evaluation and grading of students, since this was not a typical test or quiz. We agreed that, in order to reward the effort of each student, we would not allow one person to turn in reflection paragraphs for the entire group, but rather we would only add points for the student who did the work.
c. I would like to continue improving my instructional strategies for this week. I think that I have some pretty  good ideas for lessons on paper, but putting them into action in the classroom is an entirely different thing. Some students have shown a bit of resistance to the activities I have offered them because they have not done it before in this class or other math classes. I also ran into the issue of assuming they knew how to rationalize a denominator, but I had to help several students with this in the middle of a lesson. To resolve these issues, I will try to implement and explain group activities more clearly so that students understand what to do, and I will be mindful that some students do not know or remember all the prior knowledge necessary for Geometry.

Dreamland Burning:
Text-to-self: I am really enjoying reading this book because I was born and raised in Tulsa. There are so many places that I have been to and things I have done that are in this book, particularly in Rowan's narration because of the chronological setting. One thing in particular that struck me was the description of her run down Riverside, with the Arkansas River on her left and Riverside Drive on her right. Also a cross-country runner in high school, I used to run that same area, and I know the statue of that large cat catching a bird very well (but clearly not well enough to recall the species of either the bird or cat as was written in the book :) ). I have also been to the Guthrie Green many times and several other places in the book.
Text-to-world: I think this book does an excellent job of depicting the tension between the past and the present. I can see how students would relate to Rowan and then see how history connects to where they are now and the importance of learning it, especially history that has been hidden for such a long time. Basically, the text is a lesson on the importance of learning about the past, both its successes and its mistakes (though I suspect in this case it is all about the mistakes, which I don't have a problem with at all - it is clearly about what is arguably the biggest blunder in Oklahoma's history).
Text-to-text: I used to read these baseball books when I was in elementary school, in which the protagonist would acquire a baseball card, look at it or something (I can't recall how exactly it worked) and then be transported back to that time for the majority of the book. He would then meet the player and experience his life and times. The back-and-forth narration from past to present reminds me of those books, where the narrator traveled through time throughout the series. One of the books in that series that touches on racism is called Jackie and Me, where the main character meets and befriends Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play Major League Baseball. The book addresses the struggles that Jackie faced, and the white protagonist learned important lessons about racism and the difficulties faced by people of color in this country.

This week, I got to observe and grade everyone's project presentations on Monday and Tuesday. It was honestly pretty boring after a while, because 98% of the students simply read from their slides verbatim. Their material was often fascinating, but their delivery needs some serious work - that's okay, though because, as Mr. Barnhardt informed me, they are just now starting out speaking in front of people. I graded them well on their presentations for the most part, not taking off points for style or delivery but instead making a note of it in everyone's comments, which were otherwise positive and encouraging. As referred to above, we decided to give groups the opportunity to make up points missed on their projects. I was impressed with the effort and persistence of many of the students in earning points back. We began chapter 8 on right triangles - we covered geometric mean, the Pythagorean theorem (I taught these to 5th hour, the class I have taken over for now), and special triangles.
Next week, we are planning to cover sine, cosine, and tangent (2-3 days), take a quiz (midweek, about halfway through the chapter), and begin reviewing for the test, which will likely be the following week. I would like to lead a more creative lesson next week and get the students a bit more engaged. I find that almost all of them seem to be motivated by their grade, and some of them are barely motivated at all. I haven't found any students who (at least not obviously) really enjoy math. My goal for this week is to find at least some students who like math, and to show uninterested or unmotivated students something about math that is fun and engaging, even if it is not directly related to what we plan to cover.