Anker Math

Students came back to school on Wednesday, which was also the first day of the 2nd semester. I opened by asking them if they normally write resolutions in the new year, and to write an academic and a personal goal for themselves for 2018. Then I talked about my own resolutions, and I began by admitting something to them.  I hate binder checks. I hate them so much that even though I said I was going to do them periodically last semester, I just... didn't. And, the longer I waited to do a binder check, the more overwhelming it became. Not doing regular binder checks became a source of embarrassment, but not enough to overcome my laziness. They are a PAIN, and they don't even seem to work. When I actually did them last year, they took me hours upon hours, and most of the classwork looked copied at the last minute anyways. So, over this winter break, I finally admitted to myself that I'm not going to do another binder check, ever.  Here's my new policy for ch...

I saw this on twitter and it really caught my attention. I'm a third year teacher and I'm constantly finding myself thinking that I thought I would feel more self assured by now. In my first year teaching, I was so excited to write cool lesson plans and try out new ideas that I wasn't sure were going to work or not, but I kind of figured that eventually, I would have all my classroom procedures down by now, and be a totally organized teacher with a clear unit/year plan all the time. My classroom would be beautiful, colorful, and neat, and students would be learning way more from me. Since it's my third time teaching Integrated Math 3, I really thought I would pretty much have my curriculum map finished, and I would only be slightly tweaking what I did the year before. Instead, I find myself re-planning entire units all the time. I know I have improved as a teacher, but I was under the impression that a few years in, I'd find my groove and pretty much have my...

I'm a couple days away from Winter Break! I'm really looking forward to having time off and to have time to plan cool lessons that I can take my time to think about and not have the pressure of planning 2 one-hour lessons every day. I'm going to teach a quadratics unit when we get back in Integrated Math 2, which I'm excited about. I'm not a huge fan of how the book introduces it (I find it really cheesy-- you have to make a brochure for parabola customers... huh?) I'm thinking of starting off with a strategy I got from my best friend/roommate, who's actually a government teacher. The idea is you give your students a table with a box for letters A-B, C-D, etc. Then you give them a topic and have them think of any words related to that topic. I'm thinking of giving my students the prompt "words to describe a graph" and hoping they think of words like increasing, decreasing, domain, etc. Then, I want to play a game of "graph scattegories...