Musings from Mrs. Galvan

I was really happy with last year's reboot of the space diagonal (aka diagonal of the solid) lesson, but my story about the prince craving the ideal bread stick wasn't the best. This year I changed the story to my (true) childhood story of visiting Disneyland and wanting candy. For next year, how might I add an open middle? Can this be morphed into a 3 Act Lesson that incorporates a prediction?

So every year around this time, my school shuts down and takes all the kids on retreat. I typically accompany upwards of 200 9th graders on a canoe trip down the Colorado River. It is an awesome trip and a great way for the class to bond. I have this year off though and while I will miss being part such a formative experience for my students, I am so excited to sleep in my own bed and get caught up with work and blogging. Week 7 = catch up on grading, planning, blogging and interleaving project. The last few weeks in algebra have been challenging for my students as we have been exploring complicated word problems. We worked on showing our thinking by writing and labeling all helpful expressions for a problem. The most challenging were the coin problems, interest problems and mixture problems. For each type, I lead my class through a discussion on how to translate the verbal expressions to algebraic ones. While it wasn't lecture, it also wasn't inquiry. A few days after w...

After 8 years teaching Geometry from this textbook , I finally made the lesson on Space Diagonals more interesting than saying: Do Pythag twice. Sure  I always do the Space Diagonal Dance, to much laughter, but the PrBL model wins. No, I don't have a video of the dance (that I know of). I happened to have brought donuts for a meeting so I had this box. I made up a story told them the legend of the Prince who made his butler leave the castle on a quest to find a delicious bread stick, the crunchy kind. The Prince told his butler that he was not to return until he found the longest bread stick that would fit in the box. I gave them the box dimensions, put them into groups and handed out the white boards. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. They discussed and argued for about 7 minutes before coming up with the solution. I walked around and monitored, giving feedback and hints. A group presented their approach before starting independent practice, er a worksheet, ...

There are many lessons in Algebra that in typical math teacher fashion, I just love . Wind-Current rate-time-distance problems are one of them for me. Usually I present a few examples and tell a (true) story of how I have used this knowledge outside of my math teacher role... in my real life... out in the REAL WORLD! They ooh and ahh. They question that I have a real life. *sigh* They listen attentively to my telling of how on two separate occasions I have won the Half-way to Hawaii game. I don't know which airlines play and which do not, but every time I have flown to Hawaii, they play the game of finding when the plane will be half-way there. The captain gives you the rate of the plane, the distance, the time the plane took off and the rate of any tail or head wind. Of course, there is an element of chance involved in the game. Speeds aren't constant the entire flight, but I use my algebra skills to make my educated guess. I have been lucky to win twice. My students are e...

Any lesson that ends with eating cookies is a winner. We scratched the surface of the Double Stuffed Oreo questio n today in my Algebra classes. We made the double stuff assumption, solved the system and tested it with the Triple Double data. Multiple students said things like, "I'm questioning my entire childhood!" Oh drama. #middleschool My handout. We really  just scratched the surface of this. I am in awe of how thoroughly this question has been investigate by... Chris D . Chris L . Dan A. Julie Nathan

I am still saying that I won't blog very often, yet I find myself with an extra hour this Friday afternoon, so why not sum up the week? Well, maybe just today. Today in Algebra we went over last night's homework on evaluating expressions and solving linear equations then we reviewed solving equations containing fractions. It was a short lesson followed by practice. They learned these skills last year in pre-algebra but are in need of a wee bit of practice. Then they took their first Learning Target Quiz on which they sought to demonstrate... I can follow the order of operations. I can manage arithmetic of positive and negative whole numbers. I can attend to precision by being careful in my work and reading (no transfer errors, no dropped signs, legible handwriting, follows directions).  I just got done checking them and converting their "scores" into my rubric... 0 Undetermined I left the problem blank or wrote something completely unrelated to ...

So every summer I make a grand, dream to do list... ...then every summer reality sets in with this dilemma: I want to spend time with my kids and take care of my home (where regularly during the school year, mystery sticky spots on the counter remain for weeks). So the annual question becomes how do I balance my ambition to increase innovation in the classroom and spend quality time with my little ones in a (sorta) clean house (I read Lean In ; I know I can't really "have it all"). Arg. I am (again) running out of time. What should I focus on? Here is the list: 1. Study for and retake the GRE s (my scores have long expired) and start applying to grad school. 2. Plan more PrBL tasks and games for Algebra and Geometry, even more, I want to get better at encouraging students to own the process and ask the questions and discover the concepts (less lecture... oh but what about all those videos I made to flip my classroom a few years ago. Blended learning environme...