Musings from Mrs. Galvan

We are midway through a unit on inequalities. My favorite inequality related topic is Linear Programming. In class after spring break we will   do this , an in class investigation using farm expenses as our subject matter. For more examples, see here . In previous years, I'd call it a day after the "project" and move on to Radicals. Now I am committed to engaging my students more with assignments that will both get them to think and make for good posts to their digital portfolios. My idea is to have them write and solve their own linear programming problem in teams of 2. See my prompt for the assignment below. I welcome feedback. I am a little worried that I am not giving them enough to go in regards to researching and writing their problem. I will report back with samples after they do the assignment. Linear Programming Bloject So now that you have had practice with linear programming, your next objective is to create your own problem. What is int...

Usual Problem: New plan: Question: What is the area of an orange slice cut 3 cm from the top? 1. Give each kid (or pair of kids) an orange. Luckily, I have an orange tree. 2. Make other supplies available: string, ruler, plastic knives, plate 3. Challenge them to come up with a solution before making a cut 4. Compare calculated results with actual slice. 5. Eat the orange. 6. Students take pictures of their experiments while in progress and report results on blogs.

Imagine you're standing on the beach, sand in your toes, wind in your face and you're all consumed by a gorgeous sunset. As you stare at the horizon, you imagine being able to see all the way to... Wait how far is it? This week in geometry we are learning about tangent lines. My students use Pythagorean theorem to calculate about how far it is to the horizon. 

Attendees of the UCLA Math Department Curtis Center: 2014 Mathematics & Teaching Conference Thanks for coming to my session. Check out resources from our discussion here.  This is a sample Blog Post: In math class, we are learning about statistics and how we can use statistics to make guesses about large populations. My population is middle school students. My sample size was 30, selected at random from the 50 middle school students who responded to my survey.  Random sampling means that everyone in the population has an equal shot of being asked the question. We did not do a pure random sample but instead randomly selected three samples of 30 from our data using excel. Variability of student data As you can see in my box plots for pets for students, each sample has a median of 1. It is reasonable to infer that middle school kids probably have 1 pet. The hardest part of this project was getting volunteers to take my survey. See below for what my ...

We are reading Creative Confidence in our Faculty Book club to spur on Innovation. As such, we started a How Might We board (simple enough) to generate problems, questions, solutions and participation. Every Tuesday morning, we are going to chat for 15 minutes about a new question and see what happens.

Today I started each of my classes with a discussion on failure. My students were immediately uncomfortable at the mention of the word. They prefer sugar coated versions like mess-ups or stumbles. We shared our typical reactions to failures. I shared that I typically get mad at myself and say something like, "Why I am so stupid?" Others shared that they cry or ignore the failure or laugh it off. Resilience is key for success in learning anything, math included . #Caedchat on Sunday reminded me of this great acronym. :) I am reading Creative Confidence at the moment so the importance of resilience in the face of failure has been on my mind. I shared with them a passage on pages 9 and 10 about "self-efficacy." If we are afraid to fail, we are afraid to take risks, afraid to try. The fear of failure can block our opportunity to Learn and Grow.