Musings from Mrs. Galvan

Today I am thankful for long two year old naps, my husband, kids programming on Netflix (new Daniel Tiger!) and a seamless, early bedtime. Why? Because I had time and made a lot of headway on my To Do List... I updated one syllabus and adjusted my lesson calendar for Algebra. I made a more attractive front page for my Canvas site with colorful links, as well as do a bit of boring file maintenance on canvas, the most interesting of which was creating a Create & Reflect (Blog) module to group all the prompts, tips and assignments. BTW these buttons were NOT easy to make. I used word art in publisher and saved each as a photo. Anyways, the more relevant progress I made was Standards Based Grading related. I am already committed to Active Grade . I watched most of the videos on their helpful Youtube channel . Still though, this decision did not prevent multiple sleepless nights spent with mind racing, consumed by crazy spreadsheets. Tonight I am hopeful that I can go to bed an...

Thank you @Stavenski for posting. :)

Last week I obsessed about my tasks. This week I am releasing myself from an item that I didn't have the courage to include: I'm mostly a consumer in MTBoS land.  I won't be participating in most of the interesting chats. I won't be able to reach out to many teachers in need. I probably won't blog every day or every week for that matter. My blog readership isn't going to take off - I write to clarify my thoughts. I'm not great at designing innovative lessons, so I'm not contributing much for others to use (though I'll test a lesson and give feedback; maybe that's a wee contribution?). I can't make it to all the PD that I'd like or even watch all the interesting webinars. I've never submitted a picture to John's http://WouldYouRatherMath.com   or submitted a thoughtful question to Dan's  http://www.101qs.com/ .  Why not? Well I'm not  uniquely busy. I'm not moonlighting as a super hero (yet). At work, the usual tasks ta...

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...

It is summer.... finally... I am writing this sitting, in shorts and a T-shirt, in my kitchen while one kid naps and the other is on the Ipad (#motheroftheyear, #learningapps). I finally feel relaxed and have a bit of time to write about my year. I assigned my students to write reflections, so it is only fitting that I write one too. So here is the prompt I gave my students to guide their reflection. Responses varied greatly. Some did the bare minimum and some wrote detailed, insightful commentaries on their year. One kid even mentioned that he learned to value process over product. I nearly fell off the couch with joy. As for me, I feel like I have a lot to polish . I want improve my prompts, rubrics and system for grading and giving feedback. I had many a late night trying to grade every blog post and write something of value to each student. I did an okay job, but the time it took still didn't merit what I felt was mediocre feedback from me. There has a to be a better, sprea...

I have not added to my blog in a while. Too busy getting ready for the end of the year, grading, traveling, parenting, etc. I am still feeling overwhelmed, but I spent this morning grading my Students' blog posts for chapter 12 on rational expressions and equations and I had to share the results. For this post, I wanted them to try creating time lapse videos. I quite enjoy Vihart's video s and I am also a bit tired of watching looooong videos. Hence, the sped up effect increases "watchability" ten-fold! Here is the  prompt . Here are a few of my favorite submissions:

Today's task - Surface Area. We had more fun by using Mr. Stadel's lesson - File Cabinet . They had a post it to measure, rulers, paper and a calculator. They started by making a guess. Some of them got pretty close (960!) My students are still not used to doing these types of tasks... their questions going into a 3 act tasks hint to a bit of insecurity in being asked to think outside the box, or outside the filing cabinet. Still we got to the key question: How many Post-Its does it take to cover the filing cabinet? Other questions: "What did he spend on post its to do this?" "How long did this take him?" "Are you going to tell us how many squares inches is in a post it?" "Does he have a life?" (Sorry Mr. Stadel) Their answer: 936 "Does this mean if we take one post it and cut it up, it would cover all the spots he left blank?" :)