Mathletes Unite!

Tomorrow begins the math competition season for RBHS. This year's group is definitely younger than the group last year, which is exciting. There are actually freshmen and a good number of sophomores going with us tomorrow. That is, there are several signed up, how many show up at 5:45 in the morning to travel 2 hours for a math competition is another story. I anticipate us doing well though, we usually do. I will have to post again tomorrow about how we did and maybe put up some pictures as well.

Technology does not always work well.

So I thought it would be cool to get one of those writing pads for a computer so that I could start using it to write notes for my lessons at school and then upload them to BlackBoard for students that missed class. Maybe the problem is that I have only had it for one day or that I am using the wrong program, but it is not working as well as I hoped. It is really neat, but I need to find a program that I can type in that will recognize math symbols instead of trying to turn them all into letter. I guess I will keep playing around with it and see what happens. I always have 30 days to return it if I cannot get something to work.

Pre-eMINTS Homework

So the reason I started this blog is for a program that I am in with my school district. It is a pretty cool deal because I will get a SMARTboard for my classroom, a few laptops for student use, and a digital camera so that I can record the various things that my students do during class. I am really excited about the SMARTboard, especially since I received copies of TI emulators from a Calculus teacher at an AP workshop I went to last week. This software will basically allow me to project an image of a TI-83 and/or TI-89 so that I can use it in front of the class and let my students see exactly what I am doing. It will also allow the students to use the calculator in front of the class when explaining how they came to a solution. Anyway, that is not the point of this post, though I am obviously excited about it.

The purpose of this post is to talk about the homework that the participants in the Pre-eMINTS program were asked to do at our last meeting. Our assignment was to create a blog, which I have done, but I also need to post a picture on my blog as well. So, I decided to post a picture of how the math department I am in is one of the best around.

Last week was Rock Bridge's homecoming week. Each day of the week there was a theme for what you would wear to school. Monday was face-painting day, Tuesday was camouflage day, Wednesday was animal print day, and Thursday was green and gold day (our school colors). I proposed to the math department that we all wear black shoes, khaki pants, and black t-shirts with our math objectives for the day on them. This way we all blended into the front of our rooms. Most of the students understood the subtle humor and appreciated our efforts.

I know you are all now hooked by this thrilling tale and are eager to know what we looked like. I would show you a picture, but we are all standing in front of the chalkboard in one of our rooms, so you cannot see us. But I will show you a picture of my our dogs because I took Nala in for animal print day. Since I refuse to wear anything with animal print on it, and Nala is brown with black stripes, I took her to school with me so that she would be my animal print. The dog on the left is Kali and the dog on the right is Nala.

(They love to run.)

Calculus Exam

Well, my students are taking their second calculus test today. This test is on derivatives. They will have 95 minutes of fun using the power rule, product rule, quotient rule, chain rule, implicit differentiation, intermediate value theorem for derivatives, graphs, equations of tangent and normal lines, derivatives of polynomial/trig/inverse trig/exponential/logarithmic functions. It amazes me how smart these students are, but how bad they are at taking tests some times.

I put a problem on the calculator portion that they could have done in 1-2 minutes by using their calculators. But most of them tried doing the whole thing by hand. I wonder why they do things like this. We had a day for review on Wednesday and I told them that I was likely to give them a really hard chain rule on a calculator section, but that I wanted the slope at a specific point, so use the nDeriv feature to calculate the slope.

I know these students are point hungry and they all want nothing less than an A. But why do they not listen when I basically tell them how to do less work and get full points on a problem? I thought the test was pretty straight forward, but most of the students have said it was the hardest test they have ever taken. I guess it is good for them to realize these tests are hard, maybe they will start doing all of their homework on time. Maybe they will ask questions more often and study more for the test. Hopefully they will realize what it takes to do well on the AP test and be ready for it come this May.

First Post

Well, I have finally created a Blog. My wife has been trying to get me to create a Blog for a couple of years, but I never made time for it. Now that I am in a technology and teaching program with my school district I had to create one. She is going to be pissed that I did not create one when she asked; I love you Sweetie.