Too many ideas, too little time.

After our last F2F session I left feeling like I had a better handle on my HMW question, but now I again have many thoughts floating around and I wonder if I have over complicated this all for myself. Am I trying to do too much? I feel like I have too many ideas and too little time. Maybe what I really need to do it take a deep breath, and choose one path to follow, and see what happens?

At the end of the last F2F session, I realized that I wanted my action plan to focus on this idea of a thinking classroom.  I wanted my HMW question to address student responsibility, motivation, engagement, making math meaningful and relevant to the real world.  However when I sat down to write out what I had been doing in my classes, I realized that I was leaning towards drawing connections between the concepts we are learning and situations that are happening in the real world. Which brings me to yet another HMW question

How might we challenge students to use their understanding of mathematics to explain the world around us?

I set a goal for myself to create more open ended assignments for my students. To be honest this has been a challenge since math lends itself really nicely to tests, and students are used to a traditional test. However, I have been honest with the students letting them know this is my goal, and we are all guinea pigs in this.

I have been testing out these assignments with my MCV4U classes.  As a culminating project in Vectors, I asked student to plan a trip around the world, and use these locations to develop vectors, equations of lines and planes.  I made this optional for the students and about 25% of them submitted an assignment. Overall it was well done, and the students feedback indicated they appreciated the opportunity to show their knowledge. The downside to this assignment was the numbers ended up being really large making the calculations quite tedious.

The other assignment I gave to them had them research the United Nations sustainable development goal and look at the rates of change at different periods of time in a chosen country. I had mixed feedback from the students about the assignment, some of them were hesitant to write a mathematical paper, others liked the fact that they were applying what they were learning to something that interested them.

I have ideas for the other courses I teach (grade 10 and grade 11), I have tried a few open ended mini projects, and hope to roll at least one open major ended project in each course before the end of the year. I will keep you all posted!