Written by I’ve taken creative writing courses before that encourage free writing. Find a prompt, set a timer for 15 minutes, and start writing. See what spills out of you. Most of it will be useless but one or two ideas or sentences might be worthwhile. Considering it’s the night before our second face to face and I’ve not written a blog post yet, I’ve decided to take this approach.
I think about teaching all the time, and I definitely think it’s an overload of thoughts that keeps me from focusing on one interesting thing to write about. In addition to my constantly churning brain, I’ll be honest that the last month has been exhausting. Marking piled up, reports card comments have come and gone, parent-teacher interviews took place, and a plethora of meetings always seemed to fill up my precious prep time. Like most of us, I’ve worked in the evenings to keep it all going. (I think this has contributed to the fact that I’ve had more than one dream about logarithms….anyone else??) I teach in two different divisions and two different departments, all of which have a variety of demands to keep up with. And so, my blog is late. Oh well.
Here are some of my thoughts and concerns as of late:
-I feel like we test too much. I want to do more interesting and creative projects in math and science. I have a lot of ideas and a lot of previous experience of infusing fun into courses and I want to find the time to implement more of this, especially in my Gr. 8 and 10 courses.
-Sometimes I am afraid that students aren’t developing the organizational skills to run their own lives. I miss when students had agendas and were responsible for recording their own homework, instead of teachers being responsible for posting everything online for them.
-I want to learn more about programming and I want to bring it into my classroom. I want students to make things.
-I want to make the school environment fun and interactive wherever possible. I made a sudoku bulletin board this year and a March Mammal Madness (Google it!) bracket bulletin board last year, and I love seeing students in the hall checking them out.
-On a positive note…I love my classes this year! I feel lucky to have a really great batch of kids to teach. It’s fun having Gr. 8s for the first time in a while, I always love teaching Chemistry and digging into the content to make real-world connections, and my IB Math students are hard-working and good-natured. They’ve been a delight! It’s a busy year, but it’s a good one.
Looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow!
@mcurtin – these are all valuable reflections and any number of them could become the basis for an excellent action plan! Were you able to hone in on any of these yesterday at the F2F?
Please don’t ever feel guilty or the need to apologize for being late or missing a blog post — we all are there, in the thick of it, with you, and it happens to everyone. Cohort 21 is not intended to inspire guilt. Do what you can and allow your current challenges to inform your areas of focus.
Cheers on getting your first post published. Win!
Maureen, this is a great start.
I’d love to hear about what you were able to explore from our last F2F to now.
Here are some potential questions stemming from your thoughts and concerns:
HMW make time to develop strategies for keeping learning fun and engaging?
HMW help students to take control of their learning?
HMW encourage students to be invested in their own process of learning?
Coding is fun to add to your lesson plans, but it’s about time, and purpose. Our science teachers had students code games for their midyear evaluation on electricity in Gr.9. They had to use Makey Makey’s and block code the script. This was relatively easy for students who had already seen block coding, but extremely challenging for the students who had never used it before. Whenever you teach coding there will be a divide of skill sets.
I was asked to join in the class to help teach code in the middle of the project, while the science teachers supported the circuit building. The challenge is that the timing of each project is different.
Students with no programming background came up with great ideas, but the coding was complicated. We didn’t map out the game design in advance, so the options were endless. This is great for voice and choice, but made it very challenging to support within the timeframe.
If I was to offer advice it would be to minimize the functions you want students to include in the activity the first time they code.
Input
Output
If (change result)
Here is the block coding option we used at the time Scratch: https://scratch.mit.edu/
But there are many others available now.
Connect with me on Friday and I can tell you more about it.
Makey Makey: https://makeymakey.com/
Microbit: https://microbit.org/code/
CodeMonkey: https://www.playcodemonkey.com/challenges/0
Here is a good introductory activity to block coding: https://blockly-games.appspot.com/?lang=en
Microbit has it’s own blog code and I like that you can change from block code to Java or Python to see how it looks in traditional coding language, versus block.
There are many more available and we can discuss them on Friday.