Skip to main content

May 2020: The One Where We Wrapped Up The School Year Over Google Classroom

I can't say that I have necessarily missed my classroom during all of this. There are no windows, the desks are hard to group, it's crowded. My makeshift desk at home has a window next to it, a furry co-worker, ample bathroom breaks and time to eat vs. inhaling my food at lunch duty.
My makeshift desk, complete with my fav candle, cold brew coffee, and my airpods #essentials

But what I miss (and what most of us miss) is the conversations. While filling out my end of the year reflection evaluation, I had a hard time deciding what to put. My goal for this year was to encourage conversation among my students and teach them how to work together in groups and explain their thinking. I wanted to dive deeper into the #ThinkingClassroom model. I finally got my AP on board to see what I was trying to do.

                     
Some of my students working in #VRG earlier in the semester on our #vnps


Then COVID happened.

It isn't feasible to expect our students to complete synchronous learning. They have far too many responsibilities outside of school, and there was no way to make that equitable. I had to say goodbye to my goals for the year.

However, I tried to focus on things I could do better now that I had more time to work with students. We were only posting 2 assignments per week, so I could give in-depth feedback to students and help them edit their work multiple times. I couldn't have verbal conversations with most of them, but I could check in with them using the Desmos screen starters. I learned a lot more about some of my students during this time than I would have if we were in the classroom. But I was also frustrated by the students that I could not reach (and I had to remind myself it was not personal).

The best part of distance learning was getting to end my school year with the Desmos Art Project. I took advice from @MrCorleyMath and kept my directions simple. His blog was a huge help for me. Some of the kids rushed through it, some copied from existing projects online. But some kids went above and beyond what  I expected from them. The overall reflection was that it was challenging, but it was fun. One student told me that her whole family was excited to see her end product and that they had never seen a project like this before. See a few of my favorite examples below!

 










        

 

 


I ended our semester by sending a sappy email to them that I know about 1/3 of them will read. I don't care. I want them to know that I appreciate each of them, that I see them, and that I'm here for them, even over the summer. I included at the end that I hope each of them learned to like math even a little bit more than they did before they came into my class. And while I probably won't hear back from most of them, I like to think maybe some of them see the beauty and fun in math a little bit more.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A thought about assessment

 I had some thoughts about assessing my freshmen today after a particularly not great assessment last week 🙃 I wrote this all out in a thread and then thought “no, this should be a blog post!”. Our school gets students from around 40(!!) different feeder schools. Yes, we’re a private school. Also, yes, the Milwaukee area has a wild amount of K-8 and middle schools.  (Maybe it’s just wild to me because it’s the opposite of where I grew up where there was one middle school and one high school 😅) Because we get students from so many different schools, we also get students with a VERY wide range of prerequisite knowledge and skills. Example: today we covered how to find slope between two points. 2/3 of the room had at least seen it, 1/3 had never seen it. (I recognize most schools have students with a wide range of knowledge and skills and it’s not just us, but the amount of feeder schools we have is truly wild.) Enter our summative assessments. Let me start by saying I haven’t ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why I'm LOVING portfolios in my fully remote classroom

 I meant to blog in August but, you know, school started and all of that! We are starting fully remote.  I could not have been prepared for how different, awkward, and exhausting online learning would be. The energy during class is extremely different than when you're in a classroom, which makes my portfolios that much more needed.  Some background: 1:1 with chromebooks this year 6 periods this semester Periods 1-3 M/W from 9-12 Periods 4-6 T/Th from 9-12 The afternoons are for asynchronous work time, teacher office hours, small group intervention, and extra AP blocks.  Fridays we have advisory, an all school meeting, and will have time for clubs to meet. Daily Plan: Each morning I post a "Daily Links" google doc (thanks to my twitter friends for this idea!). The students open it before class. This helps us bypass the "no live links in the chat on chromebooks" issue 🙄 We start the class with a warm up problem that I screen share. The students respond in the ch...
Post a Comment
Read more

So You Want to Try an Asynchronous Number Talk?

A few weeks ago, I saw conversations about number talks on twitter and I thought, "How can I incorporate these asynchronously in a distance learning model?" Then, like magic, I came across a webinar from  Achieve the Core  and decided to sign up. During the webinar, Bethany Lockhart Johnson demonstrated how she used Flipgrid with her kindergarteners by having them record their answer to a problem, and then she would create a summary video where she pointed out different solutions and strategies and she shared that with her students. Check out her post about it  here . I was inspired by Bethany's idea, and I thought, this would work perfectly for an asynchronous number talk! I have used flipgrid in the past, but only a couple of times and not with many kids at once. So I put out a call to the #mtbos to help me out, and they delivered! I created a topic with a number talk using visual patterns (I got this idea from Sara Van Der Werf, check out the blog post  here ). I ...
2 comments
Read more