September Goals

I was going to do goals year-to-year, but those are hard. So I've decided to try doing three goals - professional, personal, and blog-related - for each month and then analyze how I've done at the end of each month.

Here are my goals for September 2012:

Blog
I am going to try and update more. To help me do this, I will create a schedule that I will follow.

Professional
I have an organizational scheme that I want to follow (I've been flying by the seat of my pants for the past two years). Hopefully this will help me save time!

Personal
Survive September and October! That's all I have planned, haha. We'll see afterwards!

Summer is officially over. I have had an amazing summer, filled with new cameras, showers, day hikes, and ultimate.

This year, I hope to post more (check out my goals!).

Counting Down the Days

It's almost summer time. I think there's about 24 school days left. I have to admit, I keep a regular count. I feel like I have so much to do, especially teaching math, but I want it to be summer break NOW. I want time to clean my home and enjoy my ultimate frisbee nights.  Soon. Soon...

But for now... it's time for bed.

One big plan I have for the summertime is to clean up my portable harddrive. Mad organization time.

Packaging

I haven't written in a while, but what can you do. Busy, busy.

First of all - marking sucks. Especially if you've left it for a very long time.

Second of all - found this amazing site on Packaging Design. I don't even know how I found it. Can't remember. But I'm really excited to look and see all of the different ideas for projects.

Waste of time?

I hate wasting my time. I don't have a lot of it, so when I do waste it, I'm not too happy. Today I unfortunately wasted my time and almost wasted the time of my students in CS40S.

We're studying two-dimensional arrays in computer science right now and what better way to study them but to make game. Gameboards are super easy to manipulate thanks to these structures. I have already made them create a tic-tac-toe game and then I wanted to get them to make Battleship. Making Battleship myself, I realized that it was a pretty tough game. Alright, how about Checkers. It was an easier concept. Still, though, it was getting "tough". By "tough", I mean challenging and fun for me but I could see it being very long and drawn out with them.  If I had time, though, I think it would have been an excellent chance to look at the benefits of Object Orientation afterwards, and seeing how data could be encapsulated. Looking at my time table, though, I realize that it's really not worth our time. If we're supposed to do all of this stuff and try and learn iPhone/iPad apps, then really, all of these fun, cool projects are just not doable.

I hate the semester system. Hate hate hate. I never have enough time for anything, it seems. In every single class, there is no time.  For example, in math, I find that I never have enough time for the students to just DO math. Take time to practice, practice, and practice.  Same thing with computer science. The project that I had planned for them isn't technically a waste of time - it would be an excellent example. But instead, I have to nix it.

Please, someone realize that the semester system is not helping anyone.

Tough Crowd

Today's math class was tough. Not because of the content but because of the way I chose to present the topic.

It was quadratics, in particular graphing using y = a(x-p)^2 + q.  I tried to show them how to do it from the base function (y = x^2) but they just flipped out. It wasn't until I did the shortened version did it go better but man alive, what a tough class.  It makes my heart sink when I deliver something poorly when they are like, "I don't get it."

That situation did become a nice learning opportunity, at least for the way we will be working as a class.  We had a chat about comments like, "I don't get it."  I had to remind them that I don't know how to help them unless their questions were specific questions. Automatically, they started to give me really good questions that really helped.

I have to make sure to thank them for rising up to that task and asking for specific help rather than just complaining (because that really is what "I don't get it" is).

On a positive note, I found this really great site called remind101. It has the capability of sending a mass text/email out to students from the teacher to remind them about stuff (math stuff, etc). It will be interested to try it in my math class.

One more day in the week. Then sweet, sweet weekend.