Sunday, June 18, 2006

Time to think about my classroom clock

Classroom clocks tend to encourage non-motivated students to pack up early. So, I covered mine. Next year, I'm thinking of putting a message over the clock. Maybe, "Time to Think." I heard of a teacher who just covered the clock with, "Now." I like that one too. I'm also considering fabricating my own digital clock that messes with my students' heads a bit. The clock will go forward at double speed for the first half of the period and then it will go at half speed for the second half of the period.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Monday, June 12, 2006

Latin American Road Rally

Last year I taught math at Nordhoff High School in Ojai and I came up with the idea for a road trip project for my Algebra 1 class. This year I taught Foundational Math at Newbury Park High School and I expanded on the idea of the road trip. Since most of my students were from Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America, I decided to make the road trip a Mexican road trip. I really liked the idea because in Mexico, the metric system is used and that requires some ability for U.S. travellers to convert gallons to litres and Fahrenheit to Celsius and even dollars to pesos.

This summer, I'd like to really expand on this idea with full blown Latin American Road Rally that integrates math with social studies, history and geography. I can include all sorts of neat stuff that I ran across this year including slope story graphs, logic puzzles, unit conversions and whatever else I can think of.