Math is everywhere!

Ok, I'm officially a nerd. For my grad school class on mathematics teaching methods I had to make a folder of articles from the newspaper and magazines about math. When I first heard about the assignment I thought it was sort of lame, blew it off, and procrastinated working on it until the night before. But now that I've done it, I'm really excited. I just found ten articles and blurbs from the paper about math. I found graphs about the weather in March, graphs about the auto industry in China, and an advertisement that can demonstrate lines of symmetry, to name a few...and I think that its really neat that math really is everywhere and its really useful in our lives.

On the classroom front, I had ten students absent today, and as much as I might be ashamed to admit it, it was kind of nice. I finally was able to teach lessons and students actually LEARNED! I did a read aloud out of Artemis Fowl, a science fiction book about a 12-year old genius who dabbles in high-tech illegal activities with help from friends in the fairy world. It sounds weird when you hear about it, but it was one of those books I could barely put down when I read it. And the students loved it! They were actually telling each other to be quiet so that they could hear. We also started a project writing character sketches, which I'm excited about because students are buying in because they can write about anyone they want to write about and they get to choose their own format. I told them they could write an essay, poem, rap, or even spoken word. I'm looking forward to what they write.

I'm also on a mission to reduce negative language, hitting, and disrespect and its going okay. I made student contracts today--basically saying the need to follow the rules, or accept the consequences if they want to go on our class trip. I've had trouble with finding meaninful consequences--I've tried in class punishments and detention, but they don't work too well when parents don't make their kids come to detention. My new system is a mixture of bribery and consequences. I was kind of against bribery at the beginning of the year, but if Starburst and raffle tickets bring order to the classroom, so be it.

Well that's all for today. I've had more late night steam because of daylight savings time, but I need to hit the sack to be ready for tomorrow...