Sunday, September 7, 2014

Teaching Math 4R: Quarter I Week 1 First Week Back!


Teaching Math 4R:
Quarter I Week 1 First Week Back!
I don't usually do a day by day rundown of the week, but here goes nothing!

MONDAY: Labor Day (nothing to report)


TUESDAY: Superintendent's Conferences where we spent all day in meetings except for the last 2 hours of the day when we finally got to set up our rooms. I spent those 2 hours moving 100 textbooks, arranging and tweeking 25 PCs, finding 25 chairs and placing 6 tables. Then I found that my SSH server's RAID drive crashed, so I had to setup openSSH on an alternate server I used to have for FTP. That's OK since I don't need the FTP server much anymore. I use the SSH sever for my AP Computer Science students to login from home and finish their Java projects. I share files with my students through Edmodo. I upload my files on DropBox, SageCell and YouTube aka my cloud!


WEDNESDAY: First Day of Classes

The first day of every quarter starts with the "Ceremony Of The Seats" (new seating assignments). The students come into a dark room except for the PC monitors and the SmartBoard. On the SmartBoard I'm playing an MP3 of the sound track to "A Beautiful Mind" over VLC. Since this isn't an MP4, VLC adds some wild special effects on the SmartBoard so it's all cool. Then I walk to each seat and call each student using my SmartPhone as a flashlight as if I'm an usher in the Movie Theater. It's all very dramatic. Then we hand out books and book cards, go over the syllabus and fill out some biographical forms. Sorry, there's no instruction the first day of classes.
YOUTUBE: Since it was Wednesday, after all, I had to show a FILK or two! So, at the end of the period I snuck in our own student made Frozen and then the infamous Mathmaticious!

THURSDAYLesson 1200 Intro to SAGE

Finally, we say goodbye to Ziggie (TI-83) and play around with SAGECELL! All we did was some basic Arithmetic and Algebra but I think we got across the power of a robust Computer Algebra System, aka CAS, such as SAGE!

FRIDAYLesson 1201 Sequences & Series

We dive right into sequences and series using for loops and list comprehensions in python!
TECH NOTE: I recorded these ScreenCasts last year. The audio isn't great as I was using a BlueTooth Mic I inherited after Hurricane Sandy. It took me a while to get all my equipment replaced, sorry.

Math 4R: preCalculus + SAGECELL SCREENCASTS

YouTube descriptions include links to code and notes if you need them.




Teaching Math 4R:
Ziggie must die - No more TI-83!
Quarter I Week 0 August Preparation:
PreCalculus is all new this year:
(1) My preCalculus for Juniors classes will start the school year with Chapter 12 this year! We start with Chapter 12 so we don't waste a lot of time reviewing topics from Chapters 1 and 2 which are about solving Linear Equations and Quadratics! So, when midyear is upon us, we can switch to Calculus without skipping important topics at the end of the preCalculus text. As such, we cover as much preCalculus as we can in the Fall Semester and as much AP Calculus AB material as we can in the Spring in preparation for Calculus next year!

(2) We are using a Computer Algebra System called SAGE instead of the TI-83. We used to call the TI-83 "Ziggie." Hence the title of this post: Ziggie must die! The grand experiment this year is to see how well students learn the Math while learning to code in python at the same time! Well, it's not such a grand experiment as we've been using SAGECELL for several years now. What's different is that we won't be using the TI-83 this year as we just don't need it anymore!

(3) We will be learning a lot of python in class. You can learn some python code on your own too with this online, interactive textbook!

(4) Here's a taste of our first day:


Well, that's all folks!

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