Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been left in an interesting situation with my Year 10 class. This is their last semester before moving into VCE or VCAL, where they get to choose their own subjects. This means that they’ll be studying a variety of maths subjects, at different levels of difficulty. Not to mention that under the Australian Curriculum, maths already has an extra level of content beyond Year 10 (“10A”).

Further complicating things is the fact that I only took over this class halfway through the year.

I want each student to have the best preparation possible for their plans for Year 11. How a student is planning to continue with their study has a lot of bearing on the content they need to be working on now.

For instance, the students who want to study Mathematical Methods (the second hardest maths in VCE behind Specialist Maths), or are considering it, would be best served by strengthening their algebra skills, and covering some of the material in 10A. That includes indices, logarithms and polynomials. The first topic I cover in Year 12 Maths Methods is the Remainder Theorem. I would love if these kids could be exposed to that in Year 10.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the students who want to do VCAL Numeracy, which focuses on basic numeracy and skills needed for employment in trades or similar. These kids really would not be thrilled with me if I tried to teach them about logarithms.

And in the middle, we have the students planning on General Maths, and eventually Further Maths in Year 12. Even within this group there’s a wide range, from those who aren’t particularly fond of maths but who know it’s important, to those who could possibly do Methods if they really wanted to, but have decided not to. I still want to extend these students where I can, and not rule out the possibility of changing their minds during the subject selection process.

In a large school, students could be divided into classes that would allow them to focus on the areas most relevant to their future. But in a small school like mine, we only have the one Year 10 maths class. Instead, I need to find a way to manage the possibility of students all doing different work.

The Plan

I want to have students decide their own plan for what they would study. I gave each student this template:

The first two sections, I had students complete themselves:

• Maths and Science subjects I am planning to study next year.
• My Maths learning goals for this semester.

The next section was filled in by the student and myself together. Over a few lessons, I sat down with each student and discussed what their plans are, and we negotiated the skills I’m expecting them to complete this semester.

The codes that are listed match my SBG skills. I identify each unit with two letters, then each skill with a number. This is the same class I first tried SBG with last year, so they’re used to the system. At the very start of this term, they were given this complete list of the skills for the semester:

Reflections

This has worked well for the most part, but is not without some issues. Students know what is expected of them at all times, and have been able to work at their own pace. This class are usually very good at taking responsibility for their own learning, so it hasn’t been too hard to motivate them. For instance, I had one student work on one unit while in class and work on another one in her free lessons, because she knew she was going to be absent for an extended period of time.

But there are still many things that need to be improved with this strategy:

• While I usually try my hardest to get away from using the textbook, it is a lot easier to assign a list of textbook questions to work on than to find different tasks for each student.
• Collaboration becomes that much more difficult, because students are in different places.
• A few students feel like they can just cruise, rather than keep pushing themselves.
• I can get many students seeking help from me for a variety of different topics all at the same time. And sometimes my students get very impatient with me.

Though as it turns out, some of that has a way of sorting itself out. As students are waiting for me for help, they start helping each other. This has a tendency of pulling the pace of the faster students back to the rest of the group, while they gain the benefits from explaining the work to others.

I’m trying to reset everyone’s pace a little bit for the start of next term. Most kids are working on Probability, or Surds, Logs and Indices, so I’ve asked them to complete PR2 or SL2 over the September break. Hopefully from then on, it’ll be easier to set deadlines for groups of kids and keep them working on the same skills together. This will mean that I can give them collaborative activities to introduce topics, and save the textbook for practice questions.

Another issue I’ve found is with my own organisation, and making sure I have quizzes written before students get to those skills. But hopefully the break will help there again, and allow me to get out ahead with my quiz writing a bit more.

I would love some comments about all of this, whether this seems like a great or terrible idea, and where there is anything else I should be improving. I’m still not completely convinced this system works, but I’m optimistic that it is allowing students to work to their own needs and strengths in my class.

I’m definitely not advocating this as a good idea in most general. I would almost always prefer having students work on the same activities, and differentiate within those activities. But for this specific situation, allowing students to tailor their own learning path seemed like something I should at least try.

I’ve been doing student feedback reflections recently. As much as I stressed to students to take this seriously, I was always going to get a bunch of silly suggestions. So, without comment, here are some of them.

Give us stuff. Mostly food.

• Mr carter should start bringing us food so we are more motivated.
• Give rewards to people who finish all of there work.
• Give us prizes.
• Give us pizza.
• Give us all the answers.
• More food involved lessons.

Change your style.

• Start growing a beard.
• Stop shaving.
• Change the lack of beard.
• Change your serious lack of facial hair!
• Grow a moustache.
• Start wearing better clothes.
• Stop wearing bad clothes.
• Change your hair style.
• You should strut into the classroom with your shades on with The real slim shady playing from your massive speaker as you get to the front of the class you whip your shades off and start spitting mad rhymes and start krumping like a boss.

Keep your style.

• Keep the swag.
• Stop nothing.
• Being a legend.
• Keep keeping on.
• You should keep on being swag, and keep everything that’s in your class.

I don’t know what to say.

• Start teaching maths. Stop teaching maths. Keep teaching maths. Change teaching maths.
• SORRY CAPS LOCK ISN’T TURNING OFF!
• Stop teaching algebra! (Multiple ones of this, with some variation of “maths shouldn’t have letters” thrown in for good measure.)
• Keep the carpet clean.
• Let us throw things around the room.
• Stop, drop and roll when there’s a fire.
• Needs more death metal blaring out of the Smartboard when we are doing bookwork.
• You should change nothing because you’re a lad of a teacher and your teaching skills are maaaaaaadddd, keep up the good work.
• Change tomatoes into potatoes.

Continuing on from my last post, here is the feedback I got from Year 7. Like last time, I used Start, Stop, Keep and Change, and I’ll go through responses for each question, adding my own reflections as I go.

I’ll be honest, a lot of this feedback wasn’t particularly helpful, such as asking me to change things that are school rules or I otherwise have no control over. Or asking whether we can do no quizzes or no written work at all. It reminds me that Year 7 students still have a lot of maturing to do, and that I need to take a lot of the things they say to me with a pinch of salt.

Start

Teaching us maths that we use in our every day lives. I want to rant about this one, but I’m trying to resist. I don’t blame the student for repeating the narrative that the rest of society seems to believe, that maths is only relevant to very particular vocational areas and a complete waste of time otherwise. But I think that could be a whole other blog post. Not what I’m trying to do here.

That misconception is something I need to help my kids escape from with how I teach them. I need to convey that I’m not just teaching students to graph a linear equation because one day they’ll need to graph a linear equation – though hopefully they will. But I also want to show them that doing maths is an interesting problem for its own sake. Because thinking mathematically, as a general skill, is something they will definitely need.

I think that over time, I am getting better at this. But comments like this from students show that I still have a long way to go.

Make it fun. I try. I really, really try. I promise. But this partly comes back to the whole ‘being organised early so I can prepare more’ thing that I talked about last time.

Telling us how to do the questions the easy way first. My students may not be a fan of the times I don’t tell them the most efficient way of solving a problem immediately. Sorry kids, I disagree.

I think this is particularly a reference to making them find fraction divisions with rectangles (got this from Fawn Nguyen). Eventually, they started figuring out they could invert the second fraction and multiply without me telling them. So, did they learn that technique by the end of the lesson? Yes. Did they also do so understanding what division means and why that method works? YES! Did this lead to my class getting annoyed when they realised I knew this all along? Well, yeah. But I’m willing for my class to be annoyed at me if they’re thinking more deeply as a result.

Free time every [insert day of week here]. Maybe this is the result of being an upper secondary specialist teaching students who have just left primary school, but I just don’t believe in giving out free time as a reward. I already feel like I’m fighting the clock to teach these kids as much as possible in a year. I firmly believe that my role is as a highly trained educator, not a baby-sitter. However, I wouldn’t mind hearing from anyone who has a difference stance, who could explain why they think free time is a good idea.

You should be organised. Yep. I’m not always the most organised at the start of a lesson, and once I enter the room (I don’t have my own classroom) it can take a little bit to get set up. But I’ve been trying to improve on that this term, doing little things to make the start of each lesson go more smoothly.

Stop

Work out of the books. I’m not a fan of using the textbook, so I’m not sure where they get this from. We do use our textbooks sometimes, if I think the questions are good, but I prefer to find something else. But it’s a reminder that even when you try and minimise the use of the textbook, kids still don’t like the textbook.

Homework. ??? I’m really confused by this one. I’ve hardly given out homework this year. In fact, I’ve had multiple students complain that I don’t give them enough homework. #icannotwin

Keep

Being nice 🙂 Awwwww….

Laptop involved lessons. I love having one-to-one laptops at my school. (I’m not such a fan of kids breaking laptops, losing chargers, leaving their laptops at home, etc.) I’m hoping that kids aren’t just saying this because they like their laptops, but because they are actually enjoying and understanding the interactive activities that we’re doing. This is the first time I’ve gotten to use something like Desmos with kids from the start of secondary school, so I’m hoping their familiarity with it will be good preparation for their years ahead.

The counting warning thing. I count by fives quietly when my class won’t give me their attention. Funnily enough, I got negative feedback about this from Year 9. I guess some kids really do appreciate that kind of explicit direction about my expectations.

Things on whiteboards. I assume they mean the mini whiteboards? I love using these. Fortunately, my students’ textbooks come with a whiteboard in the back cover. Unfortunately, a large portion of them have lost it, and I can rarely locate the set that floats around the school. In the future, I need a more permanent solution, such as a set that stays with me, so I can use them whenever I want.

Change

Most of these were either covered in earlier questions, or were things that I can’t or won’t change. But there was…

Talking pace, because you talk really fast. This one surprised me. I thought I had a pretty good talking pace. But I need to remember that I need to accommodate every student in my class. So if even on student isn’t hearing what I’m saying because I’m talking too fast for them, I need to consider slowing my pace.

Near the start of Term 3, I gathered feedback from some of my classes about what they think of the job I do as a teacher. My plan was to write reflections about it shortly afterwards, but this got pushed back as other things got busy. With a week to go in the term, it’s about time that I do this. This is the feedback I got from Year 9. Hopefully I’ll get to Year 7 soon. I never took feedback from Year 10, because I had only just taken over the class in the middle of the year, but I plan to to this with them early next term.

Just like other times I’ve gathered feedback, I used the Start, Stop, Keep, Change format, and since our students have one-to-one laptops, it was easy to create a simple Google form.

I’ll go through each section one at time, and address each comment as I go.

Start

Sending students out when they are being naughty or rude. This is a tricky one. I’ve always been averse to sending students out of class because their best chance to learn is in class. But I also realise that it’s unfair on the other students if they are being disrupted from their learning.

This has been a challenging year for me in this respect. Trying to get this balance right takes continual work. What I need to always remind myself is that my aim is to give every student of mine every opportunity to learn and to do the right things that I can.

Making stuff easier. No. Sorry, but my job isn’t to make things easy for my students. My job is to get them to learn, and I believe that getting them to work and think hard is the best way to do that. I could be reading this wrong, but it sometimes seems that when students say “this is too hard”, what they really mean is “I don’t want to think for myself”. That’s not always the case, and I need to plan tasks very carefully so they are accessible to students. But, you know, growth mindset and all that.

More puzzles like the kangaroo one. As in this puzzle. I’m not sure why this is under ‘start’, because evidently I already do this. But could I do more of this? Absolutely. These are definitely my favourite lessons, and I want to include these sort of problems as much as I can. Really, I think this comes down to preparing my lessons and units further in advance, so I can be thinking more about lessons like this. I know that I’m not always the best at forward planning, so I need to come up with strategies to improve this.

Stop

Stop stopping for the tools who don’t want to listen, pay attention to those that are giving you theirs. Dealing with students who choose not to listen is always a challenge. I really don’t think ignoring them is the solution. I don’t like speaking over the top of students, and I don’t think I should have to. I know I need to always be looking for better strategies to deal with these kids.

Stop counting when you want us to be quiet and just yell at us like a normal teacher. One of those strategies I use is counting quietly by fives when students are too loud. I’m sorry, but I use that strategy because it works. Well, sometimes it works. If the class wants me to stop doing it, they should stop talking quicker.

Stop talking in smart person language. Do I use mathematical language a lot in class? Well, yes. I want my students to learn the appropriate terminology, so I believe I should be using that terminology. Could I make that language more accessible? Maybe. Now that I think about it, I may sometimes make the false assumption that students remember the terms they’ve learnt previously. Maybe one strategy could be to define prior terms at the start of each unit, and use a standard format so students recognise that’s what I’m doing.

Keep

Keep that Sir Carter actually helps you work it out instead of yelling at you to have it finished. I’m going to ignore the “Sir Carter” bit, I don’t know what that’s about. I think I do a pretty good job at moving around the class helping students. One thing I keep working on is identifying what that minimum amount of help I can give a student, so they can do the maximum amount of thinking themselves.

Keep making it interesting. I’ll definitely keep trying!

Change

Less book work and worksheets, more hands on activities. I agree. Completely. I think this comes back to the whole issue of being organised that I mentioned earlier. Often the issue for me isn’t that I don’t want to do a hands on activity, rather I haven’t managed to find or create an activity for the lesson that I have in mind.

There are a lot of comments I’m leaving out here. There were a lot of silly ones (that can wait for another blog post). But there were a lot of lovely comments about me doing a good job, particularly all the ones who said I should change “nothing”. It’s really nice to get positive feedback from students sometimes. But I also realise that what I’m actually after are the comments that lead to a change in my teaching practice. I want to come back to this post at some point, maybe over the upcoming break, and explore specific strategies I can use to improve my teaching practice.

Today’s lesson with Year 7 looked at front, side and top perspective drawings of 3D shapes. The moment of inspiration hit me when I woke up this morning (which is an improvement over the more common 10 minutes before the lesson starts), but I decided I wanted students to create their own perspective drawings using their imaginations, then turn them into 3D themselves.

This is a lesson in three parts:

Task 1: Warm-up practice

I expected that my students had seen drawings like this before, but I was unsure how confident they would be. So, I gave each pair of students an arrangement of blocks to draw from the three perspectives.

Block shapes for practicing 3D perspective drawing with year 7. #teach180 pic.twitter.com/akH7dDy5bA

— Shaun Carter (@theshauncarter) September 7, 2015

I had one colleague comment in the morning that it was nice to see me playing with my toy blocks…

Happily, they found this pretty straight forward. Some students finished quickly, so I had them swap their block with another pair so they could draw another object.

Task 2: Drawing perspectives

I asked students to imagine their own 3D object made from cubes, then draw front, side and top perspectives of it. To give them an idea of the type of object they could create, I showed them this image:

That is a green car I created very quickly this morning before school. Not, as some students claimed, two trees next to each other…

It was interesting to see the way different students approached this. Some immediately had a creative idea, and were very carefully plotting out squares on their grid paper. Others got more excited about drawing the picture they wanted, but didn’t worry so much about making sure their shapes stayed within the grid pattern. And still others just wanted to finish the task and thought a square would be good enough.

Task 3: Creating 3D shapes

This morning I looked for a website that I students could use to create their shapes easily. After trying a few sites, I found Voxel Builder.

My idea was that I wouldn’t have to tell students if their perspective drawings were correct. They should be able to move their own 3D model to the different perspectives and see if they matched what they had drawn. If they didn’t, then something needs to be fixed with either the drawings or the model, or both.

I haven’t had much chance to explore Voxel Builder, but it seems to have some pretty neat features, including exporting to 3D printers, printing 2D templates for 3D paper models, and animation.

I had my kids export images of their creations. Here are some of them: