Dan Schneider Hey folks – long time no see. I recently presented at my favorite math conference (the Mathematics Educator Apprecation Day conference) on an intersection between math and computer science, and I thought I’d write up the gist of the presentation I wrote up the whole thing I don’t know how to be brief. Sorry / not sorry – here we go: Some Background: A Tricky Math Standard There’s a Common Core Math standard that I find especially tricky: A1.F-LE.A.3: Observe, using graphs and tables, that a quantity increasing exponentially exceeds a quantity increasing linearly or quadratical ..read more

So here’s something new: I’m gonna try writing at a new blog for a while. It’s called Codey McCoderson because good jokes only get better with age. Here’s why: I’ve spent this last year mostly out of the classroom doing quasi-administratory-things as a Math Interventionist. I’ve managed our online credit recovery program, gathered & analyzed data, and created personal relationships with our intervention students to the point where our school has a pretty robust math credit recovery program for our students who fall behind or transfer students whose credits never made it with them ..read more

So this year I’ve been teaching a brand new class called AP Computer Science Principles – and, it looks like next year my entire teaching load will be computer science classes. And that’s awesome and exciting and totally up my alley. Let’s talk about all of that. What’s Up With AP Computer Science Principles? AP Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) is a brand new AP course intended as an introduction to different areas of computer science, most notably: the internet, programming, big data, and social issues in privacy and security. There are two things that make this course exciting for me: (1 ..read more

Hey #MTBoS – long time, no see. I wanted to stop in and share something kinda cool I did with my AP Computer Science Principles class (wait – what?) I’m teaching a brand new course this year, AP Computer Science Principles. I’ve mostly been following the curriculum provided by Code.org, which has been excellent – I dig their philosophy of providing open Creative Common licensed resources to benefit everyone, and I’m totally bought-in to their underlying principles of equity and ‘this is not just another coding class’. One of the big ideas of the course is Big Data – the idea that computer scie ..read more

I don’t really know what else to title this post, but I’m about to share a few adventures I’ve had in improving my programming skills to make some problem-generators that’ll make my life easier. This is less of a reflective post and more of a “look at this!” post. Our Algebra I curriculum starts the year by introducing students to a plethora of terminology to describe functions – linear, quadratic, increasing, maximum, continuous, discrete, etc. The curriculum then exposes students to a variety of graphs and asks them to classify them based on their properties. It then takes it a step further ..read more

Previously: ELL Math – 3 Weeks In In between then and now: We’ve talked about fraction operations to decent success, decimals to mixed success, comparing numbers & comparing fractions to great success, and translating between English and Numerals (ie: fifty two thousand five hundred and six = 52,506) to decent success I have a group of students that I’m trying to prepare for Algebra I next year, who’ve been exposed to: order of operations, simplifying expressions by combining like terms and with the distributive property, solving 1-step equations, and writing linear equations from a conte ..read more

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I have a pretty good relationship with the universities near my school – they tend to send pre-service teachers to check out my classes as part of their observation hours. This semester was no exception – I had a pre-service teacher come twice a week to watch my freshmen intervention classes. Whenever I have observers, I give them a notebook during class to write down any questions they have about something they see in class but don’t really have an opportunity to ask about. Why did I answer this student’s question a certain way? Why did I handle this interaction a certain way? Why is the clas ..read more

I’m still figuring lots of stuff out with my ELL mostly-refugee students and I’m loving that I get to process it all through this blog. Here’s what’s on my mind: Fractions We started going fractions, which has been going really well. My general classroom structure is to pick a topic for the week, go over it every day, then quiz on it on Friday. Last week was just representing fractions – things like writing a fraction given shaded pieces or given a point on a divided number line. I made these Geogebra programs to help me with the practice problems and to keep the visual theme going: Writing Fr ..read more

Artifacts We started Multiplication this week. I needed a quick way to determine if students knew their multiplication tables or not that segued quickly into me working with the students who had no concept of multiplication. I decided to give 3-minute Multiplication Fact quizzes all week – the students who knew their facts completed the quizzes quickly and bought in from the challenge of improving their scores and the competition of comparing their numbers with their peers. The students who needed me to teach them multiplication were clueless on the quiz, but since it only lasted 3 minutes, I ..read more