reading around the math blogosphere!

I loved the MS Sunday Funday challenge this week.  I clicked and read as often as I could!  While I can’t use all the ideas I saw, I loved the instant “professional development” as math bloggers wrote about their challenges, trials, and crazy fun ideas!

I read with interest about the science and math journal at samjshah’s blog, Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere.  This year I am in a new position, just keeping my head above water.  But in previous years, I sponsored a writing club.  (Before that, a math club).  I love the idea of creating a magazine of science and math articles!  So I kept reading … and found myself at St. Ann’s Peer Points!   A “Shout-Out” to Phineas A , 7th Grade w / Paul Salomon … loved his confession, “Back in sixth grade I was shown a math problem in my math class.  It was originally assigned as homework but it intrigued me.  I became obsessed with it and worked on it for hours outside of school.”  How cool is that!  I don’t know how much writing I’ll do or that I’ll have time to inspire this year … but I hope to have the opportunity to lead students in creating a math magazine!  I'll definitely check back in to read Peer Points!

Later in the week, I stumbled on to crazedmummy!  I love the by-line … “assigning blame in high school math!”  This week I had a melt-down.  It was the day that the math coach came to our team meeting … and instead of coaching she read us the riot act for our failure list at the end of the marking period.  (Well, actually, she did not read us the riot act … she suggested strategies we had already been trying as if we had not been trying the obvious!)  I know she was reacting to the pressure put on her.  I know she knows we have been working as hard as we can to teach, remediate, reteach, retest!  It felt like the perfect time to assign blame!  So reading crazedmummy’s hilarious posts helped to bring some perspective.  I felt my shoulders relax as I thought to myself, “I blame the system that expects perfection even in the first six weeks!”

I could go on … and on and on!  So just one more … I loved Julie’s idea of “pimping the math worksheets!”  I’m not good at organizing stations.  It’s not that I don’t love stations … it’s just that the front –end work is huge.  Julie makes it look easy.  But I didn’t stop reading there … I even read the comments!  And that’s where I met CarolH … who shared the work from her district … and voila!  She shared the file of resources of 12 years of work!  I haven’t read through the whole file yet, but I found a graphic organizer for Linear Functions (Linear Web) that I’ll use right away!  You might want to check out the University of Massachusetts Regional Science Resource Center website:
http://www.umassmed.edu/MathGraphicOrganizers.aspx.

It was a great week in the blogging world!