required mcpost: doing things differently

second in a straight-to-VHS series of assigned blogs i had to do last month. all hail mr. guest and his 400 word minimum.

it's great to sit around in jackson and just pick away at little things: reading, resting, Jim Hill preparation, Jake n' Dave pipe dreams, getting back in shape, margaret, etc . often i look at a clock and hours have when by for which i cannot assign the completion of one thing, though through which i can account for many small improvements. this is a luxury not afforded to you when you're completely surrounded by deadlines and external responsibilities.

as for the second on that list - Jim Hill preparation - there is indeed a significant amount of things i'm going to do "differently" - both as modifications of past errors and new stabs in the dark (hopefully with a more educated hand).

setting the foundation for the culture of a classroom is invaluable, and - as i'm approaching the start of a second year - that is what i'm primarily going to focus on. i've got to be able to get out of the blocks smoothly and transition into a convincing pace if i'm going to get anything accomplished.

last year i spent i'd say two weeks completely treading water - which seemed an understandable response to supreme acclimitization in terms of: actually being alone in a classroom with 20-something kids, having schedules change daily, complete uncertainty at to when textbooks would arrive, etc. i remember days going by where all i did was go over pre-tests question by question - just sort of filling time so that i could get a bearing on what the hell was going on.

all that will - of course - not be necessary this time around. i've fine-tuned my ability to find out approximately where students are in terms of content knowledge, and have learned to throw expectations out the window until i've been with a group for a significant amount of time. as for pre-tests, i'm sure that i will provide one, but i'm not sure where it's going to come from or how long it should be. i primarily want to test the kids in proficiency in those areas that i experienced as weak-points for my students last year, and which serve as the most necessary prerequisites for the initial objectives in my curriculum. getting a broad pictue seems trivial at this point, because the appropriate reference point for that broadness still eludes me. i'm sure a broad pre-test would be good for data-heads, but i don't think i have a clear enough fluency in the curricula i've been assigned to teach to warrant any personal value for the god-send of data (data is especially useless when there isn't a fixed start or end to my curricula - and i don't want there to be - so pre-testing them on things i'm not going to post-test them on is ludicrous).

as for running up against the crippling uncertainty of textbooks and students schedules, i think i'm going to spend the first couple weeks in all of my classes throwing content more or less out the window and structuring activities that confront students with the essense of thinking mathematically, so that i can try and prompt an abstract familiarity with the performance of mathematical reasoning (which is a highly ubiquitous and transferrable act) in an effort to prime the digestion of a review of prerequisite topics as well as a thrust into "new" material. because, if i can strip away everything but the mere act of being mathematical, than this will be an invaluable preface to any content that i eventually segue into. at the end of the day, i'd rather them perform citicism than be able to define it.

as to what these wonderfully theoretical activities will be, one of my glacially accumulating tasks this month is to define a few of them and develop materials. right now i'm buzzing on the concept of moving from a reading of borges's "library of babel," to a discussion of story of "the tower of babel," to an exploration of the burning of the library at alexandria. this could all be punctuated with some simple abstract math meditations: "Is 7x8 the same as 8x7? Why? PROVE IT! Can you prove it? What does it mean to prove it? Can you prove it in more than one way?" the big focus would be on the humanness of math, whether it is created or discovered, whether or not it has a history, etc. crazy stuff like that.