Back to School

Well, it's official. I got the first letter from school today, telling me that we have our first official day on Friday, August 22. Just two and a half short weeks, and I'm back at it. Though I didn't get nearly enough done this summer, I am, as always, looking forward to it. I have two classes of sophomores and two classes of seniors, as I have for the last few years, but this time I don't have to change rooms at all. Normally, we have such a space issue that people generally get to teach 3 classes in one room, and 1 in a different room (4 classes is a full load at my school, and due to the rotating schedule, there is only one day a week that we actually teach all 4, and yet some people still bitch about how tough it is - there is only one word for this and that is spoiled). In all the time I have been there, I have had 2 in one room and 2 in another, which means I don't actually have a room of my own. In the last couple of years, however, there is one teacher in particular who has been generous enough to let me have equal access to the room that he teaches all 4 of his classes in, and he views that the room is both of ours equally (needless to say, he is a really cool coworker, and I get along with him great - he has been involved at the school as a football coach, math teacher, stage manager, and various other things for more than 25 years now). This year, however, he set it up so that I have 4 in that room, and he has 2 (with one in another room - he's going to be running a bunch of stats for the school this year, so they lowered his teaching load).

Anyway, it should be fun not having to run from room to room, and I just rearranged the desks today to set up things a little bit differently than last year - the set up was a bit problematic for the both of us last year, we had the desks in clusters, and seniors found it too easy to drift off and not pay attention to the tasks at hand. So this year, I have reverted to rows, but with the rows set up with desks right next to each other in pairs for ease of working on paired activities - say if I lecture on a topic for ten minutes and give them a problem, I want them to talk it out with a partner and then write up the answer, this arrangement should work quite well. I have used it before, and I can easily train the students to form groups of 4 quickly, so group activities work, too, and all they have to do is scoot the desk a few inches to the right or left to be able to work individually. Anyway, once school starts my posts will probably be fewer and further between, but we'll see what we can manage.

Remember, Math = # 0.5 times (the integral from zero to pi of sine x dx) ...

That's "Math is Number One" to the rest of you