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Behavior

Counting Days

I totally stole this from NASA: (The black marbles are days to the CST – I hate how that’s become the focus of everything)

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2012 08 11 Comments Off

I’m Helping!

Had a discussion with another math teacher here the other day. We were both in favor of increased observations in our classrooms, both by administrators, and by other teachers. We both think that having more feedback would allow us to focus our efforts at growth. Where we differed was in how we’d like to have […]

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2010 01 25 Comments (1)

Side effects

I teach two remedial prealgebra classes. One of the biggest hangups for these kids is that they never learned their basic multiplication tables. It’s hard to develop any sort of number sense if you can’t even make a quick guess at how many Xs are here: X X X X X X X X X […]

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2010 01 22 Comments (8)

Patience

There’s a different lesson here than I expected. This Tuesday, I had one of my former students return to my classroom. He had gone off to a charter school, and lasted less than 3 months. The post was going to be a rant about charter schools being able to pick and choose their students, compared […]

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2010 01 22 Comments (1)

How much is your time in class worth?

I’ve had this discussion too often1: Mr K: Part of the purpose of school is to get you ready for a job. Student: But I don’t get paid for going to school. Now, supposedly we all know that going to school is important, and good for you, and will lead to success later in life. […]

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2009 01 19 Comments (5)

Mr. K’s Big Fail

I’ve spent the past 3 days in a training called Capturing Kids Hearts. As professional development goes, it was pretty good1. There are some areas of teaching I’m pretty good at, but that I think I could be really good at. This covered a lot of those. One thing I’m really bad at, though, may […]

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2008 11 21 Comments (4)

Understanding Learning

Dan talks about oblivious teachers, wondering whether awareness is learned, or inherent. I hope that I’m living proof that it can be learned. This year, I inherited a room that had a 3 foot hole kicked into the wall last year. When I cleaned it out, there were several dozen books that had wedged into […]

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2008 11 17 Comments (3)

An experiment I’m not ready to try

A bit of a livejournal post I ran by mentioned a teacher how put up a “Do not eat the kleenex” sign as a lark, and the inevitable result. If nothing else, it should make us very aware of the potential for a huge gap between our intent and effectiveness in developing our classroom environment, […]

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2008 09 29 Comments Off

Warm Up Question 3

What is the state with the most people per square mile? As a side note: This feature already paid off in spades. My 5th period is somewhat rowdy, and takes somewhere between 3-5 minutes to settle down and work, depending on the day. All of my other classes have pens moving on paper before the […]

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2008 09 18 Comments Off

The Chair

As I go through my classroom expectations, one of the them is that they leave my stuff alone. The stuff I’ve got in my room is stuff I need for teaching. A lot of it, I spent my own money on. If they mess with it, they’re not messing with the school, they mess with […]

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2008 09 08 Comments Off