Gargantuan Classes, Classroom Structure with Zombies, and Team Building

Well, I survived the first day! Woo!

I got to the school at 7 AM. Greg and Nate were chatting in the classroom when I got in, and at that point, I learned that something terrible had happened to the math department over break. One of the teachers had quit. This is something that I haven't seen in the middle of school year before, so I was interested to hear how the school was handling it.

The answer? Not well. When this teacher left, they decided that the best idea was to dissolve his classes into the other existing classes. The result is several classes now having 40-55 students. This includes Nate's Algebra II class, which is currently sitting at a cozy 44 students. Luckily, there are approximately one billion teachers in that room (only one of which is technically allowed to teach the class independently). Mike, the RTI resource teacher that hangs out in 5th period and teaches 6th, is now a part of 7th period Algebra II as well, to provide additional support with the outrageous class sizes. Additionally, I'm there, and because she has planning during that period (and nothing to plan for), Hannah's going to be joining us for now.

But back to the start of the day. Nate has planning 1st and 2nd period, so arriving at the school at 7, I had roughly 3 hours of not really having much to do. So I got some silly little tasks to work on. The first of these was setting up the new cards for the groups.

In order to allow for a nice way of randomly calling on people and assigning roles for group work, Nate has playing cards taped to the desks. Each group shares a number, and then each member of the group has a different suit. Being playing cards, these were violently destroyed over the course of the fall semester, and he brought in a new set of cards to tape to the desks. These cards made me unreasonably happy, because each one has a tip for surviving the zombie apocalypse.

Brainnnsssss

After all of this was done, the time came to put together the supplies for the activity of the day. All of the classes were doing the same activity to ease back into the semester. No math the first day back, just practice with group work, and as any of you that are in SMEP with me will attest, this activity had a very Dr. P. flavor about it.

The activity is a simple one to describe. There is an arrangement of colored tiles that I created during the planning period. This is hidden on a mini-fridge behind Nate's desk. Within each group, there are four roles: the diamond is President, the spade is Vice President, and the club and heart are Builders (in groups with only three members, there is no Vice President). The President is the only one allowed to actually look at the arrangement of tiles. The President and Vice President are allowed to whisper to each other without the Builders hearing. The Builders are allowed to ask yes/no questions to the Vice President. The goal is for the Builders to recreate the arrangement of tiles using the limited amount of information they have. This activity was constructed at the last minute, and had not been tested on a group of students before. For all we knew, the entire thing was impossible and disastrous.

Before I get into how this activity played out, I must share my "artwork." The first thing I came up with looked suspiciously like a Chandelure, though some may disagree.

As much fun as I had making that one look fairly nice, we decided it was way too complicated for students to figure out in the limited amount of time with restricted communication, largely due to the boundaries between individual pieces being unclear. Therefore, it got scrapped and replaced with another design, which looks like nothing, but did the job well enough.

It's abstract. Or something.

As the first class began working, we immediately feared that this shape too would be too difficult. I began preparing a simpler one (more symmetry, fewer pieces used), when something amazing happened in the last 10 minutes of class. The groups almost all independently figured out how to communicate about the shapes with yes/no questions, and several groups were able to recreate the shape. This managed to happen, without fail, in 3/4 classes. Given that the one class that didn't get there was the 44 student class that was struggling with time management, I'd call that a success.

This more or less covers what happened in the classes. The RTI class had an additional activity led by Mike that was built around a modeling problem of sorts, which Hannah came by to partake in working with the class for, but there's not really much that I have to say on it. Lunch was exciting, because the math department at this school is decidedly awesome, and each and every one of the teachers in there was interesting to listen to the ideas of. I think that we stand to learn a great deal from them, and I hope to get a chance to bounce around and observe the rest of them at least once during planning periods in the next few weeks.

Anyway, that's about it for today. Tomorrow, the math begins. 1 day down, 84 to go.