Class Jobs

I have been taking Angela Watson's 40 hour teacher workweek course and I love it!  This month we are encouraged to consider jobs that students can do to take some pressure off of us - this is a weird idea for high school (for me and perhaps some of you), but I'd sure like to try it!

I have some ideas floating in the back of my head, but I'm not sure I have things quite right yet.  I am looking for suggestions in order to really finalize in preparation for the year.  Not that I won't change it once we get started, but just that I have a solid starting place.

Background:  I will be doing this for 9th grade algebra.  My enrollment for each period tends to vary between 12 and 20 students.  I have 6 table groups set up and I use certain ones depending on home many students there are in the course.  I plan to rearrange student seats approx every 6 weeks, and would like to reassign jobs at the same time as that.

Anyway here are the jobs I'm thinking of:

IT Support (1-2 per class):  These students would be the go-to people when other students are having trouble with Delta Math, google classroom, or desmos.  If they can't solve it, they will come to me, but hopefully a lot of problems could be resolved this way.  They could also help subs run my technology when I am absent!

Clean up Captains (2 per class):  These students' job would be to look around the classroom during those last 2 minutes and ensure everything is in its place.  That the supply caddies are organizes (with no trash), trash is picked up off the floor, and notebooks/calculators are put away.  When necessary, these students would be last out in order to take care of any areas that are not cleaned up thoroughly.

Teacher's Helper (1 per class):  This student would be available to run errands for me, pass out papers, help with attendance, and change the date (only the person at the end of the day would do this)

Table Captains (1 per table):  These students would help turn in papers, collect work and follow up with absent students, help with putting away supplies, and have a table specific job based on the location of the table group.  I'm not sure if this will make sense, but I'm going to share those specific jobs.  Table 1 is lights/door, tables 2 and 3 are board cleaners, table 4 would be in charge of the phone, tables 5 and 6 would be in charge of the blinds.

Now, here's my concern.  This is jobs for more than half the students, but not all of them.  So is that appropriate for high school?  Is it likely I will have enough interest?  Should I try to pare it down?  Ideas for changes/modifications?

Thanks for any feedback here or on twitter (@kathrynfreed)!

-Kathryn

Unit Conversions Piece

Before #TMC16, I had asked for some help with lesson ideas for unit conversions.  Anna Vance (@typeamathland), replied with this introduction that she has used

I was thinking this is pretty awesome!  How can I make it better?  How can I use it to create a cohesive lesson on unit conversions.  I got another good idea from Gregory Taylor (@mathtans) that I would like to incorporate as well:

At TMC, I got to talking a little more with Anna, and we had BOTH been trying to find a way to make the conversions a little more manipulative for students.  I was still thinking numbers, but Anna thought shapes!  And the beauty of shapes is that I can choose ones with symmetry, so that each fraction could be turned either way!!!  This to me was the awesome part.

So with a lot of trial and a little error, I created some cards that can be used to intro how dimensional analysis needs to be set up to cancel one thing and leave another.  Here are the "conversion factors"

There are 6 of them, but they could all be flipped the other way, making 12 possible options for students to choose from.  I also made cards to be the start and end of the conversion.  Nothing too exciting to see here:

Then I played around to make sure I had enough of everything, but not too much.  And I think I do.  I like that sometimes there is only one solution, and sometimes there are three.  At this point my plan for this activity would be to show the start and end I would like on my document camera and have students work in pairs.  Then if they find a solution I will prompt, "Can you find another?"  Sometimes they will be able to and sometimes not.  Hopefully some students will be able to justify why they can or cannot find another solution.  

I played around a lot with it and I don't want to put all the pictures here, because I tried to find all the solutions, but here are a few:

Start with a square and end with a hexadecagon has at least two solutions, but start with a octagon and end with a rhombus only has one.

Obviously this is not an entire lesson, so I still have some more planning to do, but I like what I've got so far and I think it will give my students some good playing and thinking about math opportunities.  I am trying to collaborate with the science teacher on this standard, so I've got a lot to do before I can be all the done thinking about it.

I have some other notes on what the rest of the lesson might be like, but really this next part is for me, so skip to the comments and throw questions or concerns up there.  I'll post links to the docs at the bottom too!

Notes for Me:

• Me:  Shape manipulatives
• Science:  Number manipulatives
• Think Input/Output (where input/output have the same value/amount/quantity)
• Me:  discuss conversion factors need to have a value of 1
• What can we multiply by without changing the value of the input?
• Science:  look up conversion rates
• Me:  notes
• Science:  guided practice
• Mistakes?  Video?  Student created mistakes?
• Should we make an assignment menu?  Due for both classes?  Revision encouraged throughout?
• I want students to journal after doing the shape manipulating! Need a good prompt.
• Introduce new shape.  Create one conversion factor that will allow you to convert this shape to any other shape in your set.  How do you know this works?  Maybe it doesn't, but you're close.  How do you know it doesn't work?

Here are the documents:

Conversion Factors WORD

Conversion Factors PDF

Start End WORD

Start End PDF

Let me know what you think!

-Kathryn

#alg1chat Master Topic List

I wanted to share tonight the Master Topic List we began creating for #alg1chat.  If there is something you are required to teach in your Algebra 1 class that you feel is not included on this document, please add it!  It's very disorganized right now, but we'll get it organized at some point :)

Master Topic List

-Kathryn

#MTBoS30
13/30