Wow. What a year. It is over.
Thank goodness.
I already miss my students, all 230 of them. (Did I mention it was a tough year?)
Summertime should mean relaxing and recovering.
That idea lasted about a week. I don’t sit still well. Except when I want to read a book or the huge backload of blogs. I have a huge stack of books and more than 150 blogs to read, all so I can try to get better at my craft.
I also missed out on so much of the activity on the MTBoS. <sniff>
I’m trying to get my blog back on. Right now, I don’t feel like I have anything to say. But I have to start somewhere.
So, here’s my plan:
I have to find a way to be ready for freshmen. I also have to find a way to be ready for Geometry. I have not taught either of them in eight years. I love Geometry. I’d like to think I love freshmen. But I’ve had mainly seniors for three years, so it will be different.
I still have seniors in the form of AP and non-AP Statistics. I’m still working on teaching the AP-level at a level that will be passed it in higher numbers. I know where to look and who to ask for help on that one.
The Geometry?
I’m going to try to do Standards-Based Grading for the brand-new standards of Common Core. My school is changing into an Integrated Math format. This year’s freshmen who scored relatively higher on their last standardized tests get me. The truly Honors students get our Honors Geometry teacher. The “regular” people will get the first year ever of Math 1. We have no textbooks for them, only district-mandated RCD lessons written (partly) last year. All in all, I feel like I got the best part of this bargain.
But I don’t know what to do about sequence for Common Core Geometry. I get to do PBL, as much as I want. But I’m not sure which projects will be best.
Any suggestions?
mrsakahoshi 
Michelle
June 28, 2014
I’m not sure where you teach, but you describe exactly what is happening in my district. I sat on our math 1 (integrated math) writing team, so I have a great start on next years planning efforts. By no means is it complete! Our site team sat down with the geometry cc standards and began to weed out and simplify next years curriculums. Basically in the geometry class, ch 1-3 (we use holt) will be taught in the first 5 weeks of school, dropped nearly all of ch 2 (logical reasoning!). Because we need to add in geometric probability, laws of sines/cosines, and introduce right triangle trig as it relates to the unit circle (in degrees only)….. As of today, I’m not teaching it. (I’ve taught geometry over 30 times in the last 10) but master schedule can change the day before school starts.
mrsakahoshi
June 28, 2014
We don’t use Holt, but I have one to look through.
I will likely steal all your (and your group’s) hard work and try to wrap SBG through it while planning.
Thanks for sharing, and giving me a place to start looking in detail. 🙂
mrsakahoshi
February 16, 2015
Aren’t we all having fun with this? 🙂