Pi Day and Pie Day
Here’s how me and my students celebrated Pi day this year! Bingo, Pie, Math Team end-of-season party, and more.
AP Calculus Mock Exam time
In five week, students begin taking their AP exams! One of my favorite things our school does to get students ready is a full mock exam, which is a previously released practice exam from CollegeBoard. Here’s how it works at my school.
Trying Bingo + Open Middle for the win
Open Middle is a great website to find engaging, open-ended, critical thinking tasks for students, especially those who finish work early. Tomorrow I am trying out Bingo for the in my class FIRST time ever! Here’s my Bingo sheet.
Classroom Screen and Lo-Fi tunes
Today I incorporated two new-to-me things into my classroom: Lo-Fi music and Classroom Screen. I love them both!
Some u-sub stuff I love
I share some of my favorite activities and problem sets that I use with my students to help them master this important method of integration. YOU can do U-sub!
Future Desmos Fellows here!
This is a huge honor and big moment in my career as a teacher. I am truly so pumped to travel out West to attend this PD to become part of the Desmos Fellows program!
Building Cross-Sectional Volumes
My favorite way to help Calculus students visualize cross-sectional volumes is with PIPE CLEANERS!
How I Introduce Volumes of Revolution
In this post, I describe what the critical first day of volumes looks like in my classroom and how I use various techniques to help my student conceptually understand how to use calculus to find those volumes.
Happy Mathentine’s Day!
Normally for Valentine’s Day, I mark the occasion by posting a couple fun Valentine’s day and math related links for students to explore, but this year I found some cute and fun math Valentine’s Day cards (“Mathentines”) online and decided to use them as well.
Super Bowl Prediction Contest
I share a fun and easy-to-use prediction sheet to use with students to increase their interest in the game.
Officially Accepted as an AP Calculus Reader!
I am excited to say that this year I have been selected to be an AP Calculus reader and helps score the exams this summer. I never thought I’d be excited to grade, but this feels different thank you typical grading, and it will be excellent professional development.
My AP Calc Bonus FRQ Bin
Now that it’s mid-January, the AP exams are beginning to seem much closer! Here I describe how I create and use my beloved Free Response Question filing bin with my students.
That Feeling When You’re Finally Caught Up…
It has been a whirlwind of a school year so far, and I have finally dug myself out of the hole I created.
How I Make my Flipped Classroom Videos
I switched to a Flipped Classroom model when I began teaching AP Calculus in 2015 and realized that I would struggle to finish all the curriculum and leave room for practice in class with a traditional model. Here I explain my process from start to finish to create my own instructional videos.
Bring Back the Discontinued NCTM MT journal!
Reminiscing on the glorious “Mathematics Teacher,” NCTM’s discontinued monthly magazine dedicated to high school math teachers, as I browse through a box full of these magazines from 2009 - 2012.
MATHstodon Math Teacher Community
The MTBoS online math teacher community was flourishing around 2012, when the first Twitter Math Camp (TMC) was held. I missed out on this, but luckily, the community is reforming on a new platform!
Practice-informed Research
BIG QUESTION: Am I researcher? Is every current teacher a researcher?
For the first time in a few years, I signed up for a graduate-level education course through a local university. The class was called “Using Practice-Informed Research to Maximize Student Learning.”
AP Calculus Bootcamp💪
I spent my first full week of summer teaching my first AP Calculus bootcamp for rising seniors! This was a new program that I helped plan and organize, and I designed the curriculum for the week.
Making Visuals with Graphfree
I cannot believe that I have been teaching for 11 years and it wasn’t until this month that I found out about Graphfree, an incredible free website for teachers to make textbook quality, beautiful graphs.
LAST Day of School!
Summer is here! This is how I wrapped up my end of the year to help ensure a smooth start to school in two months.