TMC18

Last week I attended my second TMC. If you follow me on Twitter (@jprice444) then you probably noticed my tweeting spiked last week. The reason was because TMC stands for Twitter Math Camp. Yep- it's as awesome as it sounds! I blogged about my first experience about a month ago. This year's experience was even better and here are some reasons why.

1. There were so many first time attendees I felt like a veteran there, although it was only my second year attending. In my morning session, "Talk Less, Smile More" there were 30+ people in there and I would say at least 2/3 of them were first time attendees. It was nice knowing what to expect and it was also nice being able to help newbies figure things out. The morning session choice confused me last year. I thought I could pick a session for Thursday and then pick another session Friday and Saturday. For Friday, the schedule says "same as Thursday" so I thought that just meant to go back and look at the choice offerings and go to a different session. Nope, you pick one and you are locked in for 3 days. I met a few first timers at the registration Wednesday night that were under the same impression. I felt bad telling them that wasn't the case and they had to pick one morning session for all 3 days. They were appreciative though so they could look over the options again that night.

2. I picked really good sessions to attend. Not that there are bad sessions, they all seemed great. The ones I went to were all applicable and I came away with so many ideas for myself and my peers. My favorites were my morning session (@stoodle & @cluzniak) , Chris Shore's (@mathpojects) session on Clothesline Math Grows Up and Kent Haines' (@KentHaines) flex session on Exploding Dots. I wrote down some many notes, took so many pictures and wrote many reminders to myself about how to incorporate these session into my next school year.

3. I was able to attend the Desmos pre-conference this year. Last year I was on the wait list for TMC and once I found out I was "in", the Desmos conference was already full. This year I was able to attend and it was really informative. I loved Julie's (@jreulbach) and Bob's (@rawrdimus) Assessmos session. The new Snapshots feature that was unveiled is also amazing! Also, I'm a sucker for free things, so hooray for Desmos pencils and stickers!

4. This year I felt like part of TMC. This could be because it was my second go around, but I think it has more to do with the fact that it was in another city so I stayed in hotel with most of the other attendees. We rode the shuttle to the conference together each morning, went to sessions together, ate lunch together, sometime rode the shuttle back together, sometimes walked back over that long bridge together. Each day these were all done with different people (sometimes there were overlaps, but mostly new people each day). Don't get me wrong, for an introvert it was exhausting to be "on" all the time and make conversations with new people. Constantly. I wasn't sure if I'd be tapped out by day two, but I powered through and I had fun! I went to Happy Hour, the non-first timers dinner (we are tweeting in the pic below), Trivia night and some of game night. Being able do attend all these things made it feel more "campy" to me. I loved it!

5. I made more friends this year! A few of the Atlanta people I met last year where there again so it was nice catching up with them. I also meet a few new Atlanta people (ATL crew pic is below, missing 2 people though) and we hope to organize more Tweet Ups or something similar to stay in touch and share ideas. I also met two more vegan math teachers! I think there were 5 of us total. By my calculations, that's 2.5% of TMC. Woohoo!

I could write lots more, but I think I'll stop here. I loved everything about TMC18 and when it was over, I felt a little bummed.

Normally at this time of year I am sad my summer is almost over. Pre-planning starts next Monday. I can't wait to go back to work! Okay that's a lie. I will miss hanging out at the pool with my son. And not setting an alarm. Other that that though, I feel energized with ideas and I can't wait to start using them in my classroom. Thank you TMC18!

Summer Camp!

So in a previous post I mentioned how a 7th grade teacher decided to quit/retire a few months into the school year. The students in that class had more subs than I can remember. Needless to say, the parents of these students were not happy. I wouldn't have been either if my son was in that class.

If you don't remember, the students impacted by this craziness were actually some of the brightest students in the school. As seventh graders they were taking the same math my 8th graders were taking- Accelerated Algebra. So basically there were ninety 7th graders taking high school math. Since I was the lead teacher for that course, and the math coach for the school, I was the one that made sure those kids stayed on track.

As a way to ease parents' minds, my admin team decided to offer a week long summer camp for these kids to ensure they were in fact ready to move to the next course- Accelerated Geometry (2nd semester of geometry and all of Algebra II). They also decided to make this free for these students. The idea was for the ACC Geo teacher to hold this camp. Well, since it was free... 48 students signed up! That meant they needed backup and I was their person.

So last week I hit the pause button on my summer and taught these kids. To be honest, I wasn't real thrilled about doing this. I LOVE my summer off. However, the week was actually pretty great. My teammate and I got to pick what we wanted to teach for the whole week! When does that happen during the school year? Not often enough! Having taught ACC Geo this year, my teammate knew where the weaknesses were so that helped us determine topics. Once we had our list, we split them up. Another perk of the camp? It was only from 9am - noon each day. We each had a first period, then we took a snack break, then we switched classes. And other great thing about camp? Nothing was graded and the kids were engaged and wanted to do math during the summer. I know these are the top kids, but it makes we wonder, if something like this was offered for all students, how many would come? How many would take more risks if they weren't being graded? I think this is something that needs to be explored more.

One of the topics for the week were the different forms of quadratic functions. I almost love quadratics as much as I love summer. Okay, maybe not that much.  :  )

Here is one of my favorite activities for this topic. I sadly didn't have time to do this with my own classes this year. Having my camp kids do this task reminded me how good it is though and I'm going to make it a point to include it in my plans this year.

Basically students work with a partner to match graphs of quadratics with their equations. Some equations are all filled out, but most had students convert standard form to intercept form and/or vertex form. This is also a shameless plug for my session on FALs at TMC18. I'll give you more info then! (I'll try to post a better quality picture too.)