Student Reflections on my Class

So the students had to fill out this survey of questions to help the teachers to get  an idea of what to write about in the letters of recommendation. I found the surveys very helpful for some students. Other students did not understand the question or the point of the question. Some students were too vague or didn't give really good specifics.

However I wanted to share with you some of the comments students made about my class and my teaching. Reading some of these made me feel like I was doing something right in the classroom. These are responses to why calculus is their favorite class (I did not edit the students answer so that you can see what level of English my students have).

Student 1: Seriously, I am very interested in Calculus. The teacher is very good at teaching and always gives us a lot of examples to practice which improves our knowledge of Calculus a lot. Miss Lomax is very interesting and we can play little games in her class. I like the challenging questions the occurring in Calculus which let me always want to do my best in this subject.

Student 2: Calculus is very interesting and can be connected with other courses such as physics. Calculus always brings up several methods for one question. Some methods used to solve the questions are miraculous. The solving process provides the opportunity of thinking. The in-class group discussions and fellow cooperation are quite excellent.

I put a lot of emphasis on solving problems or explaining problems in different ways which is what I think student 2 is referring to. I make sure students who solve problems in a different or unique way share their method with the class. I make sure which discuss the methods and compare them as well.

this student also enjoys solving problems different ways as well

Student 3: When solving one difficult question , I will have a feeling of fulfillment. Also, I love the approaches to working Calculus are cool and fantastic.

Student 4: Because the knowledge of calculus are practical, which can be used in many spheres of our everyday life to solve some common but cumbersome problems. Also the calculus teacher is really skillful who can keep attracting students’ attentions in class.

Oh here is one of my favorites

Student 5: Mathematics has been my defect for my grades for more than 6 years. However, when I first turn to the calculus courses, I was awakened. I never thought that mathematic problems could be solved in such amazing and interesting way. I have no interests in Math simply because I was not able to find the applications in real world. Derivatives and Integral opened a new gate for me. I then fell in love with this charming course.

Student 6: Because our calculus teacher is very humorous and kind. She always explain my questions patiently before making sure I truly understand the knowledge point. Also, I think Calculus is very important for my college study and even useful for my future work.

These are just a few that I read and enjoyed. I will read through more of the surveys and add more student comments.

Update on Pre-Calculus Course

So the meeting was super informative and helpful this weekend. It gave me a really good idea about what to cover. We met with a retired Chinese math teacher who works for the publishing arm of our company. He went over how the Chinese math curriculum was organized and designed. This helped show the areas in which are students were strong and others in which they were weak. We went through our current textbook and looked over what section was needed for AP Calculus AB, AP Calculus BC, AP Statistics, SAT II subject tests, and the Chinese graduation exams. So I will focus on the topics they will need for the AP tests. The Chinese math teachers prepare them for the SAT II subject test and I have a feeling my students don't take the Chinese graduation exam.

We are still discussing which chapter is important prep for some of those classes, but I have a basic idea about where to start.

I will still be flipping the classroom and got the resources from the other teacher who is currently doing that. This will make it so I don't have to use the 90 minutes I see the students each week on lecture. I will use this series of pre-calculus videos to support my teaching. He does not have videos for every chapter so that may guide me in what I teach and what I don't.

I will start with chapter 4 which is over trig. The Chinese math curriculum focuses a lot on trig, but does not focus on all six trig functions. They do not spend much time with cotangent, cosecant, and secant. The students easily understand and pick up those functions, but they need to be discussed. The Chinese math curriculum also does not spend any time on inverse trig functions. So starting with the trig chapter will help ease them into the class so that some of the stuff they are seeing they understand and some is new. This chapter comes with notes to take as the students are watching the videos. However does not come with worksheets to do in class. I will have to pull problems from the book or elsewhere.

I will then move onto chapter 3 which is over exponential functions and logarithms. The Chinese curriculum does not talk about these functions a lot or rather uses different notation than we do for these functions. So I will spend some time on that. This chapter does not come with any handouts. I will have to make my own following his format. I may make a very simple one for these videos just to check that they watched it. Then have them hand those in and grade them pretty easily.

Now I may pick and chose what I do in the beginning chapters. I know students are really strong in those beginning chapters. I don't think it will hurt to go over earlier stuff just because a lot of them know the math, but don't know it in English. I will make sure to put emphasis on the early stuff in lots of different ways as well. The students need to understand everything graphically, algebraically, and numerically. So I will make sure to include a lesson based on this video.

My colleagues say that the students are really weak in statistics. The Chinese math system does not do much with probability and statistics. The students are also not asked to explain, describe, analyze, or justify their answer in the Chinese math system. So statistics is about doing just that analyzing and describing data. So I will include a stats unit. I am afraid to do it, but it will help me get over my fear of teaching statistics. My colleague at the meeting was really trying to encourage me and give me advice about how to advance my career. So I will include a unit on Chapter 9 which is an overview of stats and probability. This unit has worksheets and notes which will help immensely since I don't know much about stats. I am thinking of having the students design or complete an experiment. I think I will work with the 10th grade science teacher to see if we can take that on together.

Now that content will probably only take me a semester and maybe just a little bit over. I doubt I can stretch that into a year. I will look at what other chapters are suggested, but the problem is I won't have pre-made videos to use. I think it would be weird to switch back into a normal class and I don't want to make the videos. I will look around to see if there are other videos I can use or at least good power points I can use. The text book came with a set of power points to use. They look like pretty good ones with examples and things. So I can make the videos my self using those power points. It will probably not be as good as the other videos since I won't have the nice set up that he does and I will probably be making them must faster. But then I won't have to spend my time in class going through the power points and just focus on the students understanding of the concepts.

If I make it so that I have 6 or 7 groups that have to present then I can stretch this small part out. I want to keep the group size small and want to make one person from each group present. So I think I will still have it so first period students work in groups to solve a problem and then work on how to present the solution. I will have as many groups present in the second period. I will have a minimum of four groups present in a period. Then have 3 or 4 groups present the following week. Then have some time to review or ask questions. Then have a quiz over the content that was just presented on. We may not get through as much content, but it will help their English abilites and presentation abilities so much more.

I think each week I will give them a handout to fill out while watching the video. We may not talk about the content in the video each week, but that gets them working ahead. It allows them two weeks to watch the video, rewatch the video, and ask questions about the video.

So the break down of the class will look like this:

Final: 20%
Tests/Midterms: 20% (Tests every month)
Quizzes: 15% (One every other week)
Presentations: 15% (Each student will present every two months graded on these rubrics)
In-class: 15% (presentation exit slips, class dojo, any other activities)
Homework: 15% (filling out notes worksheet on video every week)

If you want more resources/information going to this post about my pre-calculus course or this post about my calculus course. 

Pre-Calculus Course

Grade breakdown:
Final: 20%
Tests/Midterms: 20% (Tests every month)
Quizzes: 15% (One every other week)
Presentations: 15% (Each student will present every two months)
In-class: 15% (presentation exit slips and class dojo)
Homework: 15% (taking notes on video every other week and short assignment from book the other week)

Alright so my bosses trust me and my knowledge of the system to teach pre-calculus. They don't want to give pre-calculus to the new teacher coming in because they don't really know what they are getting. This would allow the other teacher time to get their footing at the beginning of the year and teach classes that have a specific outline of topics given by the collegeboard. I will take this as a sign that my bosses think I am capable and trust that I will do a good job. So this is my idea for the class right now. I will get more specific and add more resources after I go to the mathematics company department meeting on Friday.

First off let me say that there will be three sections of Pre-calc and each section will meet once a week for 90 minutes. There should be about 24 or 25 students in each section of the class.

I am thinking of flipping the classroom and putting all the learning/teaching on them. I know a colleague of mine is doing this with the pre-calculus class here in China. I want to do it too and will talk to him about how he does when I see him at the math meeting on Friday.

My idea is that each week the students watch a video over content. Then they come to class and discuss it in small groups. My hope then is to assign a problem that they should know how to do after watching the video to each small group. Then have one person in each group present the problem to the class.

My plan is that the first 35 minutes to 40 minutes of class the students will be in groups of four discussing what they learned from the video and solving an assigned problem. They will also work on preparing a presentation for the class for the next period. I think I will make each group mixed ability as much as I can. I will try to make the problems fairly challenging so that even the smarter students have to work at it a little bit. I am not sure where I will pull the questions from. I might modify free response questions from the AP site or use AMC questions or problem of the week questions. I am worried I will be searching around forever for the questions though. I will also look in the textbook to see what questions I could use, but I find that those are usually not challenging enough. I will have to decide on what content I am teaching and which videos I will be using before deciding on questions. I will talk to the other teacher who flips the classroom about the videos he uses. Also at the meeting we will be discussing and writing the syllabus for pre-calculus. So I will do a lot more planning when I get back from Nanjing on Friday.

My idea is after the students have discussed and prepared then they will present in the second period of class. So I am thinking that there will be 8 groups of 3 or 7 groups of 3 with one group of 4. I will ask one student from each group to present. I am thinking that the presentations should be at least 5 minutes long so we can get through several in a period. If they go over 5 minutes I think I will just cut them off at 7 minutes. So we will try to get through as many as possible and the ones we don't get to will present the next week. The following week the remaining students will present.

I will have students fill in an exit slip during the presentations. My principal suggested I implement something like this to help keep students engaged during presentations. This will be collected at the end of each day that there are presentations and will be included in the in-class category. It will be their responsibility to turn it in at the end of the day and if they don't they will get a zero. I will read the exit slips and then use the answers to plan review on the days where only a few students are presenting. Then after my guided review I will give the students a quiz.

So that means that every other week the students will be getting guided review and a quiz. The quiz will be multiple choice and be very short. I am thinking only 5 questions.

I hope to have longer multiple choice exams periodically through out the year. I don't know when I will have them. I hope to have them every month or every two months. Hopefully get through three rounds of presentations, which will take six weeks, before giving a big exam. So big test in mid October and then the midterm a month later in mid November. Then have a test at the end of December and the final at the end of January. That means two tests, midterm, and final. So that means I will have two tests and a midterm in that category. The midterm will be worth more points in that category, but there will be three exam scores in the category. Which will make so each exam is around 7% of their grade. If I weight the midterm it will mean the midterm is 10% of their grade while the other tests are around 5% each. That will even out nicely. However it will be hard fitting in more content in between some of those tests. I might need to put new questions over old material on the tests to make them long enough. This will help show students improvement and make sure they are not forgetting anything.

I did the math and this means students will be presenting about every six weeks. I will ask for volunteers in the beginning, but then I will choose the students who will present to ensure everyone presents once before beginning their second presentation.

I will grade the students presentations on this rubric. It is the rubric I use with my calculus class I just took out the focus on the AP test.

General Rubric
Detailed Rubric

I wanted to grade the students notebooks in this class, but I think I will be able to do that better in Calculus since I see them more often. I will teach them how to take notes using the cornell or two column note taking system that I will expect them to use next year. I will have to model how to watch a video and take notes in this format. I will have them take notes on the video and take notes during class presentations following the two column format. I could periodically check that they are taking notes and include this as a homework grade. I could assign the video and expect that they take notes on the video following that format. Then when they will turn in their notebooks. I won't grade the notes as closely as I do with my calculus students. I will just check that they toke notes and hand them back.

Then to prepare them for the quiz that is coming I will assign 10 problems from the book that will be due the following week.

That means every other week I am either checking notebooks really fast or I am grading short assignments from the book. I will try to make the book assignments easy to grade so I can get them done really fast. I want to make this not add too much to the amount of grading I have to do. I want to focus on my calculus class more because the students and company put a lot of pressure on getting good results.

I will use class dojo with this class as well. I will use it more during that period where students are discussing the video and preparing the presentation. This are the criteria I will be using:

Positive:

Different solution method

Critical thinking

Questions

Helps others

Negative:

Unprepared

Speaking in Chinese

Off task

If the students use a unique solution method or solve the problem using multiple methods in their presentation I will give points to the group. I will have to listen to students discussion to catch their critical thinking. If the students ask questions during presentations then they will get points and if a discussion using critical thinking skills starts after a question has been asked I will give the appropriate student points. I will watch how the groups work together and give the points to those who help their group members. This will encourage the students to work together as a group and really collaborate. I will have to switch groups every two weeks so they work with different people.