Getting started is hard to do!

I thought I was going to be able to write more for Blaugust, but instead, I seem to be even worse off than before!

Last week, I spent two days at the district office working with the new math teacher from the other school in our district.  That's right, we only have two high school math teachers in our district. We are approximately 70 miles apart, so common planning is kind of a pipe dream. Still, we have new curriculum for this year--we will be using Eureka Math--so we needed to get together and begin thrashing our way through the modules. We managed to work our way through most of Module 1 for Algebra 1 through Pre-calculus. We have a lot of work ahead of us for the year. Even with the chance to plan, I can pretty much guarantee that the other teacher and I are not going to be teaching the material in the same way simply because he is a first year teacher and I have 20+ years under my belt.

I'm not really going to comment on the Eureka Math until I have been using it consistently for awhile. I used some of the lessons last year, but haven't used it day in and day out. One of the goals I have is to integrate the 5 Practices into my classroom more fully this year. I am finding that there are some good problems within the curriculum that I can expand on to orchestrate higher quality classroom discussion, but I am still thinking I may have to supplement from other sources. We'll see... I also plan to continue with the warm-ups from wodb, visual patterns, number talks, graphing stories, etc... Finally, I plan to keep rocking the Desmos-verse. I am blown away by the new card sorts--I will definitely be figuring out how to have students model, explain, analyze and synthesize what they are learning using Desmos.

I have also learned that our new teacher is a somewhat proficient Scratch programmer and has spent a lot of time on Geogebra.  I am hoping to use him as a resource to help me get into both of those programs. I would love to incorporate Geogebra into my geometry class, but I've never even used it! We used to have Geometer's Sketchpad here, but haven't used it since we went to the Macs.

I am still completely overwhelmed by the amount of work I need to do to be ready for students next week.  I'm working on a first day presentation inspired by Robert Kaplinsky and Kaneka Turner's excellent ShadowCon talks this year. I'm really hoping to make the math classroom a more inviting place for my students this year.