Ms. Hatley’s Middle School Math Blog

Student certificates were added to the Math Mach 12 (http://www.thatmathsite.com/mach_12/mach_12.shtml) portion of the website yesterday.  These certificates can be printed freely to give to students as recognition for completion of

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I enjoy reading the educational magazine Edutopia.  The magazine is FREE (you can subscribe at http://www.edutopia.org/), and it includes many articles that I have found to be interesting and/or helpful.  I viewed the most recent issue online rather than have it mailed in a traditional magazine form, and it was great.  I printed out an article to share with my colleagues, and I printed a list of books that I thought might be good for student reading opportunities.

*Sigh*  Seven.  The number of meetings our grade level had about our retention list.  The list that was eventually cut in half.

Teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, and academic facilitators were all given an opportunity to express their views on retention and promotion, in general and regarding specific students.  The views were quite diverse, and, of course, most were very passionate about their position.

In one corner: If a student fails any core course (math, science, social studies, or English), the student should be retained. 

In the opposite corner: Retention should be avoided in almost (if not every) case. 

Most of the people in the meetings fell somewhere in between.

In the end, everyone ends up compromising a little.  Some end up compromising a lot.  But everyone knows that the same heated passionate discussions will take place next year, not just among us but also among the teachers who get the students that we promoted unprepared.

With the end of the year (and testing, of course) fast approaching, I’ve done tons of planning to try to prepare my students for state testing.  They’ve taken a practice test that helps me analyze their strengths and weaknesses, and we’ll soon begin the process of reteaching the topics that they struggle with the most.

This time of year always makes me think more about what I teach well and what I could teach better.  In discussing this with other math teachers, it always amazes me at how different we are.  For example, I feel that I have a lot of room for improvement in teaching surface area.  I have tried all types of activities, including having my students find surface area by bringing in paper shapes and rulers for students to actually find surface area by measuring and cutting a shape apart.  However, my students still seem to struggle with surface area problems.  One of my colleagues, however, feels that surface area is one of the topics that she teaches the best, and I have observed her students working surface area problems with a great deal of success.

Sometimes we discuss the idea of “team teaching,” where perhaps we “trade” students occasionally so that they are exposed to the same information presented in different ways.  However, we haven’t really worked out the logistics of this very well.  I would love to hear ideas from other teachers about how to make this work.

Well, good, bad, or ugly, I’ve finished my portfolio for National Board certification.  I learned so much from having completed this process.  November seems like such a long time from now to find out whether I passed or not.  There is so much that I would like to share about the experience, but, quite frankly, I’m not sure how much am I allowed to discuss.  I will say, however, that I think having gone through this process will help me be a better teacher in the future.  It really taught me so much about ways that I can improve my teaching.