I was a math tutor and technology director for a small tutoring company in the states, trying unsuccessfully to get into international teaching, and considering different career paths. Out of the blue, I stumbled into a last-minute position teaching math in a start-up school in China, and I've been here ever since.
The last 3+ years have been incredibly challenging, engaging, frustrating, eye-opening. I was teaching in a classroom for the first time since my student teaching 8 years before; I was the only math teacher for grades 6 and up; I was teaching in a brand new school with no defined curriculum; I was teaching mostly English language learners; I was learning about standards-based assessment, grading, and reporting (which I'd never even heard about before); I was learning about the IB program for the first time.
Needless to say, the last few years have been pretty busy, but here's a little bit about where I am now:
- I'm teaching math to students in grades 7-11: Math 7, Integrated Math 1-3, IB HL/SL year 1. This year, I'm back to teaching in sequence; in the previous two years, one of the classes has been covered by the other math teacher. I like this, because I've been building our curriculum since we started, and it finally feels like it's coming together.
- I'm kind of steeped in the CCSSM from the experience of putting together this curriculum. I use resources from Engage New York, the Mathematics Vision Project, Illustrative Mathematics, New Jersey Center for Teaching and Learning, Dan Meyer and crew, etc.
- The vast majority of my professional development time and energy over the last few years has been in the area of EAL instruction, and this summer I completed coursework for a certificate in EAL instruction in the mainstream classroom. For math instruction, this means I spend a great deal of effort teaching math as a language and the language of math.
- I've also been spending a great deal of time preparing to teach IB mathematics. I'm currently teaching my first cohort in their first year; my class is standard and higher level math combined.
- Technology is extremely important to my instruction. Our school has a 1-1 laptop program, and I've been working on utilizing this resource effectively since the beginning.
It's actually the last point that inspired me to start this blog up again. A couple of months ago I learned about Desmos classroom at a weekend workshop. This led me to start playing around with the idea of a paperless classroom, which I just hadn't been able to pull off yet. In the course of this exploration, I stumbled across GeoGebra groups, and felt like I'd found the answer.
For the past month, I've been teaching a majority of my classes through GGB groups, with consistent use of Desmos classroom activities, and it's really changed how I feel about designing learning activities and teaching in general. I'll get into more of that later; for now, I just wanted to get this post out to separate what comes after it from what comes before, and to give anyone who reads future posts a little context. I'm expecting future posts to focus on this journey into paperless instruction, but who knows? Something in me just feels like recording and sharing right now.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned!
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned!
