Jeremy-Teaching

This video is of me teaching sixth graders about decimals to the 10ths and 100ths place. We just finished a unit on fractions. It went okay. We had a little confusion with a few students that I had to help individually later on, but most of the kids got it pretty well. Recording the video was easy, I just had my teacher push record and I have a Flip camera, so it was easy. It added a little bit of extra pressure, so I wasn't as comfortable as usual. The whole Vimeo process was easy, but I had a lot of trouble with the Flip software. I have used it before, but never to put online so I got a little lost and confused. The only problems I had were strictly based on my inexperience with the Flip software. Here is my video. Enjoy.

Untitled from Jeremiah Milliron on Vimeo.

Interview Q & A's

I interviewed my practicum teacher Brian Miller. He has been teaching for about fifteen years and his teaching philosophy is very inquiry based. He feels that students would rather learn through doing than by listening to him lecture all day and he has had a lot of success with this. His classes have far above average test scores compared to the rest of the school. Here is what he had to say about these questions. 1. How does the CMP curriculum align with the national Common Core and NCTM standards? The NCTM aligns pretty much exactly with the state standards because they come from the NCTM standards. They use the CMP textbooks and those cover all of the state standards (but they have to skip around to different grade level books sometimes to cover all of the state benchmarks), so he believes that they all align pretty closely 2. Numerous students are a year or more behind in the basics. How does one address the needs of these students on a daily basis so they can get up to grade level and also experience success in the inquiry to investigation philosophy of the CMP? Math lab is a class that is available to students who are struggling and it is offered in place of a normally required music class. Math lab is taken along with the standard 6th, 7th, or 8th grade math class and they focus on the aspects of math that these students are struggling with and going over concepts learned that day or in previous days of class. Students in math lab are recommended by teachers from the previous year or students who are not meeting the standards on the OAKS tests are usually required to take it. The school also offers before and after school tutorial that is available to all students. It takes place three mornings and three afternoons a week. 3. What is the role of homework (and accountability) in the CMP? The role of homework in the CMP is to make sure that students can do problems that we have done in class on their own. They also do extension problems that are basically extra credit, so it also shows you which students are willing to put in extra work. Students are rarely given time to work on homework in class, so it really does show you what students can do on their own (assuming they aren't working on it with friends or copying). 4. CMP Investigations compose of small-groups (pair-share, teamwork, cooperative learning).Describe several classroom management techniques that ensure all students are actively engaged. Eg, how are individual roles established? Accountability (Group, individual)? Ongoing assessment(s) and checking for understanding? Mr. Miller keeps students actively engaged in class by being energetic and funny. His students love him and they feed off his energy. He also is constantly walking around the classroom and checking on students to make sure they are staying on task and understanding everything. Students ask him and their peers for help when they are working on assignment and he feels that letting students work together is a good way to keep them having fun because they are interacting and not getting bored. He also offers a lot of one on one help for students who seem to be off task or copying answers and not doing the work. It lets those students know that he is watching them and he is usually able to stop those things before they become a problem.

Inquiry and CMP Research

The reasoning behind inquiry based learning is that when students are at the center of their learning, they become more involved and will learn more. Students learn based on their own curiosities, interests, and perspectives. Students are controlling where their learning is headed in a sense because their learning is more organic so the student feels like they are discovering and not being told what they are learning. This process makes learning more enjoyable for the student and helps them to have a greater sense of accomplishment in their learning. I feel that the CMP model is inquiry based because we use the CMP textbooks in the classroom that I am working in now and they are relatively inquiry based. A lot of the lessons are about discovery of concepts. My teacher I am working with is very inquiry based and he only does a small portion of lecturing each day (maybe 3 minutes( and the rest of the learning is done through assignments and activities. Most of his students are doing well and I believe he only has six students failing in all six of his classes. He even had a very impressive student discover a way to easily find a fraction in between two given fractions (add the numerators and denominators together and your resulting fraction will be between the two) that wasn't in the book and neither he or I had ever heard before.

Closure and Anticipatory Set

The closure section in a lesson plan provides context for the lesson and also reviews what the students have learned during the lesson. It is a good opportunity for the teacher to add insight to the knowledge the students have just received. In math specifically, I like it when I can relate what we have learned to what students may learn in the future. Students are more likely to remember things if there is a sense of importance to it, so it is good if you can give them a reason to remember what they have learned. Relating a lesson to a career path or a future class the student may take can make more of an impact in the mind of the student so they may be more likely to recall what they have learned. As boring as it is, even saying that the concept will come up on a final exam or something like that can do the trick. Anticipatory set is the introduction of your lesson to students that includes their motivation for learning. This is very similar to closure in a lesson, but it involves more background information for the student. In a sense it is the attention grabber for the lesson and gets the student interested, so it needs to be appealing to the crowd you are teaching. Obviously, sometimes learning is a touch sell for students so it is good to relate concepts they will learn to something they may be interested. Relate statistics lessons to sports or something like that is a good way to interest a younger group. http://k6educators.about.com/od/lessonplanheadquarters/g/closure.htm http://www.edulink.org/lessonplans/anticipa.htm

Practicum-Sharing a lesson

Last week I taught a lesson about similarity. We talked about similarity for a few minutes, basically that they needed to be proportional to each other or the same to be similar. After our discussion, I gave them a worksheet where there were plotted points on a graph that created a hat. There was a table on the worksheet that had hat transformations (for example: Hat 2-(x+3, y+2), Hat 3-(.5x, .5y), Hat 4-(3x, 2y), and so on) and the students had to fill in the table by writing in the new points and then graphing them and determining which ones were similar to the original hat. My main strategy was learning by discovery because I basically told them what similarity was and then let them work on the worksheet. We did a lot of class discussions and group discussions (the students are at tables of four people) trying to figure out which hats were similar. The lesson objective was to get students to see what similarity looks like and how to determine which shapes are similar. The things that worked were the group discussions because I didn't give them a whole lot of information and they needed to clarify what similarity was with each other. Some students got it right away and others took time. The worksheet was great because they got to work on some graphing stuff that we had been doing and transformations along with the new lesson we were doing. I checked for understanding through the discussions and walking around and talking to groups. I also did something that my teacher does, which was make students turn in a release question on a small piece of scratch paper. The question was "which hats are similar and why" from the worksheet. They turn it in on the way out and I can see if all of the students understood the lesson and concept of similarity. That allows me to see if I need to clarify anything the next day or if we can move on to the next thing. I really liked this idea. If I were to reteach the lesson, I would changed the transformations to be more different because three of the five hats were the same hat moved into a different position and not a different size so they didn't really get a lot of work with similarity because most of them were exactly the same. I would also have gone over similarity more in the beginning and used more examples because I think that some people were lost early on because I didn't go over it enough.

Warm-Ups in Math Education

The purpose of warm-ups in my classroom is to get students calmed and focused for class as well as review concepts from the class prior. My warm-ups are roughly 5-8 questions, the first few are reviewing the concepts from the past class and the last few are more difficult problems that connect to the lecture. They take about five minutes as not to waste time, but to make our time in class most efficient. Warm-ups give me time to take role and handle any other things that I need to do before class starts while keeping the students on task and getting them focused on math. The problems are all done individually and we go over them as a group to answer any questions or clarify any confusion.

Appropriate Use of Technology? 2-3: Bagel Algebra

I selected the “Bagel Algebra” activity where a bagel company in Virginia displays a sign in their shop comparing their bagel prices to their competitor’s prices using a proportion. You show the students the sign and give them time to think about the sign and what the math being done tells them. After a few minutes, pair up students to talk about what the information means and try to get the pairs to agree on an answer. Then bring the whole class together to discuss what they have come up with. Lead a discussion about what the variable x stands for, what the purpose of the sign was, etc. so that the students fully understand the purpose of their sign and the logic behind it. The categories to describe the lesson plan that were used in this assignment were: learning objectives, materials, instructional plan, assessment options, extensions, teacher reflection, NCTM standards and expectations, and references. The teaching strategies used in this assignment are teaching through student exploration and analysis because the students are making logical conclusions based on the information given where the teacher is only leading a discussion that is the students mostly participate in. There is a lot of critical thinking in this lesson because the students are analyzing data and trying to make sense of it. The problem solving in this lesson mostly is used in the extension of this assignment where students are creating their own justification for how much a bagel should cost using proportions. I think that this lesson had all of the proper components, but you could add a few things to it to make it more interesting. If I were teaching this assignment, I would change a few things about it. The first thing I would change is talking to the students about the actual price of the other stores bagels. The lesson shows you how much their oppositions bagels should cost, but doesn’t show you their actual prices, so it just makes the student think the other place has cheaper bagels and the original place is dumb for putting the sign up because it would probably lead business to their competitor. The other thing that I would change is I would get students to come up with a reasonable weight for a bagel (the weight given is almost two pounds, which is insane) and do the problem over using the same information, but with a different weight and see if the problem changes at all. It would be a good chance for them to see how changing multiple variables makes the problem different.

2-2: Standards, Standards, Everywhere: Algebra

The NCTM, Common Core, and CMP standards blend together in most cases when dealing with algebra. In their words they aren’t exactly the same as each other, but the goal of Algebra in middle school is mostly the same. Common Core goes much more in depth with their standards than the other two, but they still all cover the same standards for the most part. All of the standards talk about: • Using equations and expressions to solve real life problems • Graphing and solving linear equations and relating them • Use tables and graphs to analyze equations • Understanding variables and their relationships to a problem There are many more, but these seem to be the biggest concepts that are most closely related between the standards. The differences in the standards are mostly the way that students use all of the different standards and how they use them. CMP is mostly about connecting concepts and relating concepts to real life, NCTM seems to be about making things simple and understanding concepts at their most basic level, and Common Core has to do more with analyzing concepts and figuring out what they mean. All of those styles are pretty similar and the three standards are very similar in my opinion.

Task 1-1- educ 533- Best Practices Research

Here is a link to the best practices in education website that I found. The website has a list of the nine standards for best practices in education with explanations on what those standards entail. These standards are very appropriate for most settings. I think it is a good overview about all of the bases teachers need to touch to give students a successful education. Obviously you don't need to do all of these perfectly to be a productive teacher, but these have been found the most effective parts. Most of them are pretty obvious like strong leadership and curriculum and instruction, but there are a few that are a little more surprising. If I had to guess the nine, I probably could have come up with half off the top of my head, but a few things like parent/community involvement and supportive, personalized and relevant learning would not have been things I thought of off the top of my head. The surprising parts were more the idea that they were not really things that I have seen being very relevant in the schools that I have visited or been a part of. The ideas are great, but carrying them out seems to be a monumental task if I have not been in an environment where I have seen all of these working together, especially when this information is readily available to anyone with internet. I am growing more and more frustrated with public education because it seems like what I am learning is what all teachers with master's degrees have learned and there is something about teaching that draws you away from what you already know will work. No one has told me why teachers do that and that is what I am most interested in learning right now. If you have all the answers to a test, you can't fail right? Here is a link to my best practices in instruction site that I found. My main impression of what this website talks about is what the student needs to do to be most successful. I think it is trying to get you to implement these values into students like test taking and homwork strategies, but you can't force them to do it. It would be more effective to learn strategies on how to get students interested in putting in extra time to doing well in school. Not all students are motivated to do well. I like some of the strategies this website has to offer, they are mostly things we have already been taught but they are good refreshers. Things like "identifying simiarities and differences" and "cooperative learning" are good reminders to relate to students on a level that makes the material relevant and appealing and to also help them to work together. A classroom is a team, the teacher is the coach and the students are the players and you can't win if everyone isn't working together.

About Me

My name is Jeremy Milliron. I am 24 years old and I live in Bend, OR. I have been married for two years this Sunday to my wife Cassie. We have a one and a half year old Beagle/Pitbull puppy named Dexter (he is named after the TV show because we love it). I am working at Pepsi right now pretty much just sitting on a fork lift all day which is actually kind of awesome. I am beginning my fifth year of coaching Mountain View High School's freshman boy's basketball team. I have been coaching ever since I got out of high school and I really like doing it other than a few times a year when it is insanely frustrating. My interests involve basketball (watching, playing and coaching), football (watching and playing fantasy football), good beer (I live in the beer capital of the world, it would be blasphemy not to love it), and watching TV (Modern Family, It's Always Sunny, Dexter, etc.). I am into anything that makes me laugh or smile, I would say that having fun is my biggest hobby. I graduated with a bachelor's in mathematics at the University of Oregon (Go Ducks!) last year and am at Willamette now. When I am done I will be able to teach middle school and high school math and hopefully someday get my PE credentials. At this point I prefer to teach high school because I coach high school basketball and have really had fun with that age group. High schoolers are realizing their dreams and creating future goals, but also very impressionable which makes the role of high school teachers so important. I want to teach because I feel like I have a gift for teaching and it is the only job that I can see myself having for an extended period of time. It is hard to explain (as I am sure it is for most people), but someone who is a teacher probably knows what I am talking about.

Class Website

Here is the link to my class website: https://sites.google.com/site/mvhstriginometry/home

My class is a triginometry class at Mountain View High School.