I’m working on community building a little more within my classes. Now that things are a little smaller I want to place a greater emphasis on the whole group being involved, rather than 5-6 kids at one table. Last year’s BC Calculus group was my first foray with a sub 20 class in a while, and I structured like it was a big class. Kids sat at three tables, and they stayed more or less confined to those tables. At the end of the year I felt like in a room of 15 people, they should’ve known each other and worked with each other better.Year two I’m trying to fix that. This year’s group of 14 sits ..read more

This is a bit overdue and was intended as a first week of school update, but the conclusions here have really been reinforcing themselves over the last couple of weeks.At the start of the school year I was in a bit of a funk. I found staff development week to be particularly uninteresting, not because of the content but just for that delay of being at work but not really doing my work, teaching kids. I think it was a mix of three things.Rinse, RepeatLike most of you, I have to break down and rebuild the room every year, and I’ve gotten that system down to a science. I used to take tons of stuf ..read more

A few nights ago I was working on an assessment and I spat this in my twitter machine:I love looking at student work and providing feedback, I hate having to decide how many points it’s supposed to be worth— Jonathan (@rawrdimus) August 31, 2018 I do this often as a way of talking to myself while working on things late in the evening. Often it's just to be funny, sometimes it's a little more serious, but I always I figure it's late and not a lot of people are reading. Not so much this time. It happens. There were a few reactions I want to address though, as my use of "points" there was misinte ..read more