ECST Mathematics Department
Newsletter
March 6-10, 2023
Newsletter
March 6-10, 2023
ACTIONABLE ITEMs
If you have not submitted your budget as of today, please do so immediately!
I am impressed with the number of math teachers who have used their allowed amount responsibly. There are two teachers who used every last cent. Impressive budgeting skills!
ATTENTION ALL GRADE 11 TEACHERS!
If you have not begun administering the Practice NJGPA to your students, you should do so immediately. All juniors should use their district issued device to access the TestNav app to complete the practice test. This is to ensure that there will be no technology issues the day of the actual NJGPA. It also exposes the students to the test specifications and features. While the students are taking the practice assessment, you should point out the location of the reference sheet, the calculator (for the calculator enabled unit), and the equation editors. Encourage the students to make use of their scrap paper to increase accuracy.
PUT THIS IN YOUR CALENDAR AND PLAN FOR LUNCH AND TRAVEL TIME TO PT!
This Friday, the ECST Math Team will have a PD session presented by Dr. Eric Milou from 1:30PM to 3:30PM in the PT Innovation Centre. The title of the presentation will be Desmos Activity Builder Features with Focus on IM Curricula. Please bring a device and be on time as Dr. Milou will begin promptly at 1:30PM.
Dr. Eric Milou is a professor of mathematics at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ. Dr. Milou has taught at Rowan for the past 25 years and served six terms as the President of the Rowan University Senate from 2007 to 2013. He previously served as President as the Association of Mathematics Teachers of New Jersey, the program chairperson of the 2007 NCTM annual meeting and has extensive speaking experience on reform in mathematics education. His most recent book is Invigorating High School Mathematics (co-authored with Steve Leinwand). He is also one of the authors of digits, EnVisions 6-8 and EnVisions A|G|A (published by Savvas) and was the recipient of the Max Sobel Outstanding Mathematics Educator Award in 2009.
REMINDERS & IMPORTANT NOTES
FRI., MARCH 10 - INSERVICE WITH DR. ERIC MILOU (USING DESMOS WITH IM)
MARCH 14 -16 - NJGPA (11th grade only)
WED., MARCH 15 - MARCH DEPARTMENT MEETING Please bring your book!
APRIL 7-14 - SPRING BREAK
WED., APRIL 19 - APRIL DEPARTMENT MEETING Please bring your book!
TUE., APRIL 25 - SAT School Day (11th grade only)
The Rover's will be in the buildings shortly. These are the math team members who will be providing "garage space" and support for the TI Rovers in your buildings:
WCT: Arenstein & Tanion
NT: Lucas & Tewelde
PT: Shin, Zimmerman, Vodrazka, & Lopez-Cassano
Getting Started on TI Innovator Rover
MATHEMATICS FOR EVERYONE
Celebrating IDM in 2023 presents a bit of a challenge as the NJGPA assessment will be administered to the 11th grade students on March 14-16. Because of the limited available time during the season of testing, ECST will celebrate IDM on Wednesday, March 29th. This will also be the day the we will begin the ECST math competition, MATH MADNESS. We will be using the Arete Labs platform which will simplify the time and location constraints. I will be meeting with Mr. Bevilacqua, Ms. Antoine, and Mrs. Lopez-Cassano to discuss the logistics of getting started. Information will be disseminated at the March 15th department meeting.
Questions to reflect upon before we discuss chapters 10-12 at the March 15th department meeting:
Ch10: What is the primary goal for consolidating a task, activity, or lesson in your classroom?
Ch10: Does the way you currently consolidate a task, activity, or lesson encourage or inhibit thinking?
Ch11: For the students who write notes, why do they do it? Who do the students think the notes are for?
Ch11: Does the way you currently have your students take notes encourage or inhibit thinking?
Ch12: If you teach more than one math course or one subject, how does the spectrum of what you evaluate differ between courses/subjects?
Ch12: Does the way you currently choose to evaluate encourage or inhibit thinking?
PROFESSIONAL/INSTRUCTIONAL RESOURCES WORTH SHARING
From Jennifer Gonzalez/Cult of Pedagogy:
Today's post was originally meant to be for math teachers, because the methodology I'm sharing comes from the world of math. But the longer I looked at it and the more I learned, I realized that no, this is an approach that would work in a lot of different classrooms. So I'm urging everyone to take a few minutes to check it out.
The approach I'm referring to is called Thinking Classrooms. Developed by a math education professor named Peter Liljedahl, it's a way of teaching that gets students up on their feet, collaborating on rich thinking tasks in small groups, and when you see it in action you'll know right away that there's something very different about it. In fact, I put a video right at the beginning of the post so you can see what I mean. If you like what you see, there's a full podcast interview, a book, and a whole bunch of online communities that can help you get started. (But at least watch the video...it's cool and it's less than 2 minutes long.)
The Thinking Classroom: An Interview with Peter Liljedahl
Have a great week!
Jenn
The video summaries of all the chapters in BUILDING THINKING CLASSROOMS are listed below. The teacher who is summarizing the chapters of the book teaches science, which emphasizes how the suggested practices are not just for math classrooms.
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Document links
New! Slideshows with real-time scoring
//www.problem-attic.com/realtime
New! Scramble multiple-choice answers on PDFs
//www.problem-attic.com/pdf-scrambling
Support for interactive question types
//www.problem-attic.com/interactive-questions
Splitting and merging documents with My Database
//www.problem-attic.com/mydatabase
Shortcuts - Navigation Panel & Random Selection
//www.problem-attic.com/shortcuts1
More information about key features
Happy 2023! With the new year came an important milestone for Problem-Attic: it now has upwards of 350,000 questions! In this email we’ll highlight the new content, starting with titles which were already on the main Select page.
State Assessments. All questions released through summer 2022 should now be in the database. (If we missed something, please let us know.) This includes about 1000 new questions each from CO, MD and NC, and another 3000 from AZ, MA, ME, MS, RI, and PA and TX.
NY Regents and NYS 3–8. The database has all exams through last August, including Spanish translations for Algebra 1, Living Environment, and Earth Science. 450 new Spanish Competency questions are there, too. (Look in World Languages.)
NC Math Contests. For NC State, WCU and UNCC, we added about five years’ of questions, or 1500 total. We’re now caught up with all tests (pre-COVID), and a topical sort will follow soon.
On the main Select page in Problem-Attic, you’ll also see these new titles:
Illustrative Mathematics. We created a separate link in the top-right panel because the database grew so large! We added more than 8000 questions for grades 3–5 and high school, both lessons and practice. (Middle school was already there.) This is an excellent curriculum—math teachers, please check it out.
UT Austin Science Olympiad (ATXSO). This is the start of a big move into SciOly! We’ve got two years covered so far, 2021 and 2022, with nearly 6300 questions for Divisions B and C. They’re organized by level and subject.
NASA Space Math. These questions, about 3000, are for teaching applications of math through space science. They’re organized by original source or “booklet”. (A big thank-you to the main author, Dr. Sten Odenwald!) Our plan is to re-organize all or most of the questions by topic or NextGen Science Standards. If you’re interested in working on such a project, you can get details here.
There’s a new feature in Problem-Attic which is connected to the growing database of questions. It’s called Public Frameworks. Briefly, it gives you a way to customize the database for a specific purpose. Currently, there are more than 20 frameworks available for you to install—and you can easily build your own. We’ll tell you more about this in a separate email. But you don’t have to wait. There’s already a re-alignment of questions to MA, TX and VA science standards, New Visions Math (NY), and two math textbooks. See this page to get started.
Everything described above is freely available when you sign up for Problem-Attic. For teachers at subscribing schools, we’ll quickly mention two updates: the Pre-Alg to Pre-Calc database has roughly doubled in size, to about 19,000 questions; and, on the panel called Additional Math and Science, you’ll see a new title, IM Paired Practice Questions. It has about 4700 original questions to go with the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum. To learn more, click the info button on the panel.