Saturday, June 19, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
It all comes together
The ants are disturbing me a little. They seem to have blocked up all three entrances between the top area and the bottom sand. There are about 9 on the bottom and 6 up top. It seems the top ones are excavating the entrance hole to get back to the rest of the colony. But while three are moving pieces of sand around, there's an ant 1.5 centimeters below continuing to pile up sand to block the hole. I could use a skewer to unblock the hole, but I don't know that that's what they need.
Unfortunately this relates both to students and to my mother. My mother has been in the hospital since June 1. Last night she got put on a respirator again and intubated so she has a tube down her throat to her lungs, I think. She can't talk. Tonight she signaled that she wanted to write something. But my wife and I visiting was also stimulating or overstimulating her. She was also too tired to try to write. Basically a helpless feeling about how I can help her.
Then going to students: how long to wait while they are trying to solve a problem before trying to help. I think there's a Superman concept, of swooping in to the rescue. Teachers want to help students, but sometimes the best help is not giving any and letting their brains work. Maybe even not sometimes, but most of the time? Read More......
Unfortunately this relates both to students and to my mother. My mother has been in the hospital since June 1. Last night she got put on a respirator again and intubated so she has a tube down her throat to her lungs, I think. She can't talk. Tonight she signaled that she wanted to write something. But my wife and I visiting was also stimulating or overstimulating her. She was also too tired to try to write. Basically a helpless feeling about how I can help her.
Then going to students: how long to wait while they are trying to solve a problem before trying to help. I think there's a Superman concept, of swooping in to the rescue. Teachers want to help students, but sometimes the best help is not giving any and letting their brains work. Maybe even not sometimes, but most of the time? Read More......
Monday's "twist"
When I worked on classifying the measurement/rate problems and then trying to identify what they had in common on Monday, I honed in on the fact that all of the problems dealt with units (of measurement) which are divisible.
1. So problems had hours which can be broken down into minutes and seconds or grouped as days.
2. Miles can be expressed as yards or feet and so on.
3. Dollars can be divided into cents or the various denominations on bills.
Were these problems harder to classify? I would say no, but I have learned that they are [for students]. Where I can see them being trickier or more complex is if problem 4 were changed from:
Todd's tomato plants grow 4 inches a week. How many weeks will it take for them to grow 20 inches?
to:
Todd's tomato plant grows 4 inches a week. How many days will it take for them to grow one and a half feet?
Solving the problem now requires conversion of both time and distance. So that's where I could see the problem increasing in complexity. I think that such complexity is actually desirable, but not if it is causing confusion.
Once you know that a three-sided polygon is called a triangle, I think it is purely academic and impractical to tell students "Draw a three-sided polygon and color it yellow and write the word Caution in the middle of it." BUT if we know that a tortoise moves a yard every four seconds, I WOULD expect someone to predict how many feet it may have moved in a minute. We don't talk about 180 minutes passing, we just say 3 hours. But if a TV show is 90 minutes long, we should know that it's an hour and a half in duration. Read More......
1. So problems had hours which can be broken down into minutes and seconds or grouped as days.
2. Miles can be expressed as yards or feet and so on.
3. Dollars can be divided into cents or the various denominations on bills.
Were these problems harder to classify? I would say no, but I have learned that they are [for students]. Where I can see them being trickier or more complex is if problem 4 were changed from:
Todd's tomato plants grow 4 inches a week. How many weeks will it take for them to grow 20 inches?
to:
Todd's tomato plant grows 4 inches a week. How many days will it take for them to grow one and a half feet?
Solving the problem now requires conversion of both time and distance. So that's where I could see the problem increasing in complexity. I think that such complexity is actually desirable, but not if it is causing confusion.
Once you know that a three-sided polygon is called a triangle, I think it is purely academic and impractical to tell students "Draw a three-sided polygon and color it yellow and write the word Caution in the middle of it." BUT if we know that a tortoise moves a yard every four seconds, I WOULD expect someone to predict how many feet it may have moved in a minute. We don't talk about 180 minutes passing, we just say 3 hours. But if a TV show is 90 minutes long, we should know that it's an hour and a half in duration. Read More......
Monday, June 14, 2010
Ant Pic
That was from Saturday (Day 2 of having them). They've added a lot on since then.
Read More......
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