reflection

2016-2017 Year in Review: Being New

Overview

This was my first year since 2010 being the new kid in school. Developing a reputation takes time, so I was deliberate about establishing who I am as a teacher from the beginning. I wrote about learning names at the beginning of the year, for example. My school, surpassing 1,000 students this year, is the second largest of those at which I have worked. The high school division is just over 320 students. There are many systems that are in place to manage the reality of this group of ninth through twelfth graders that has a tremendous diversity of interests, programs (IB and AP), extra-curricular organizations, and obligations outside of the school walls. I walked in admittedly intimidated by the scope of this place and what it aims to accomplish.

After one of our meetings before student orientation, there was a lot of information that had been shared. I asked our high school principal what the priority needed to be in the first quarter in terms of processing all of that information. He put me at ease – the focus should be on figuring out how this place works. He promised (and certainly delivered) on a pledge to remind us of what was important throughout the year, but with the understanding that there would be a learning curve for our group of newbies. The faculty is passionate about teaching and creative in how they go about designing classroom experiences. They were intensely committed to sharing what they do and helping those of us that were new how to prioritize at any given time.

What worked:

The beginning of school was was a mix of content and getting to know them/me activities that were deliberately designed for those purposes. This sort of thing is important at the beginning of any year if the composition of a class is new. It’s essential if the teacher is new too. Each group is unique and has chemistry that not only is important to suss out in the beginning, but must be regularly assessed as the year proceeds. I thought this series of activities worked really well. I will modify these for the purpose of offering variety for next year’s student groups, but not really improvement.
I was able to get most of my work preparing lessons at school during my prep periods. Exceptions were after exams, the end of the year, and near reporting deadlines. This required serious levels of prioritization and disciplined decisions around what I actually could accomplish in those blocks of time. While I maintained to-do lists, a major component of my success came from block-scheduling those tasks and sticking to the schedule. This left time after school and at home to spend designing the explorations, experiments, and bigger picture puzzles that were nice, but not necessary.
I streamlined many of the administrative procedures I had created in my previous schools. I rebuilt spreadsheets that had been unchanged for several years rather than hacking old ones to work. Part of this was required to address the fact that my class sizes were substantially larger, but I also decided it was time.
As I had hoped to do, I spent much of the year watching. I did not want to come in and identify everything that this school did not have that I may have had a hand in organizing in past school years, and then add it myself. That is how I came to feel burnt out every time June came around. I was quite picky with what I involved myself in. I said no to things. When I was ready to design a VEX robotics sprint (more on that later) at the end of the year, however, this meant I had the energy and drive to do so.
The level of support I have felt from administrators and colleagues this year has been incredible. Nothing makes you feel so effective as a team that has your back, and that is realistic about what should, what can, and what cannot be accomplished with a given set of resources.

What needs work:

I did not get out and visit my colleagues anywhere nearly as frequently as I wanted. This is a seriously impressive group of teachers trying different things. Part of the problem was my commitment to trying to get things done during my prep periods, so I do take responsibility for that. It would not have been too devastating to that structure, however, if I also planned blocks of time when I would visit specific colleagues. I ate in the lunchroom with colleagues fairly regularly, and that was great for learning what everyone was doing. It was not enough. More of that next year.
I originally planned on doing outreach with parents more regularly this year. They are incredibly trusting of what we as teachers design for students, and this was evident at parent teacher conference nights during both semesters. I want more than that though. I want them to understand my philosophy for why learning mathematics right now is important. I don’t think the parents understand standards based grading, and although the students made solid attempts to explain it during conferences, these conversations don’t happen nearly as frequently as they should. I need to think more about what that communication looks like, and why I feel it is important, because I don’t think I can fully articulate that here. I do know that there is a lost opportunity when it comes to parents really understanding what we do in the classroom on a regular basis.
I now believe that the ease of establishing community and connections with others is inversely related to the ease of living in that place. I often tell the story of how it was easy to rally a group of colleagues in my early days of China to go find cheese, which was difficult to find. Many of my closest bonds were formed during those adventures of first world adversity. Here in District 7 of HCMC, there is no such difficulty. Life is really good and easy here. This means, however, that one must work a little bit harder to leave the comfortable bubble of life to find adventure and make new friends. This is especially the case for me as the father of a now toddling ball of energy. It takes effort and time to build those relationships. That’s definitely something that I need to work on deliberately planning more frequently next year.

Conclusion

The second year anywhere is always less scattered than the first. The next few weeks are all about figuring about how to use the time not spent learning the ropes.

Notes to the Future with Google Scripts & PearDeck

I wrote previously about my use of PearDeck in an end of semester activity. One of the slides in this deck was one in which I asked students to write themselves a note containing the things they would want to remember three weeks later at the beginning of semester two. With vacation now over, that day is now. I wrote a Google script that automatically sends the notes they wrote to each student. This allowed me to generally send these out without inadvertently reading the notes in detail. I saw some of them, but made an effort not to see who was writing what.

The PearDeck output spreadsheet for this deck looks like this:

Column 3 of the spreadsheet contains columns with the student’s email addresses, so that made it easy to get the address corresponding with a given note to the future, which is column 4. By selecting ‘Script Editor’ from the tools menu, you can create a script that has the ability to process this data.

You can delete the code that is there, and then paste in the code below to create the email script.

You’ll need to save the script, and from the run menu, select ‘sendEmails’. You’ll need to give permission for this script to read the spreadsheet for this to proceed. The emails will all be sent from your Google email.

Code:
function sendEmails() {

var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
var startRow = 2; // First row of data to process
var numRows = 12; // Number of rows to process

var dataRange = sheet.getRange(startRow, 1, numRows, 5) //get all the data in the spreadsheet from the range between (startRow,1) and (numRows,5).
//This gets the first 12 students that are in this class, and the five columns of data I want to use for the email.

var data = dataRange.getValues(); //Store the spreadsheet data in an array
for (i in data) { //for each row in the spreadsheet
var row = data[i];

var studentEmail = row[2]; //the student email is in element 2, which is the third column

var subject = "Note To The Future (AKA Now): " + studentEmail; //email subject

//This next line is text formatted using HTML tags that appears before each students' note.

var greeting = "Happy New Year!

Before break, I asked you to write an email to yourself with things you would want to remember at the beginning of the semester. Whatever you wrote in that text box in Pear Deck is below for you to enjoy.

I'm looking forward to seeing you Tuesday or Wednesday in class.

Be well,
EMW

";
var message = greeting + row[3] //Combines the greeting and the student's individual note

MailApp.sendEmail({to:studentEmail, subject:subject, htmlBody:message});
//Sends the email to the student, with the subject defined in line 14, and the message from lines 20 and 21.
//htmlBody means the email will be formatted as HTML, not just text.
}

}

2015-2016 Year in Review: IB Mathematics SL/HL

This was my second year working in the IB program for mathematics. For those that don’t know, this is a two year program, culminating in an exam at the end of year two. The content of the standard level (SL) and higher level (HL) courses cross algebra, functions, trigonometry, vectors, calculus, statistics, and probability. The HL course goes more into depth in all of these topics, and includes an option that is assessed on a third, one-hour exam paper after the first two parts of the exam.

An individualized mathematics exploration serves as an internally assessed component of the final grade. This began with two blocks at the end of year one so that students could work on it over the summer. Students then had four class blocks spread out over the first month of school of year two two work and ask questions related to the exploration during class.

I taught year one again, as well as my first attempt at year two. As I have written about previously, this was run as a combined block of both SL and HL students together, with two out of every five blocks as HL focused classes.

What worked:

I was able to streamline the year 1 course to better meet the needs of the students. Most of my ability in doing this came from knowing the scope of the entire course. Certain topics didn’t need to be emphasized as I had emphasized in my first attempt last year. It also helped that the students were much better aware of the demands of higher-level vs. standard level from day one.
I did a lot more work using IB questions both in class and on assessments. I’ve become more experienced with the style and expectations of the questions and was better able to speak to questions about those from students.
The two blocks on HL in this combined class was really useful from the beginning of year one, and continued to be an important tool for year two. I don’t know how I would have done this otherwise.
I spent more time in HL on induction than last year, both on sums and series and on divisibility rules, and the extra practice seemed to stick better than it did last year in year one.
For students that were self starters, my internal assessment (IA) schedule worked well. The official draft submitted for feedback was turned in before a break so that I had time to go through them. Seeing student’s writing was quite instructive in knowing what they did and did not understand.
I made time for open ended, “what-if” situations that mathematics could be used to analyze and predict. I usually have a lot of this in my courses anyway, but I did a number of activities in year one specifically to hint at the exploration and what it was all about. I’m confident that students finished the year having seen me model this process, and having gone through mini explorations themselves.
After student feedback in the HL course, I gave many more HL level questions for practice throughout the year. There was a major disconnect between the textbook level questions and what students saw on the HL assessments, which were usually composed of past exam questions. Students were more comfortable floundering for a bit before mapping a path to a solution to each problem.
For year two, the exam review was nothing more than extended class time for students to work past papers. I did some curation of question collections around specific topics as students requested, but nearly every student had different needs. The best way to address this was to float between students as needed rather than do a review of individual topics from start to finish.
The SL students in year two learned modeling and regression over the Chinese new year break. This worked really well.
Students that had marginally more experience doing probability and statistics in previous courses (AP stats in particular) rocked the conditional probability, normal distribution, and distribution characteristics. This applied even to students who were exposed to that material, but did poorly on it in those courses. This is definitely a nod to the idea that earlier exposure (not mastery) of some concepts is useful later on.
Furthermore, regarding distributions, my handwaving to students about finding area under the curve using the calculator didn’t seem to hurt the approach later on when we did integration by hand.
This is no surprise, but being self sufficient and persevering through difficult mathematics needs to be a requirement for being in HL mathematics. Students that are sharp, but refuse to put in the effort, will be stuck in the 1-3 score range throughout. A level of algebraic and conceptual fluency is assumed for this course, and struggling with those aspects in year one is a sign of bigger issues later on. Many of the students I advised this way in year one were happier and more successful throughout the second year.
I successfully had students smiling at the Section B questions on the IB exam in the slick way that the parts are all connected to each other.

What needs work:

For year one:

I lean far too hard on computer based solutions (Geogebra, Desmos) than on the graphing calculator during class. The ease of doing it these ways leads to students being unsure of how to use the graphing calculator to do the same tasks (finding intersections and solutions numerically) during an assessment. I definitely need to emphasize the calculator as a diagnostic tool before really digging into a problem to know whether an integer or algebraic solution is possible.
Understanding the IB rounding rules needs to be something we discuss throughout. I did more of this in year one on my second attempt, but it still didn’t seem to be enough.

For year two:

Writing about mathematics needs to be part of the courses leading up to IB. Students liked the mini explorations (mentioned above) but really hated the writing part. I’m sure some of this is because students haven’t caught the writing bug. Writing is one of those things that improves by doing more of it with feedback though, so I need to do much more of this in the future.
I hate to say it, but the engagement grade of the IA isn’t big enough to compel me to encourage students to do work that mattered to them. This element of the exploration was what made many students struggle to find a topic within their interests. I think engagement needs to be broadened in my presentation of the IA to something bigger: find something that compels you to puzzle (and then un-puzzle) yourself. A topic that has a low floor, high ceiling serves much more effectively than picking an area of interest, and then finding the math within it. Sounds a lot like the arguments against real world math, no?
I taught the Calculus option topics of the HL course interspersed with the core material, and this may have been a mistake. Part of my reason for doing this was that the topic seemed to most easily fit in the context of a combined SL/HL situation. Some of the option topics like continuity and differentiability I taught alongside the definition of the derivative, which is in the core content for both SL and HL. The reason I regret this decision is that the HL students didn’t know which topics were part of the option, which appear only on a third exam section, Paper 3. Studying was consequently difficult.
If for no other reason, the reason not to do a combined SL/HL course is that neither HL or SL students get the time they deserve. There is much more potential for great explorations and inquiry in SL, and much more depth that is required for success in HL. There is too much in that course to be able to do both courses justice and meet the needs of the students. That said, I would have gone to three HL classes per two week rotation for the second semester, rather than the two that I used throughout year one.
The HL students in year two were assigned series convergence tests. The option book we used (Haese and Harris) had some great development of these topics, and full worked solutions in the back. This ended up being a miserable failure due to the difficulty of the content and the challenge of pushing second semester seniors to work independently during a vacation. We made up some of this through a weekend session, but I don’t like to depend on out-of-school instruction time to get through material.

Overall, I think the SL course is a very reasonable exercise in developing mathematical thinking over two years. The HL course is an exercise in speed and fluency. Even highly motivated students of mathematics might be more satisfied with the SL course if they are not driven to meet the demands of HL. I also think that HL students must enjoy being puzzled and should be prepared to use tricks from their preceding years of mathematics education outside of being taught to do so by teachers.

Exploring Functions (and Non-Functions) Interactively

Heeding Dan’s encouragement to step things up in his NCTM talk, I revisited an introduction to functions activity that I put together three years ago. The idea is to get students to make observations about inputs and outputs and use the ‘notice and wonder’ parlance from the Math Forum to prompt conversations about these ideas.

I rewrote the activity with some deliberate changes and webified it to make it easy to access and share – you can find it here:
http://emwdx.github.io/functions-exploration/index.html

The activity has a few elements that I want to highlight with the hope that you might consider (a) trying the activity with your students or (b) downloading the code for the activity, tweaking it, and then re-sharing it with your enhancements.

Students go through the modeling cycle multiple times.

The activity begs students to take a playful approach. Change the input value and watch the output. Predict what’s going to happen and see if your mental model is correct. Then do the next one, and the next.

Arithmetic isn’t necessarily a prerequisite.

Some students were actually more puzzled by the functions that took text inputs. They experimented nevertheless to figure out what was happening, and some noticed that the pattern worked for numbers too.

Controversy is built in.

Students working on Functions 5 and 6 saw nothing weird happening when they worked alone. When they then went to share their answers with classmates, the latter function started some really interesting interactions between students trying to figure out who was wrong.

Students of different levels all succeeded and all struggled at some point.

One student zipped through the arithmetic exercises and then got stuck figuring out Function 3 or 7. Some of the weaker students jumped around and got Functions 1 and 4 and 8, which is enough to get in the game of finding patterns and drawing conclusions. A higher level student experimented with Function 7 to find that there was a well defined range for the outputs – random, but with limitations.

The need for definitions came out of the activity, not the other way around.

Students felt the need to clearly define the behavior of Functions 6 and 7 as being different than the others in a fundamental way. Definitions for relations and functions weren’t huge cognitive jumps for students since there was a recently established context. It’s also important to notice that the definition for relations that aren’t functions has to be more than just the lack of a pattern. Function 6 helps with this.

Many of the CCSS standards for mathematical practice are embedded within.

…as are some of the high school standards for functions.

If you try this with students, let me know how it goes.

Technical Details:

If you want to try this yourself, you can download the code from Github here:
https://github.com/emwdx/functions-exploration/tree/gh-pages

I did this also as an attempt to whip together something using the React JS library which I’ve been learning recently. It makes for a really nice interface for building this type of interactivity into a webpage. There will be more, so stay tuned.

The React components for the eight functions are in lines 86-102 of the index.html file. The function definitions used by each component are defined toward the bottom of the code in that file. You could change these around using Javascript to make these functions fit with your vision of this activity for students. The file is self contained, so you share just the HTML file you change with students, the page will function correctly.

Happy coding!

The Incredible Growing Bricks

I put together this three-act activity two years ago, and decided to include it in the playlist for this year’s Math 9 course. The students got right to work in figuring out the total mass of the three bricks together.

This time, I circulated the actual bricks among the students as they worked. I opted not to do this two years ago because I wanted to force them to use the dimensions in the image above to find their answers. The result was that some students chose to make the measurements themselves rather than use the image. This yielded some great interactions between students asking if the bricks were proportional to each other, and those assuming they were proportional. There were some excellent examples of strong explanations involving proportional reasoning among the student work, as well as typical examples of misconceptions, such as the mass being proportional to the scale factor between the sides.

I also did something new with this modeling task and asked students to predict their uncertainty. Often times, students see that they were close to the actual answer revealed in the third act (but not exactly equal), and subsequently classify their answers as wrong. The uncertainties allow more flexibility in this regard. It also revealed some misunderstanding of the relationship between uncertainty and reporting answers that wasn’t unexpected: one student gave 16.895 grams, with an uncertainty of plus or minus 0.1 grams. This is a frequent issue in science classes, but not something I’ve addressed with mathematics students in the past.

Taking Time Learning Math: A Student’s Perspective

Yesterday was our school’s student led conference day. I’ve written previously on how proud these days make me as an educator. Whens students do genuine reflection on their learning and share the ups and downs of their school days, it’s hard not to see the value of this as an exercise.

During one conference, a student shared a fascinating perspective on her learning in math. This is not the usual level of specificity that we get from our students, so I am eager to share her thinking. Here’s the student’s comment during the conference:

“It isn’t that I don’t like math. Learning takes time in math, and I don’t always get the time it takes to really understand it.”

I asked her for further clarification, and this was her response:

…Math is such an interesting subject that can be “explored” in so many different ways, however, in school here I don’t really get to learn it to a point where I say yeah this is what I know, I fully understand it. We move on from topic to topic so quickly that the process of me creating links is interrupted and I practice only for the test in order to get high grades.

It’s certainly striking to get this sort of feedback from a student who is doing all the things we ask her to do. The activities this student is doing in class are not day-after-day repetitions of “I do, we do, you do” – we do a range of class activities that involve exploring, questioning, and interacting with other students.

This student’s comment is about limitations of time. She isn’t saying that we aren’t doing enough of X, Y, or Z – quite the contrary, she just is asking for time to let it sink in. She doesn’t answer the question of what that time looks like, but that’s not her job, it’s ours.

I know I always feel compelled to nudge a class forward in some way. This doesn’t mean I moving through material more quickly, but I do push for increased depth, intuition, or quality conversation about the content in every class period. Her comment makes me realize that something still stands to be improved. Great food for thought for the weekend.

An Easy Transformation: Right Triangle Trigonometry

From Haese and Harris MYP 9:

I was looking for problems to give my students as applications of the right angle trigonometry from our previous class. The problem is essentially equivalent to the basic questions requiring them to find an unknown side or angle – the work is all done for them. One of my standards is all about parsing a word problem for the information needed to answer it, and this question does not require students to do any parsing.

I removed all of the measurements, and this problem became remarkably more demanding:

This will certainly prompt more conversation than in its original form.

It’s embarrassing how easy it was to make this change – I anticipate a nice payoff in class.

Project Nora

A week ago, my wife and I saw the official beginning of a new project. Here’s a photo from the ride home:

This past week has been a rapid tour through a set of ideas both familiar and foreign. We’ve gotten advice in many different forms and from varied groups of people, and we are grateful for the assistance. The one vague bit of advice that has made the most sense through it all: be flexible and appreciate each moment for what it is. I am frightened with the speed with which the minutes drift away while my daughter sleeps in my arms.

I’ve also gotten an appreciation for my own learning process. I read a lot in the months leading up to the birth. I listened to lots of stories from those who had been through this before, including my own parents. None of it truly made sense to me until I was actually experiencing things myself. I changed diapers and used way too many wipes. I watched the nurses give our daughter a bath. I’ve needed experienced people to tell me how to make a swaddle that lasts longer than thirty seconds – my own learning has often taken a backseat to restoring my daughter’s comfort. Others have told me what worked for their infants, and I take that advice as it applies, but given that every child is different, I understand there is no cure-all in this process. If nothing else, walking around in the middle of the night swaying her back and forth is a really comfortable way to be present and enjoy the moment.

I’m grateful to all of you who have wished us well and shared your recommendations and experience. My wife inspires me with the patience she has shown with our daughter (and with me) as we figure out how the pieces fit together. Spending this winter break with the new ‘us’ at home is truly a gift.

Happy holidays everyone!

A New Year, A New Formula Sheet

I wrote earlier this year about my difficulties with equation reference sheets. Students fall into the habit of using them like a menu rather than a set of tools.

Yesterday I had the great experience of trying a revised approach. The idea is to rely more on memorization, but only so far as keeping close definitions that are crucial to understanding.

A student asked during a quiz for a formula for electric field. I said I wasn’t going to provide one, so I pushed further to find out why this student needed it.

The student asked for the relationship between electric field, charge, and force. I provided this:

The student subsequently nodded and told me what went where. I then stepped away, keeping the post-it note with me.

This was an application of the definition of electric field, not Coulomb’s law, and the student either knew this, or guessed. In either case, it was enough to enable the student to then solve the problem completely.

I don’t know yet what this means, but it seems like a step in the right direction. I wonder if providing a reference sheet with random elements erased might be enough of a skeleton to encourage the students to know how to fill in the blanks, but wouldn’t allow the sort of hunting that students often do in a problem solving situation.

It has been a nice start to the year, folks. Here’s to a great school year for all of you.

2014-2015 Year In Review: Web Programming

This was the first year I’ve taught a computer programming course. The class was a broad survey of programming in HTML5. This was the overall sequence:

Semester 1:

Hacking a webpage from the browser console
HTML tags, structures, and organization
CSS – page design, classes and IDs, along with using Bootstrap
Javascript – variables, structures, conditionals
jQuery – manipulating the page using events and selectors, animations

Semester 2:

Mongo Databases & Queries
HTML Templates using Blaze
Writing Meteor Apps
Meteor, Media, and the HTML5 Canvas
HTML5 Games using Phaser

I have posted the files and projects I used with students at this repository on Github:
https://github.com/emwdx/webprogramming2014-2015

What did I do?

The class generally began with a warm-up activity that involved students analyzing, writing, or running code that I gave them. This always led into what we were going to explore on a given day’s lesson. I would show the class a few lines of code, ask them to make a prediction of what they thought would happen. This might be a visual request – what will this look like? Will there be an error? Was this error intentional or not?

This was all done while students had their laptops closed and notebooks open. I usually designed a series of tasks for students to complete using some code snippets that were saved in the directory on the school server.

We didn’t use any textbook, so I knew I needed to create a reference that students could refer back to whenever they got stuck. For each class, I took notes either in Microsoft OneNote or the SMART Notebook software and saved the notes in PDF form. I don’t know if students used this or not.

I had three types of assessment:

Mini-projects, which were fairly straight forward and had unique answers. These were assessed by general completion (4.5/5) with a (5/5) given for effort to creatively make the code their own. I was fairly loose on that final half point, giving it whenever I saw students clearly engaged by the task. You can see an example of this assignment here.
Projects, which had clear guidelines and requirements to meet the minimum grade that ranged from 80 – 90 percent, and then a series of additional tasks that raised the grade up to 100%. The additional task points weren’t awarded until the basic requirements were met, though that didn’t stop students from trying (see below).
Blog posts, which were required for every class. The expectations required a summary of what we learned for each class, along with code snippets, questions about what we learned, or confusion about something they wanted to go over in the next class. As the students became more skilled, this turned into questions that started as “How can we…/Is it possible to…”.

Once every two weeks, and usually on a Friday, I had a 20% day during which students could work on anything they wanted related to web programming. Some students worked on previous projects to resubmit them, others experimented with code from the previous class or week. In a couple of cases, students worked on their own pet projects, which included a chat application, a mathematical formula parser, and applying visual design principles to the pages we created in class. I often made suggestions for what students could do at the beginning of the class block, including providing some basic code they could use to experiment.

What worked:

Based on feedback from the end of the year, students enjoyed the course. They had a lot of positive comments on the ways I ran the class and that they always got help when they needed it.
Forcing students to write down code helped with retention and building a useful reference for later. I didn’t require them to write down long blocks of code, but for things like HTML tags and Javascript, I wanted there to be some written reinforcement that things were important. I was pretty strict on deciding when I wanted students to write down code (to activate that part of the brain) and when I wanted them to copy it directly into a text editor and run it.
Forcing students to recreate code (and not copy and paste) led to higher activity and interaction between students while learning to code. I saved some code as images, not text, which required students to go line by line and see what they were doing. This was a decision I made early on because it helped me when learning to code. That extra step of needing to look at the code while I was typing it in led me to take a closer look at what it said, and I wanted to give a similar opportunity to my students.
The more open ended projects led to much richer questions and interaction between students. I really liked the range of responses I received when I gave open ended projects. Some students were exceptionally creative or went well beyond the requirements to make code that mattered to them.
Students were constantly helping each other with their code…when they eventually asked for this help. I was called over many times by students calling out the blanket statement “my code doesn’t work” and then handing me their laptop, but over time they learned that I wasn’t going to just fix their code for them. They became careful readers of each other’s code, when they finally made the step to ask someone to help, though this took some time.
I succeeded in having students do more than listen. I never talked for more than 15 minutes before students were actually writing and experimenting with code. This was exactly what I wanted.
20% days were a big hit. Some students wanted this time as extra processing time to complete the mini projects from the rest of the week. Others liked being able to ask me how to do anything, or to find tutorials for HTML elements that they wanted to learn to use. I really liked how well this worked with this group of students and looked forward to it, and not just because it was a reduction in the planning required for class.
Videos offered an effective and preferred method for learning to write code in this class. I put together a number of screencasts in which I spoke about the code, and in some cases coded it live. Students were able to pause, copy code to the editor, and then run it pretty easily. Some zipped through it, others took longer, but this is nothing new. The time required to do this, as is always a consideration for me, was often more than I could afford. Luckily, there is plenty of material available already out there, so I was able to step back and give another voice and face a chance to teach my students.

What needs work:

The bonus elements for projects were the first things most students wanted to figure out first. Many students did not put in the time to read and complete the basic requirements for projects, resulting in submitted projects that were sent right back as being incomplete. Some of this was a language issue, as there were many ESOL students in the class, but most of it was what we always encounter when working with adolescents: not reading the directions.
Students reused a lot of old (and unrelated) code. I emphasized creating simple code from scratch throughout the year, as my expectations were relatively simple. For many students, copying and pasting code was a crutch that led to many more problems than simply writing simple, clean code from the start. I get it – I copy and paste code myself – but I also know how to clean it up. They knew why not to do it (because they all tried it at some point) but some students continued doing it to the end. I need a better plan for helping students not fall into this trap.
Many students did not pick up on error messages in the console that said precisely where the problem with the code was located. At times, I expected too much from students, because the console is a scary place. That said, I think I could do a better job of emphasizing how to find the line numbers referenced in these errors messages, regardless of what the error message is.

I really enjoyed teaching this class, and not just because of the awesome group of students that took it. It helped me refine my knowledge and get better at some of the HTML, CSS, and Javascript coding skills that I had used, but often had to relearn every time I wanted to use them.

Feedback, as always, is welcome!

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