First Day – very quick thoughts

This is almost a 180 blog post, except I forgot to take many pictures. 20 minute classes today. Pretty good!

    • Geometry – three sections. Debated “What is a sandwich” and wrote definitions using this slide deck. Went super-well in all three classes and was lots of fun. Haven’t looked through the sandwich definitions they all handed in; we’ll see if I have time since I’m also doing Sara Van Der Werf’s name tents with the geometry classes this year.
    • Intro to Computer Science – one section. Modified lesson from beginning of day 2 of code.org’s AP CSP curriculum. Students attempted to come up with definitions for “computer science,” then “information.” Sadly, the discussion didn’t go very smoothly and I had to essentially throw the idea of a “binary message” as simple information at them all willy-nilly. They had 5 minutes to start brainstorming a device that will let them send a single binary message across a room even through obstacles (both visual and auditory). It wasn’t bad, but I would like to come up with something different next year.
    • AP Statistics – jumped right in to gathering data about students, then did the first problem from lesson 1.1.1 in the CPM Statistics book – grouping the charts into groups. Nice discussion about the various ways of charting the data we used, and the various types. Good setup for tomorrow, and pretty active. Had about 5 minutes to talk about boring things like how homework will work, etc, which I went ahead and embraced.

Overall, not a bad day!

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