Recovering from Burn-out

If you read my last post, you know I recently went to the NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) Annual Conference held in San Antonio, Texas.  I came back with so many thoughts in my head, that my head hurts. Truly really hurts. Just ask @BridgetDunbar how much I've gone back and forth with her.... Then I realized why: I am recovering from burn-out.

I'll spare you all of the deepest details, but suffice it to say that until I recharged by hanging with my people and reconnecting with my purpose did I not realize how I had started to rely on pre-created materials and stopped creatively thinking about crafting quality activities that would actively engage my students in purposeful learning.  UGH. I fell into the burnout trap. I did what was easily available with minimal modifications.

I am no where near where I want to be, but I recognize that I don't want to be where I'm at; if that made any sense to anyone. I plan to move forward by making small manageable changes for the remainder of this year (it is the end of April already) and thinking through ideas and searching my favorite places like

• Math = Love by Sarah Carter 
• Finding Ways by Fawn Nguyen
• Divisible by 3 by Andrew Stadel
• Cheesemonkey Wonders by CheesemonkeySF
• MathyCathy by Cathy Yenca

just to name a few....

This past week, I started with this.

I saw a series of picture tweets from Christopher Danielson and used this specific one where he asked "How Many? #unitchat". I threw that picture alone on the board.

And just asked my students - How many? My 7th graders seemed a little puzzled at first,  one quickly yelling out "obviously, 6". When I asked him to explain more, he went on to document because he saw six hexagons. But another student quickly went on to say, 36 documenting each side piece to which another countered with 72 because of the round dots they saw - this conversation went on for several minutes. We even included how many as 1, as we could consider the entire piece a unit. This lead into a fantastic & messy unit chat.

I then moved on to a clothesline activity. I was recently introduced to the clothesline instructional activity by attending the NCTM session lead by Andrew Stadel (you can see more here) where students are given numbers on a clothesline and asked to make sense of them not only in their correct placement, but in the correct space.  Since we are working on 5 number summaries and box plots (my students need a review of this, it was not something they have shown a good grasp on) I used the materials I found here from The Math Project Journal.  I tweaked the card set and added a Q3 and Q4 and did not use the standard deviation cards.

I printed the number cards on white card stock and the summary cards in pink. I hung two clothes lines on the wall.

I asked students to come and make two changes. Until the only changes they could make were slight movements in spacing. Then I asked, how closely does the numbers on the top line resemble a number line?  Within a few minutes, they realized, some of the numbers were double, but they couldn't be doubled on a number line.  They tried to put them on top of each other: 

But realized that wouldn't work because then they lost some of the data. 

Then they ASKED for paper clips. SCORE. 🙌

Once they were happy with their arrangements for both lines and we were down to just discussing the little discrepancies on placement of the numbers on the clothesline, I asked how we could ensure their spacing was correct. And they said - let's measure it - so we did. We used a non-standard unit of measure (a piece of string) to measure the distance they had deemed worthy of a space between 61 and 63.  We called that one unit that was worth two spaces. We used some variation of this unit to help us properly space out the other numbers and then aligned the pink cards below them accordingly.  

Feeling good about how I tied in non-standard units together and reviewed a five number summary, it was now time to move on. I do what I hardly ever do & I let the students pick their partners. Shocking... right? It is Friday. Let's live on the edge. 

Having recently read this blog by Sarah Carter, I adapted her activity slightly to meet the needs of my seventh graders.  Her original task was about identifying outliers while I wanted my task to focus on constructing box-plots and determining the IQR.  So I adapted slightly. I gathered the materials - and a quick, HUGE shout out to Sarah for the affiliate links to for the dry erase pockets - THOSE ARE AWESOME..... and set my kids out to work. 

I placed the value cards in a brown paper lunch sack, had the kids draw out 12, put them in order and complete the box plot practice template before having it spot checked by me. 

After two pairs had been spot checked by me, I had them fill out a comparison sheet to compare the two sets of data. Each group had to do a minimum of one. 

This is just a start of what I want to do with my students and where I want to go. Years ago, I used to be able to think up these types of activities on my own. Then I burned myself out.  It wasn't due to planning these types of activities for my students. It was due to the fact that I am a mom, a wife, a department chair, a team leader, a tutor, a friend, a good neighbor - and I tried to do all without letting anything go. That's not going to work. Something has got to give. And what's not going to give any more is my creativity.  I also need to realize it takes a village and to rely on my village more. 

Interested in the materials? Sarah's originals are linked to her blog where you can find the numbers. My adaptation of the work mat is here and my comparison sheet is here.