The Death of Animated Algebra

My dean just killed the class. I don't think I'm ever going to try anything innovative again.

Spring Recruitment Begins

As Spring rolls around my head begins to shake in amazement. All the *other* Algebra classes are half-full, but Animated Algebra has ZERO students. I don't know why this is such a hard sell. I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle.

This semester K and I visited an uninspiring total of three classes, which is upsetting because last semester we gained three students through classroom visitations. The remaining three were my students. I wanted to visit more, but K's adjuncts never answered her emails, and she didn't follow through.

Last semester I taught the class with just a few students. I don't think I'll be allowed to do that next semester.

Why do I try anything innovative at all? The students just don't appreciate it, and to be honest I think administration is less than enthusiastic. After all, publicity = enthusiasm.

Digital Learning

I found out in junior high that I was never going to be one of those super-organized students, with all the folders and brads and dividers, but over the years I've learned to digitally fake it. One of my goals this semester, as an Algebra student, is to see how using a TabletPC in class would impact my learning experience. For the most part I've been very happy. This entry is a run-down of pitfalls and unexpected advantages, and a short summary of the tools that worked for me.

OneNote has been my main companion, allowing me to organize my notes and homework in a straightforward fashion. Luckily our textbook publisher uses a Blackboard-like system that includes PDFs of the textbook chapters. I was able to download the PDFs, and link to them in OneNote. As you can see in the image below (click for a close-up) I have a separate tab for each chapter's section. On the right you can see separate pages for my homework and for associated lecture notes. The first page of the homework (pictured) features a list of problems, and links to the related textbook PDF files.

I really love this system. My default paper is graph paper, which is ever so handy in an Algebra class. I like being able to write in different colors, as shown in the second illustration. And capturing complicated problems straight from the textbook, minimizing the risk of mis-copy, has also been a blessing.







I think one of my favorite features is the ability to "star" problems I'm having trouble with, and then find them instantly later when needed.

And of course I love being paperless. Katherine posts a good deal of the math class material on Blackboard, so there isn't as much paper for me to loose.

I also like the free flash card program included in Microsoft's TabletPC Education Pack. It's a little slow sometimes, but indispensable as test time rolls around. My original plan was to make flash cards in class as Katherine lectures, copying sections of my notes directly to the cards, but ink from OneNote didn't paste correctly. The Education Pack also features an Equation Writer, but that was a pretty stupid feature. I used it exactly once, wearing my Teacher Hat, when I made a class handout. I never found any reason to use it as a student.

Calculators have been a bit of a hassle. I played with several free calculators, and the best I found is GraphCalc. The basic functionality is good, and I love some of the features. A few things (like plotting a series of specified points) seem to be missing, but the manual is spotty. Maybe I'll find those missing features later. I do love the way it keeps track of all the graphs I've made from one session to another. I put the basic "library of functions" on a tab, so if I need to manipulate, say, the square root function's graph I already have a nice head-start.




My favorite calcing app may change, though. Yesterday I bought Microsoft Student 2007 with Encarta Premium, just so I could get my hands on the graphing calculator. So far all I've done is install the program, and so far I'm not impressed. The install routine has junked up my hard drive with stuff I don't want, like over one thousand book summaries, Office templates, foreign-language dictionaries, and a ton of files related to Encarta. (I don't want Encarta -- I'm a Wikipedia girl.) I'll play with it this week, and post again later.

Calculators had one huge problem I didn't foresee. The testing center wouldn't let me take my TabletPC into the test room (gee, is there a problem with that officer?) so I had to use TI-183. I guess I should say I attempted to use a TI-183. I couldn't even begin to make it work, and it's not like the testing center has manuals to loan out. I didn't do so well on that test. I think the calculator would have helped me figure out I was making a ton of sign errors.

The other issues I faced were boot-up time and battery life.

The tablet took FOREVER to boot, sometimes as long as five minutes, so I would sometimes miss the first few minutes of class, which as everyone knows is prime note-taking time. About halfway through the semester I started booting while I was in the parking lot.

My tablet is an older model, so I could only get about four hours of battery life out of it. If I forgot to charge I would be up a creek, except I claimed a desk near a wall outlet early in the semester. The two times I forgot my AC adapter I was *really* up a creek, and actually had to borrow a pencil and paper from a fellow student. Oh, the shame!!

Population Explosion

I spent this evening working on a visual aide for K to use in the lecture class. It demonstrates linear growth and exponential growth using little people cartoons. Everything works fine until I run the exponential part of the program, and then all the people overload my computer, forcing me to shut down the program. I was going to fix this "bug" but decided not to because it's a very visual and viscercal demonstration of exponential growth issues!!

Wow, it's been such a wonderful semester. I didn't blog nearly enough, partially because I feel guilty because I'm not spending as much time on the class as I should. The class isn't as solid as I'd like, and that's mostly due to my shortcomings. Next semester I'm cutting back on my teaching load so I'll have more time to work on everything.

I still think the class has been successful. We have students who have told us they understood Algebra concepts better after being required to program using the concepts. Transformations were particularly successful. That exercise lead to the end-of-the-semester team project, a video game featuring a canon on a cliff launching cannonball at boats in the water below. The whole class is excited about the project, and almost every class member has asked me questions outside of class time. At least one student is going to take trigonometry, and another will tackle C++. And one ambitious student will be taking both.

We had one drop, which saddens me. I know the student had personal issues, but I also think she's in danger of doing what I do all too often -- she letting one failure give her an excuse to cry, and while she's crying she misses a deadline and has another failure, generating another excuse to cry, leading to another failure. She's (OK, the two of us) are nothing more than a row of dominos waiting to be pushed over.

Anyway, I'm a better programmer because of the class. My ActionScript has sharpened. Dynamically-created objects, which used to give me royal headaches, are much easier now. Scope and global variables, things I knew about but didn't really use unless forced to, are part of my daily existence now that I'm trying to write ActionScript 3.0-compliant code. Next semester I hope to spend more time on OOP. Students can parrot some of the basic concepts, but I want to have them writing their own classes by the end of the semester. I'm hoping to fit it in this semester, but since we only have three weeks left I don't think we'll get many chances.

Channeling Mrs. Adams and Test Reprise

Very quickly -- it wasn't the Testing Center's fault I failed the test. It was my fault. I wasn't as prepared as I should have been, and I was NERVOUS, and all of that is my fault. I'm just shocked that so many things could be poorly communicated in such a short period of time.

Anyway --

Devled headfirst into a lesson from Flash Math Creativity today, and asked the students to make four variations of the file. I can't wait to see what they come up with. It was an interesting class, at least from my perspective. We took a huge block of code with some unfamiliar stuff, and went through it line by line. We explicitly covered some things I hoped they would pick up by example -- using the Help file, changing variables to see what the change does to to the program in hopes of figuring out what the variables are, and the importance of commenting code!!!

This was all wonderful, but I meant to start off class talking about functions. I made a mistake in K's class that I wanted to correct very first thing. But I was so excited about the Flash Math exercise that I forgot, and had to stop in the middle of the lesson and cover material I should have started with!

To this end I'm going to make a more determined effort to channel Mrs. Adams.

Mrs. Adams was one of my favorite teachers at John Adams Middle School. It's more accurate to say she was one of everyone's favorite teachers. She taught history to sixth graders, and was so slick that it sometimes took me years to realize what a particular moment in her class had been about.

A classic Mrs. Adams gamebit would be the absent-minded professor routine. She would ask students to help keep her on track -- had she asked for homework already? What did we do yeaterday? She would pretend to forget facts so we could volunteer answers. She would encourage us to write and speak in slang if necessary, just so long as we were expressing ourselves originally. She made us, little 12-year-olds, feel like we had some control over what happened in the room. (She was old, so she needed us!)

(I think my favorite Mrs. Adams story was when Corey S. brought a shuriken to class. Mrs. A pretended she had never seen such a neat thing, would Corey mind if she took it home to show her husband? Corey let her, and Mrs. A. spent the rest of the semester forgetting to bring it back to campus. I loved it -- dangerous object removed from a child's hands without the bother of involving admin, who would have come down on poor Corey like a ton of bricks, which was the last thing he needed at that stage. Now, of course, a shuriken would be taken much more seriously, but in 1980 we were still fairly naive.)

I'm going to channel a little Mrs. Adams. "Did anyone look at eCampus? What are we doing today?" If I can get them to buy into my feather-headed-ness early then they'll keep me on track all semester.

A Failure to Communicate

I’m anxious. I’m upset. I can feel my brains leaking out of my ears. You guessed it. I’m about to take a test in NLC’s Testing Center.

Before my visit I went online and tried to find the weekend hours, but the posted hours on their home page are for summer. My anxiety kicks up a notch. What if they’re closed and I missed my deadline? I take a deep breath, and skim “General Information for Students” so I would have an idea of what to expect. OK, I can do this. It seems all I need is an ID, and if I want to I could rent a locker.

The Testing Center is somewhere on the 4^th floor. I’ve walked past it several times, at least once a month on average since the remodel. And even though I know this fact I’m listening to all my doubts, the ones that are also telling me I’m about to fail this test, and I start to wonder if maybe the Testing Center has been moved. My fear index creeps up a little further. I walk fast now, unconsciously trying to bleed off some of my anxiety.

When I find the center people are coming out of the door, so I go in, not realizing there is a bunch of information posted on that outer door. In the inner room people are messing with lockers. I’ve read the website, and I don’t need a locker, so I walk through a cloud of anxiety is so thick you could cut it with a knife. I open the door to Mission Control, and am confronted with a DMV-style line.

What a horrible room. Big glass windows, all the better to see you with my dear! That cold, cold, lifeless color scheme. Loud ugly scantron machines. Big barricading counters. Everything is sharp, ugly, and either impersonal or all too personably intrusive. Big Brother is alive and well.

After waiting in line for ten minutes (feeling my brain continuing to pool around my feet) a proctor informs me I needed to fill out a form. I instantly feel stupid, and resentful of the time I’ll have to waste standing in line twice. “Thanks for the sign!” I sputter in frustration. The proctor looks at me with a combination of pity and mild exasperation. Pity because I’m clearly upset, and exasperation because he’s probably been through this a hundred times today. He explains the sign is posted everywhere in the locker room.

I go back into the locker room and finally notice the signs about the forms. The white signs posted on the white walls, all written with same-size, same-weight super-dull capital letters centered in the middle of the page. I look back to Mission Control’s door, and notice this important sign is posted in a cluster of presumably equally-important signs. (All white, all dull, and altogether too much information for that one small space.) The sign I should have read is the one furthest from the door.

I fill out the form again, and this time when I reach the counter I try to explain to a different proctor how bad the signs are, that maybe the Testing Center should consult with Elyse Gappa or another campus graphic designer. The proctor I’m dealing very pointedly looks away from me, and shuts me down with a cool “I don’t think so.” Subject closed, feedback deflected into the impersonal chilled air of Mission Control.

When I get in to take my test I’m so upset that I can’t concentrate. My game plan was to have a quick brain dump – write down all the facts I’ve been mumbling under my breath for twenty minutes, all the things I’m afraid I’ll forget or have to remember to double-check. I didn’t do a brain dump, and I forgot key information.

It’s very hard to concentrate. My brain keeps skittering back to the upsetting stuff instead of focusing on the math in front of me. My people-oriented mind wants to analyze what went wrong out there rather than think about the quadratic formula.

So what exactly did go wrong?

• Outdated information on website.
• Incomplete information on website. Why didn’t it mention the forms? Why isn’t there a “What To Expect” section?
• No signage on 4^th floor to help people locate the testing center[1].
• Pitiful signage inside testing center.
• Unfriendly atmosphere
• One indifferent employee who should have been trained on how to handle feedback. Giving me a suggestion form would have been a nice gesture, and would have given him a graceful way to end the conversation.

Lots of little things, but the little things are important. My test, which I’m sure I failed because I forgot several little things, can serve as proof of this concept.

Yes, I know the testing center is always going to be somewhat intimidating. The center’s purpose requires big glass windows and security procedures. We’re probably stuck with the newly-remodeled industrial butt-ugly color scheme, and with the sharp-edged counters.

There are things that can be changed, though. Better signs would be great. An updated, more informative web page would be wonderful. Some personal touches – photos, action figures, anything. A few plants would be nice. The old testing center had big windows with a view I could look at when I needed to calm my mind. In the new center all I can look at are worried students, and if I look at them I’ll probably be accused of cheating.

A little sympathy wouldn’t kill anyone, either. What harm would a “Good Luck!” sign have? Personally I’d like to see a little humor, too, like maybe a Buddha statue we could rub for luck, but some overly Christian soul would probably complain.

---

[1] Extended Rant: Signage is a big problem at NLC!! That horrible map in the schedule isn’t helping. Sure, we can find a building from the outside, but it isn’t much help when we’re in the middle of C and trying to find our way to J. And where is the “B” building? And why aren’t the rooms in the T Building’s second floor in numerical order? Who do you talk to when you enter the President’s suite, especially when you’re confronted with all those high, identical, people-concealing cubicles? What are all those little white intercoms in the hallway for? Do the red phones in the computer labs call the police?

For Want of a Nail

I spent over an hour this week trying to find a beginner-level well-written MX-or-better tutorial on functions. I can't find one anywhere, and it's really getting depressing. There is so much information on the Net, and so freaking much of it is just re-creation!! It takes too long to sort through the junk to find the treasures. My lab assistants have been helpful here. I have them find three good tutorials and send me the URLs, then I pick from the three.

I wish all those tutorial-conglomeration websites, like tutorialize and tutorialfind.com were better. I'd like to see more than star ratings -- amazon.com-style comments would be invaluable. Especially if people would start commenting!! Getting people to participate is difficult. It's one of the biggest problems with my online classes.

Animated Algebra is going well. We spent this week on timelines, programming the common-library buttons, and functions. I wish I had more time. I want to write my own functions tutorial. Hopefully I'll have some time over the winter break, if I'm not too busy cramming in graduate classes.

I'd rather avoid grad school altogether, but I'll need the classes in order to continue teaching this baby. The alternative is to find a third teaching partner, but I'm very reluctant to do that. K and I are getting along well, and I don't want to add a third person to the mix. And the one person I approached about this (a math- and comp sci-qualified person) shocked me by suggesting we shove K out of the project!