Summer School Day 4

Due to unforeseen circumstances I find myself at home instead of at summer school since day 1. Although frustrating, it has given me time to ponder why I consider it an important part of each year.

These I think are the main reasons:
1. It gives me an excuse to investigate areas of the curriculum in detail and develop my understanding of a topic
2. It provides time to interact with other mathematics teachers and gain insight into their motivation, teaching methods and knowledge
3. It's a great time to spend with the kids outside the pressure cooker that is TEE (and I know we're supposed to call it WACE now, but the pressure of L3 WACE is far different to level 1 & 2) and gain that rapport that helps when you have to give them a nudge to get over the finish line.
4. It's a time where you can develop method/pedagogy and style and measure results in an environment where you are not going to leave yourself weeks behind if it doesn't work.
5. You can work on the motivational, career oriented, aspirational and inspirational components of students rather than just focus on curriculum.

Russ.

Summer school day 1

Today was the first day of summer school and what a great bunch. We worked on some areas that have caused difficulties in past years...

1. Fractional indicies and how to simplify where the numerator of the index is greater than one or where the index is negative.
2. Graphing a variety of different functions
3. Domain and range of a variety of functions
4. Odd and even functions
5. Piecewise functions and domain/range
6. Counting techniques and associated proofs

From an IT point of view it's great to use tools (such as slideshows) and make them highly interactive through joint presentations with other presenters. The students seem to enjoy the change in venue too! Students were actively challenging each other to speak up when they didn't understand and demanding more information when an explanation was incomplete.

A productive day!

Summer School 2010/2011

Summer school is about to start again when we get our year 10->11 and year 11->12 students ready for level 3 subjects. It was interesting to hear the students volunteering this year and plaguing us to run it so lets hope they turn up.

A whole week of students and just maths. Who would have guessed it would have been successful?

I wish I could find our slides from last year!

IOTY 2010 Winner

And the Idiot of the Year 2010 goes to our perennial winner

... (drum roll please) ...



.... Julia Gillard .....




...for her ongoing support of the myschool website, the diabolical national curriculum rollout, computers in schools schemes and her support for the complete an utter waste of money during the GFC on school rebuilding.

Oh, and please do us a favour Julia, get out of the way and let Ms Bligh do her job... although they might need you around soon with your unending bag of cash.

Congratulations Julia!