Taking a line out of Ice Cube's lyrics, 'Today was a good day'. Well, honestly it's been a pretty good couple of days as of late...and I hope it continues. This year I am teaching 5 classes of AP, and one geometry support class. Actually, my AP courses have converted into dual-credit credit courses with a 4-year University a couple hours away. That has created a whole new approach for me in my teaching as the district is covering 2/3 of the cost of the course for the students, so for just a little bit more than the cost of an AP exam, students can eliminate the stress associated with a one-day high stakes test and instead get the grade earned in the class over the course of the entire year. So my 2 sections of statistics, 2 sections of Calculus AB, and one new section of Calculus BC all the on this format. Because we can take a little bit more time now, I am really working on developing topics a bit deeper now and trying to get students to interact with the mathemat
Okay, this #MTBoSBlaugust thing is going to make me write, and I'm going to commit to it this year! This past year, I was one of several teachers in our building that piloted our high school's move into Standards-Based Grading, or Grading for Learning (GfL) as we're calling it. You can read more about my initial planning on this whole process here , as I really only intended to try it out in my AP Calculus AB course. I also presented on my journey at our Wisconsin Math Council State Math Conference last May, and you can view the slides here . I had originally planned to revamp the structure of my calculus course from the onset as AP scores were falling steadily over the previous 4-5 years, and it seemed that students just weren't grasping the material as readily as well compared to a decade earlier. So, that was my impetus for a total overhaul and a more integrated and spiraled approach to the topics. Since I was overhauling everything anyways, and I knew we wer