Hello Finally!

I am still alive and kicking, do not fear friends and family! I apologize for not updating my blog since returning from my travels in Southeast Asia over Christmas but it got very busy very quickly here when the students returned. After writing my midterm exams (30+ pages after all is said and done for my three classes) all day today, I finally have a few moments to update my blog.

Now I know that reading long blog posts about travels that you have not experienced yourself can be a little dull, and I don't want to bore you. So I'll give you the highlights from the trip.

Cambodia:

Jane, Kate (the two girls I was traveling with), and I all really enjoyed our time in Cambodia. The poverty is very depressing and always evident, but it was such an amazingly unique place that it was great just to experience it. We toured the genocide museum in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and also made it to the Heart of Darkness (which is a nightclub). We took a bus to Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat, the largest religious complex in the world built in the 12th century, and wished we would have had more time there. It was so impressive!

Vietnam:

After four short days in Cambodia, we took a bus from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City. Our first impressions of Vietnam was that it was busy! Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City) has some of the craziest traffic I have ever seen! In the beginning of our time in Vietnam we really only spent about 12 hours in Saigon because we caught another bus the next day to Dalat, a resort type town in the mountains.

Dalat was an interesting town that I wouldn't need to go back to anytime soon, however we were all very glad that we made a pitstop there because the bus we took from Dalat to Nha Trang was the most beautiful ride I have ever taken!

We arrived in Nha Trang, the "#1 beach in Vietnam," on Christmas Eve for some much needed rest and relaxation in the sun. It was such a unique Christmas since it was 85 degrees and sunny on Christmas day and I swam in the ocean- it was awesome! Of course, I missed seeing my family and thought of all of the gatherings I was missing all day long, but it was pretty fun spending it in Nha Trang.

After Nha Trang, we flew up to Hanoi to spend some time in the Old Quarter of the city. We all really liked Hanoi but it was a little chilly compared to Nha Trang so we missed our sun and sand. After two days in Hanoi, we took a two day overnight trip on Halong Bay- another very beautiful place in this world. Although two days and one night was very short, we all really enjoyed our cruise on Halong Bay and would gladely go back someday.

After spending some time in the north, we headed back down to Saigon to finish up our trip. We were right about our first impressions of Saigon because the traffic was still crazy to us when we returned by the end of our trip. It got even crazier when we went out on New Year's Eve in Saigon; traffic was so thick that once we were out to dinner, we couldn't cross the street to go to a different place until well after midnight. Although we were confined to one side of the street, we still had a great time bringing in the new year in Saigon- definitely the most exotic new year's I've ever spent!

14 days went by very quickly and before we knew it, we were back on a plane heading home to Taiwan. Even though we loved our time in Vietnam and Cambodia, all of us cheered when the plane touched down in the Taipei airport- when you've been away from your home base in Asia for a while, you miss it! Being away from Taiwan makes me realize how nice of a place it is that I live in. I had fun, but I'm glad to be "home" finally.

Now I only have three more weeks before I depart for Thailand for Chinese New Year. Rough life I'm living these days!

Christmas in Taiwan

About a week ago now, we had our annual Christmas concert here at school. I was pretty busy all week getting ready for the break that I didn't have time to do anything with my pictures or video I took...until now!

Enjoy a little taste of my experience with Christmas in Taiwan!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcuDj7ptIeE

So I tried this with 7th Graders....and it went OK I guess

My 7th grade class is always somewhat of a challenge to me because I never know exactly what will motivate them and more importantly, keep their attention. So far throughout this year I have stumbled upon lots of random activities that they like for no apparent reason. There have also been times when I plan and plan and plan for an activity I think they will like and it is a total flop. Needless to say, they are about as unpredictable as any other 7th grader I know.

This week, with the semester wrapping up and Christmas break so close at hand, I decided to slowly introduce concepts we will learn next chapter by doing a hands-on activity with estimation and ratios. I found this activity in one of my NCTM math books (Navigating through Mathematical Connections in Grades 6-8) and I really like the idea of this one. Basically you get a large bag or bowl of some small, countable object; I found some small beans at the grocery store to use. Then you use a method called "capture-recapture" to estimate the number of beans in the bowl.

You first take out a small handful and make a mark on each bean and count them. You put the colored beans back and proceed to take another handful and count both the total number of beans you grabbed and the number of those that have your mark on them. You repeat this seven or eight times and average your results at the end. Finally, you can figure out how many beans are in the bag by using the ratio of total beans you pulled out each time compared to the number of those that were marked which should be a similar ratio to the total number of beans in the bag compared to the total number you marked in the beginning. Environmental scientists use this method often to guess how many fish are in a pond for example.

What I liked about this idea in theory was that the 7th graders would be working with their hands and working in small groups- both things that I thought the boys would excel at. For these very reasons, I split my class up into two groups, four girls in one group and the four boys in the other. Never again will I make this mistake. The differences between boys and girls in the 7th grade is so astronomical and I keep forgetting this; my girls had finished with the entire activity by the end of the hour while the boys hadn't even finished with their first handful after marking their first batch of beans. Needless to say, I also learned a lot during this activity...I learned that girls are better bean counters :)

Overall, I liked the activity, but I think I would structure it a little differently next time and perhaps even try it with older grades.

December Already

Well it's December. I know that it's already December 12th (Happy Birthday Mom!) and I'm just now getting around to writing this blog post, but things got a little busy around here recently! In another week, I will be already in Cambodia for my two week long Christmas vacation in both Cambodia and Vietnam. I am terribly excited as you can imagine, but it still feels years and years away at the moment.

Recently it seems like the weeks have been moving at a snails pace yet when I stop to think about it, it has all gone so quickly. I've been living in Taiwan for four months now and it's already Christmas break. I've been told from the other teachers who have been here for more than a year that it is all downhill from here as well. This week I am giving chapter tests in all of my classes and that will be the last material on the midterm test (which I still need to write...ugh) when we return in January. Midterms, already?

It is also hard for me to grasp that it is truly Christmas season already. Although the weather has cooled slightly to high seventies during the day and fifties at night, it's no blizzard like the current conditions at home. And with all of the sunny weather (sorry to rub it in Minne-snow-ta!) and work to be done wrapping up a semester, I still feel like Christmas must be far off.

This past week however, I did receive two awesome Christmas care packages from home to put me in the spirit. I now have a small Christmas tree sitting on my TV, presents wrapped in green and red sitting on my table, and have already eaten about a dozen spritz cookies. It doesn't feel like the typical Christmas to me for obvious reasons, but having those things from home is appreciated more than you can imagine. So thank you to all who contributed to the Maria Pint Christmas boxes and to all a good night!

Good Activity for Geometry Students

My geometry students all took the Chapter 6 test yesterday and are about to start learning about geometric transformations in the next chapter. For all of you out there who aren't familiar with the term geometric transformations, I assure you that you probably know exactly what they are! Basically it's reflections of shapes, rotations, and translations (when you just slide something over without changing it). So instead of diving right into the chapter in the book, I decided to do a little activity with them today. I found this lesson plan on PBS, which is the best resource for teachers if you ask me:

http://www.pbs.org/teachers/connect/resources/3945/preview/

The challenge is that given a square split into 8 parts (as seen in that activity), there are 13 unique ways to display 1/2 without simply rotating or reflecting a previous way. The students got 7 minutes to try to come up with all of them in partners of their choosing and then we went one by one in the groups to fill in the boxes online. I was able to get the math department projector for today too so we could all watch as each answer was submitted to see if it was right or wrong.

The cool thing about this lesson was that not only did students get introduced to reflections and rotations (we had a discussion after every rejected answer based on it being a previous box simply flipped or rotated) but they were literally cheering when we got the last one together. It was awesome to see my students that excited about math at 8 a.m.!

All of my little kiddos hard at work!

Busy November

Today is the last day of November already. It seems like just yesterday that I first got here and started teaching; the school year is three whole months under way but it still sort of has that new car smell to it. At home, snow is flying yet here it is still 80 degrees during the day. Thanksgiving came and went, and although I wasn't able to do any Black Friday shopping, I was able to eat turkey and gravy and the works (twice even!). Life in Taiwan seems to be going at warp speed.

Tomorrow is the first day of December and before I blink an eye, I'm sure it will be Christmas break. And judging from how fast fall has gone for me, I think in another few blinks I will find myself in spring and then summer. It all makes me realize how quickly this experience is going to pass me by. It makes me a little sad to think about, but it also makes me excited for the future. Another year (or two???) here, and then who knows...

Thanksgiving in Taiwan

Although this is the first Thanksgiving I have ever spent away from family and loved ones, I think Taiwan did us proud on this one. The school brought in turkey and mashed potatoes and stuffing. There was even pumpkin pie for dessert! Even better was the awesome time I got to have with my group of girls that I sit with at every meal, my advisees.

I'm thankful for this amazing life experience and the chance to get to know so many different people from around the world. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!