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!

Scooter Owner Maria

Well it's official, I own a scooter!

My friend and coworker, Jane, and I struck a deal with a nice Indian man who has lived in Taichung for the past 5 years about buying two scooters he had for sale. This afternoon while I was teaching, Jane had some preps and went to go meet the Indian man and his cousin at the DMV. These scooters are now safely registered under our names, we have paid full in cash, and I even got a name stamp out of the deal!

Let me explain that last part. Everyone (well, almost everyone) in Taiwan (and possibly other Asian countries as well) signs their name with a personalized name stamp. Since each persons name is generally broken down into three chinese characters, they easily fit on a small square stamp that people just carry with them. So apparently this cousin of the Indian man who sold us our scooters is very good friends with some people at the Taichung DMV and while Jane was waiting for the paperwork to process, this cousin went ahead and had them make us our very own name stamps too!

A scooter AND a personalized name stamp?! Thanks Indian man and your cousin.