With Shiriyah hours away...the math department took time to play

Anyone familiar with Frisch knows that our week long celebration and grade level competition called Shiriyah is more than an elaborate color war.  It is multi-facet 100% student created extravaganza of movies, dance routines, murals, banners, and songs highlighting a theme or holiday aspects of Judaism.  It is a chance for our students to learn and work together on a grand scale outside the confines of their classrooms. Though I am a 15 year veteran of Shiriyah, I still find the incredible display the students collaboratively put together simply astounding.


For Frisch teachers, the inherent schedule of Shiryah gives us time to reflect on our progress over the past five months and start to work on our group and individual goals for the remaining part of the year.  The math department used some down time during this past week then to focus on two important topics: the changes in standardized tests and the various uses of technology in our classrooms.

Mrs. Sabrina Bernath, Frisch Math Department Chair, ran the first meeting which focused on standardized tests. Each teacher was present with a thick packet of sample problems which reflect the new type of questions being asked on the new version of the SAT.  With even more emphasis on linear equations and students being able to analyze various types of graphs. the department worked on these different sample questions and discussed how to help students improve upon these ever important skills. Members shared their various ideas about how to fit these types of questions into our already packed curriculum.

Additionally, the math teachers focused next on the various topics of the SAT 2 level 1 and level 2 subject tests.  They examined closely the various types of questions being asked about functions, conics, rational functions, sequences/series, and any other advance topics on each exam.  Comparing the two exams brought to light their different focuses which is not obvious just from reading descriptions of the tests on the College Board website. Not only are the list of tested topics slightly different between the exams but also the emphasis on how to apply that material varies also.

This PD refresher on what our top level math students need to learn to be successful on these exams was a productive and effective use of time.  While we are not solely prepping students for outside tests, it is important to keep in mind the various skills sets measured by these external assessments.


The second PD meeting of the department focused on three specific apps /programs different members of the department are currently using in their classrooms.  Prior to the meeting, teachers were asked to fill out a survey answering questions about the use of technology in their classrooms for administrative duties, to instruction to assessment.  Based on those results, various members of the department were asked to present.

First, Sabrina Bernath showed the functionality of a rubric she created for her twelfth grade Precalculus video project. The rubric is an embedded part of her Haiku gradebook and not only can she enter a grade using the various subsections of the rubric, she demonstrated also how she can leave comments for each criteria. Once the grade is made public, student can not only see their grade but also comments from the teacher.  The members of the department were excited by this enhanced feature and the extensive customization you can do with it.

Next Katya Gourge, a first year teacher at Frisch, showed her incredible creations using Geometer's Sketchpad.  Ms. Gourge makes unique and elaborate demonstrations  to teach her ninth grade Geomtry students many of the most difficult properties and theorems of the course.  Her one of a kind creations help students visualize the theorems and ideas the course. Her skill set with the program is impressive and the members of the department immediately requested further PD time to learn more from her about incredible program.

Finally, Michael Gatto, another first year teacher at Frisch, highlighted key features of GeoGebra.  This program has even greater capabilities to help students visualize topics not just from Geometry but all areas of mathematics with pre-made templates and user- friendly interface that allows teachers to easily to create their own custom programs.  With the incredible accessibility for both teachers and students as a free Web based program, the members of the department also requested extensive PD later this year and into the summer with this program. Though the meeting ended after an hour, several teachers continued the discussion in another locations and Mr. Gatto continued teaching several of the other math teachers how to use GeoGebra in their classes.

As we begin the winter break, the math teachers at Frisch are already looking forward to returning.  They can't wait to show their students all their worked on during Shiriyah also.  Maybe not as exciting as the students' stomp routines but just as important to their overall education.

The Frisch Math Team - the most impressive athletes on campus!

Frisch is proud to have many boys’ and girls’ winning sports teams.  From our back to back champion boys’ varsity baseball team to our three time yeshiva league girls’ volleyball team, there is a lot of competing and winning that occurs with Frisch athletes. There is another team at Frisch though that is not as well known but is also competing and winning all the time….The Frisch Math League Team!

The Frisch Math League is comprised of around 20+ students from all four grade levels.  With plans to create our own team jersey, this group of math minded young men and women are bright, determined, and eager to show their academic prowess.  The team has already had an activity filled year with more events planned for the next few months.

For those of you who don’t know, Frisch competes in two yeshiva Math bowls, one at SAR and another at Heschel.  These two events are highlights of the year where students get to compete against the best and brightest math students in the greater yeshiva community.  Just as many people know of the student athletes in basketball or hockey, so too do these students know of the best math minds at other schools.  With awe and admiration, they relish the chance to compete head to head or mind to mind shall we say with their friends and peers in these intense all day math competitions.

The Frisch math team also takes part in the New Jersey Math League.  Just this week the team took exam #3  out of six administered by the state high . A sample question from an exam last year is the following:

“Suppose a hotel has rooms numbered 1-14 and keys also numbered 1-14 BUT the room numbers and key numbers do not have to match. Instead, the keys are assigned to the rooms so that the sum of the room number and the key number is always an exact multiple of 3. How many ways can this be done ?

(The answer is 345,600)”

The five highest scores are entered into a state database and we are ranked against some of the best private and public high schools in the state.  We are proud to say that we even had a 6/6 ( a perfect score) on the first exam this year from a freshman!  Few students if any will score a perfect 6/6 in their entire high school careers but Frisch students have done that impressive feat repeatedly!

 

Math Team Athletes taking a New Jersey Math League Exam

The Math Team has many future events coming up including the AMC 10 and AMC 12 exams in February and a possible shabbaton/yeshiva math competition at Yale University in April.  Always eager for more opportunities to do math competitively, the team enjoys a full plate of activities.

Besides competing in various state and national competitions, the Math League also meets twice a month after school.  The sessions vary between practicing for the various math competitions to listening to presentations from guest speakers.  This past math team meeting Frisch faculty member Mr. Herb Grossman presented on the Binomial Theorem.  It was a fascinating talk which the students loved.  They have already requested that he come back no less than two more times to discuss possibly determinants and conic sections. Future presenters will include Mrs. Rhona Flaumenhaft of the Frisch math department discussing polar coordinates and the team’s own president Gabriel Dardik ‘16 who will be speaking about non-Euclidean Geometry.

The remainder of the year for the Math Team will be fun, educational and full of numbers….exactly how these athletes like it!  

9th grade Centroid Activity by Frisch math teacher Debbie Stein

One of my favorite ways that I like to enhance instruction in my math classroom, particularly in Geometry, is by using hands-on learning with my students.  This  has them in effect learn by discovery.  Nothing beats watching my students as they actively engage in the learning process by exploring concepts, answering questions and discovering new relationships.   As they work in cooperative groups I can see their confidence and self-esteem grow as they assume responsibilities within the team. In addition to this, I usually find that my students show higher comprehension of the concepts that they discovered on their own.

I introduced this activity to my students after we discussed the median and midpoint of a triangle.  I then explained to them that the centroid of a triangle is the center of gravity for a triangle.  The students were assigned a group where they constructed triangles, located the midpoints of each side of the triangle, drew in medians and then located the centroid which happens to be the intersection of the medians of the triangle.  The students were able to prove that the centroid is the point of balance by threading a knotted string through the centroid and watching their triangle balance as they held up the string.

I then had each group measure and record the distances from the midpoint to the centroid and the centroid to the vertex of the triangle.  The students were excited to see and discover a pattern!  They came to realize through the hands-on lesson that the distance from the centroid to the vertex of a triangle will always be twice the distance from the midpoint to the centroid of a triangle.

As an extension to this activity, the students went through a process of locating the center of balance for an L-shaped figure.  Students were quick to discover, as they all created L-shapes of different sizes, that while the centroid of a triangle must always lie inside the triangle, the centroid of an L-shaped figure will not always lie inside the shape.

It was  a fun and educational activity for  my 9th grade class  right before Thanksgiving break. They really  “learned  by doing”!

"GoFormative" " New Technology for a New School Year

In many classrooms, formative assessments are given during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student attainment, but are difficult to administer and grade in a timely fashion without the assessment's initial purpose getting lost. Goformative.com, a new website that I learned about during ISTE this past summer, has transformed the way in which I assign and grade formative assessments. "Formative" is a user-friendly website which allows teachers to create original or embed preexisting material into short assessments. A simple quiz takes only minutes to create. 

Intervene in the moments that matter most.

GET LIVE RESULTS!

The true beauty of "Formative", though, is the ability to grade - and send feedback about - students' results in real-time. Students were enthused to receive scores and feedback instantly, and as a teacher I find it exhilarating to see and mark students instantly. The first time that I launched the website, I showed the results on the SmartBoard, capitalizing on the pulsing excitement in the room. 

I've been in constant contact with the founders of Goformative.com since my discovery of the website - from a private Google Hangout with one of the primary founders, tweets with them on Twitter, and live chats where I have asked specific questions and received specific responses via email. I look forward to using this program throughout the year and tracking students' progress in a more efficient and exciting way. 

by Mrs. Shira Techiman

Math Teacher and Enthusiast

Summer is a fabulous time to learn!

The Frisch Math Department once again is having a successful and productive summer. Various members of the department have taken advantage of a little down time to brush up on their own teaching and technology skills.  Teaching is truly a 12 month job for professionals are serious and devoted as the Frisch Math Department.

The summer learning got off to a great start when Elissa Katz, Shira Teichman, Rhona Flaumenhaft, Sabrina Bernath along with seven other Frisch faculty members attending the ISTE 2015 conference in Philadelphia at the end of June.  The annual three day conference is the the singlest largest edtech gathering of teachers and vendors in the country.  From large ( 400+) lecture sessions to small group settings in the Playground section, Frisch math teachers learned from expert in the field of educational technology and pedagogy.  Besides several hundred daily sessions on blended learning, flipped classrooms, real time assessment to choose from, teachers walked the Expo floor to learn about the latest software and apps in the marketplace. It was an exhausting and inspiring trip that each one of us walked away from with many new and exciting ideas. We can wait to try out all that we learned.

Here is a photo of Rabbi Pittinsky, Director of Educational Technology, Dr.Mindy Furman, Head of the Science Department, Rifki Silverman, Head of Engineering, Ahuva Mantell, Head of the Arts Program, and Rhona Flaumenhaft, math department faculty member up late at night learning how to set up Twitter accounts.

Frisch Faculty collaborating and learning into the night.

A week after ISTE, Frisch math faculty member Elissa Katz was yet again back in school learning.  She attended a week long College Board summer session on AP Statistics at Fordham University. Besides learning the recent changes to the exam, Elissa was given a chance to relearn many ideas from her graduate studies in Statistics with the benefit of newer and more advance technology. She said the teacher and course were "amazing".  Here is a cute picture of her working hard  in one of the sessions.

A highlight of the Frisch calendar for teachers is actually August when Rabbi Tzvi Pittinsky, the Director of Educational Technology, runs his one of kind Technology Boot Camp. His month long schedule of progressive and innovative sessions are highly anticipated each year as teachers look forward to learning from a recognized expert in the world of edtech.

This past Monday, six members of the Frisch math department met with Rabbi Pittinsky to learn about and explore Educanon and Formative. Educanon is a web based tool which allows a teacher to create a virtual worksheet for a preexisting video.  Rather than ask questions about the content discussed in the film at the end, Educanon pauses the video and allows the teacher to ask multiple choice, fill in the blank, and free response questions which it then grades and records the results on a teacher dashboard.  It is a powerful tool to assess student's learning.  Formative is an online formative assessment tool.  By giving your students' a class code, students and  their device of choice are automatically  entered into your "online classroom".  All work they perform with their device is visible to the teacher on their iPad or laptop.   With a choir of "oh" and "ahs" as the two programs were demoed, both Educanon and Formative will be sure to be utilized in your child's math classroom this Fall.

Mrs. Teichman demos Formative to members of the Math Department.

With so much excitement building about the upcoming school year, the math department is eager to get things started.  It is going to be a great year and we look forward to working with your child soon!

Math Never Hiberates!!!!

While things might be chilly outside the Frisch math department is far from hibernating.  Besides the exciting teaching occurring in a typical school day, there is a great deal of math being explored both by our students and teachers outside of the classroom.

The Frisch Math Team has just taken the 5th out of 6 New Jersey math league contest exam. It is an annual series of contests which ask questions not typical in a high school math classroom. On this past exam one question was “ Suppose a hotel has rooms numbered 1- 14 and keys also numbered 1-14 BUT the room numbers and key numbers do not have to match.  Instead, the keys are assigned to the rooms so that the sum of the room number and the key number is always an exact multiple of 3.  How many ways can this be done?”  Not your average problem ...right?  The answer is at the end of this blog.  Many of our mathematically inclined cougars on this popular “ team” have been getting 6/ 6 on these contests which is nothing less than incredible considering that they only have 30 minutes each contest to complete all 6 questions.  

Even students not on our “Math Team” are welcome to take the American Math Contest (AMC 10 and 12) later this month.  The AMC is a 75 minute multiple choice exam to identify the very best math students in the country.  The AMC 10 covers basic algebra and geometry.  The AMC 12 covers all of high school mathematics with the exception of calculus.  Those who qualify based on their scores in the AMC 12 are given the opportunity to compete in the International Math Olympiad.  We hope Frisch will be represented!

Students are not the only ones busy outside of class time. The teachers of the math department are busy learning about the latest online math programs in their weekly tech meetings.  They recently had an online session with a representative from KnowRe.  This coming week they are having a representative from “Think Through Math”  give an in-person presentation to our whole department.   Texas Instruments and Ten Marks are other vendors they will be meeting in the Spring as they continue to explore the best online math platforms for our students.

Additionally, to continue to foster their own professional growth, several members of our department will be returning to New Brunswick this March to attend the 29th Annual “ Good Ideas in Teaching PreCalc and…” conference through the DIMAS Center, the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science,  at Rutgers University.  We are honored that our Math Department Chair Mrs. Sabrina Bernath has been chosen to present at this conference for the first time. Her topic is, “The Use of Technology for Differentiated Instruction in Algebra I and Algebra 2”.  She is looking forward to sharing the successful and innovative approaches already being used at Frisch.  

Below is a picture from last year’s PreCalc conference at Rutgers of several Frisch math teachers.  They loved being students once again!

It is only March so there is still a great deal more math in the coming weeks.  Students and teachers are working hard to have our most productive and successful year yet. By the way the answer to the question about the hotel rooms and the keys is 345,600 but I am sure you already knew that.

Is there more than just giving tests? Reflections on a math PBL by Shira Teichman.

Anyone who knows of my background in Secondary Math Education and/or my current position as a high school math teacher feels obliged, it seems, to email me links to the myriad of math-related articles that are currently riddled throughout Twitter feeds and newspapers.

Many articles have little to no bearing on my teaching (e.g. the private school that I teach in did not need to reorient their curriculum to fit the Common Core), but one recurring topic did truly tug at my pedagogical conscience: TESTS. How much emphasis should we give to students' performance on tests?  Why are tests so anxiety-provoking, to the point that they often hinder students from showing their knowledge masterfully? What are other forms of assessment that can supplement tests? How truthful is the age-old saying, "either you know it [on the test day], or you don't!"?

In an attempt to answer some of these questions, I brainstormed with a colleague and we decided to assign an Independent Study project to be completed once during each of the four terms of this year in two classes that we co-teach. These projects would serve a dual purpose. They would help diminish the weight of tests in the average calculated each marking period. Moreover, these projects would give students the opportunity to apply some of the skills they were learning to real-world scenarios, thereby reinforcing knowledge in the context of an interesting topic of study. 

My "grade-level" sophomore Algebra 1 class does not cease to amaze me; all of them were receptive to, and most of them were quite enthused by, this idea. The students were allowed to choose from a list of topics of study - ranging from the distance from Earth to the Sun during a year's perihelion, to unit pay rates of entertainers like Leonardo DiCaprio as compared to athletes like Koby Bryant. 

The beauty of this Independent Study was that both the teachers and the students worked independently. Once they chose a topic, the students accessed and printed accompanying worksheets from our class website and answered the questions that followed a graph, article, or excerpt of information. Although they were allowed to confer with teachers and classmates, or look on the web for help, students could complete the assignments entirely on their own. Furthermore, as teachers, we worked very "independently"; these assignments were taken from excellent websites such as yummymath.com, illuminations.nctm.com, and mathalicious.com, which our Math supervisor mentioned briefly in a summer professional development session after she met some of these site-writers at the ISTE Convention.   

We were amazed with the results of these projects. When we eliminated the build-up of pressure and the frantic race against the 40-or-so minute timer that accompanies a test, the students produced work that showed self-motivation, creativity, thoughtfulness,application and retention of skills, and mathematical rigor. We are particularly proud to see our sophomores strengthen their ability to learn and produce mathematical work independently of a structured classroom lesson. Aren't all of these components what we math teachers strive to see students display on a test...?