Graduation arrives; I'll try to savor it

Among many other things, the last year has been incredibly hectic. Which is why I'm really looking forward to Saturday. Graduation Day. The work for the MAC program isn't finished yet, and there is still much student teaching left to be done, but for tomorrow at least, I'm going to try to savor how much we have achieved. I probably won't ever earn another degree (especially by completing 40 credits in 11 months or so). I may never hear another sitting president speak in person. And I can't imagine working with a better group of people than I have in the MAC program. I'll reflect on all of those things tomorrow.

Here's to mentor teachers

As I was finishing up some school work for the week, I got to thinking about the incredible role that mentor teachers play in our development. In my case, Michele Macke at Pioneer High has been unbelievable. She's trusted me in the classroom, she's encouraged me to try different things, she's been understanding about our myriad MAC assignments and she has supported me throughout the year. Most of all, though, she's been an incredible model for me when it comes to great teaching. Michele, I thank you, and thank all the other mentor teachers who have helped our program this year. A few years down the road, I hope I can give back to the teaching community in a similar way.

NCAA Math Madness

I was still reveling in my alma mater's NCAA Championship victory over Butler earlier this month (take that Carolina!), when I came across a blog posting that had compiled a number of ways to link the tournament to math. In my Algebra II classes, I had drawn a graph of the number of teams that remained in the tournament by round, and the students make the connection between that representation, exponential decay functions and geometric series. Here's a link to some additional ways that teachers have helped turn March Madness in Math Madness.

One year ago.....

One year ago, I had just accepted admission to the MAC program, had no idea what a taxonomy table was and hadn't spent a full day in a high school classroom in 25 year. How time has flown. The academic part of the program is winding down, I've been student teaching full time since January and I'm beginning to start my job search in earnest. It's been an incredibly busy, stressful and enjoyable time. After celebrating our graduation in a few weeks, I hope we will all be able to look back at our year in the MAC program with a well-deserved sense of accomplishment.