Music Video Time!

Happy Monday one and all! I hope everybody enjoyed a nice relaxing weekend. This week Ms. Gavan is gone to her brother's wedding back east and the students will be continuing with their Music Video projects in her absence. We're on schedule to have them done by the end of this week, but we'll just have to see how well the students do without her outstanding guidance and modelling. I recently signed up for a trial account with heymath.net (google it if it doesn't come up immediately) and we'll be pulling from that a bit this week. In case any of you want to check it out the evaluation username is evalscb4017 and the password is the same. We're actively searching for an answer to our dearth of curriculum supplies for the kids, and Heymath seems like it might fall into line with the principles of High Tech quite nicely, so take a look and let me know what you think as your input will undoubtedly prove useful as we try to make the best possible decision for our students. -Mr. H

testing...testing....

Well, I'd be lying if I said I was happy with the scores from our first test. Overall both classes right now are sitting at a C+ average, far lower than I was hoping for, although I hold out a little hope for that average to rise to a B- when the students who were absent on Friday take their tests later today. The results were very surprising for me, not just because the average was so low (I was aware that it was a difficult test) but because the range was so great. In one class I had seven F's, seven A's and all the rest in the B range. Naturally, I was feeling like a pretty lousy teacher while I was grading these things this weekend, but I was encouraged a bit when I noticed that most students were missing points not because they didn't know how to do the problem correctly, but because they had made some astonishingly careless errors. Among the more embarassing of these were incidents of failing to copy the problem correctly, omitting decimals in the process of solving the problem, adding instead of subtracting (even when the operation is clearly labelled and set up correctly), or the error I personally find the most exasperating to see: mistaking one number for another because of poor penmanship. There were also numerous examples of students missing points because of a failure to completely adhere to the directions of the test or the individual problem. Clearly, there are some areas of math (aside from the actual lessons) that I will be addressing in the coming weeks. One of my initial ideas is to give the students no less than one hour with their test in the hopes that if they are forced to look at their work even after they are finished, they may discover some of the careless errors they made (this didn't happen during this test because I allowed the students to turn in their test as soon as they were finished, prompting too many to turn it in without adequately reviewing). Another idea I will be introducing in the coming weeks is the concept of doing a "reality check" after each problem. This conicides with my own desire to have the students obtain a true understanding of math rather than an understanding of its processes and consists of a simple review of each problem and the supposed answer upon completing the problem (4.04 + 6.22 = 10.26? Reality Check: four and some plus six and some is ten and some. Ok, that answer is probably right. 3.58 - 1.02 = 4.6? Reality Check: three and some minus 1 and some is four and some. Ok, that answer is probably wrong, where did I screw up?). Hopefully with some proactive strategies and rigorous enforcement we will be able to minimize the careless errors occuring on exams and see a subsequent rise in scores. Time will tell, don't forget to check powerschool and make sure your student does their test corrections. Until Friday, -Mr. H

Second Week

Well, we've made it through the first two weeks of school (and quite successfully I might add)! This morning the 6th grade team met at Red's Coffee House on Rosecrans to look at some possible future activities for the students and were able to arrive at a few possibilities. Right now it looks like we'll be moving into some group ecology projects for the first half of next week before introducing the music video project which will dovetail off of the ecology presentations and last about ten days. Hopefully, if everything goes according to plans, we'll begin Water Rockets in the first week of October and wrap up the lab reports by the end of the second week. Then the countdown for King Tut's Tomb begins (November 1st!). By the way, we'll be having our first Math Test on the 16th covering everything we've done so far during the year, and the following Friday will be our first Free Market Friday with the whole sixth grade attending and (hopefully) more than a few parent volunteers. We'll be sure to send more information out with the permission slips next week. -Mr. H

Simone Speaks!

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been doing some cool stuff. In Mr.Hartman’s class we’ve been doing Jeopardy, and learning about order of operations and now decimals. We’ve also been working on our digital portfolios everyday.
In Ms.Looney’s class we each made fish that showed different personality traits that we have. We also talked about Hurricane Katrina and played some fun games. -Simone Arasimowicz

Open House and all

Well everybody, so far I'm not living up to my expectation of updating this blog twice a week. I suppose an optomist might look at such a failure as an opportunity for improvement, so I'm aligning myself with the side of positivity at this point. Last night we held Open House here at HTM, which is basically our version of Back to School Night. Typical of both Kendall and me we went well over our alotted time slot for addressing the parents, but I still feel like the night was an overwhelming success. Thanks are due to all those who made it, I know Kendall and I both appreciated your thoughts and compliments, and if you weren't able to make it out last night, maybe you'd like to stop by and talk with one or both of us after school. Some of you may have already noticed that a couple of grades were entered into Powerschool over the weekend for my class. The first was for the Math Binder that each student submits to me on Fridays with their handout notes and practice problems completed, and the second was a score for the quiz we had on Friday. Overall I was very pleased with the quiz scores from both classes, with both averaging an A-. On Tuesday I offered an optional assignment for those students who may have not acheived the score they desire.
The assignment is called Quiz Corrections and allows each student the opportunity to earn back half of a point on their quiz for each point they missed. To complete their Quiz Corrections, a student must do three things on a separate sheet of paper:
1. Correctly solve the problem they missed.
2. Tell why they made the mistake and missed the point.
3. Explain what they will do during the next exam to get the question correct the first time.
Finally, the student must staple their Quiz Corrections to their original quiz and submit it on the day after they received their quiz back. (Usually I return the quizzes on Monday, so the quiz corrections are due on Tuesday).
While Quiz Corrections are an optional assignment, I strongly encourage all students who missed any points on their quiz to do the assignment. Since I round each student's Quiz Corrections score up instead of down, this means that a student who missed three points can earn back two points, raising their grade from a seven to a nine or a C- to an A-. If there are any other questions regarding quiz corrections, please don't hesitate to contact me. (I promise I'm working on having a student or two post something here, maybe it will happen today?) -Mr. H