Parent reflection on the Egypt Project

Well everyone, it's only a few short hours until we're off on our holiday break and seeing as how we've spent these past days hearing from our wonderful students about Egypt and projects and partners and webpages and challenges and presentations, I thought I'd share with you all one response I got from a parent when I asked about her impression of the Egypt project. I hope you'll find it as valuable as I did, feel free to e-mail me your own thoughts be they similar or different. -Mr. H

"This was a challenging project. He worked hard on the project but could
have done more. I know that he didn't use his time effectively in
class. He did, however, do a lot of research and he learned quite a bit
- much more than had he read a chapter and studied for a test: ) I had
him get organized at home and write out the narration. He did it in
stages. I think he was more into the mummification process than the
royals. He had trouble finding enough information that was interesting
to him on the royals, but he suffered through it.

I thought he did a really good job of distilling down the information
from his research. He had reams of paper and he read, absorbed, and
distilled just like a college student: ) He also pulled down the
pictures. He was very selective in the pictures that he wanted to use.
I helped him with a few pictures at the end. I also helped him with
timing the pictures with the narration. I think he should have done
that during the class time. It was time consuming and labor intensive.
It would probably help if he had his own laptop and not have to contend
with the issues of compatibility of programs. Some of his pictures
didn't show up at school and so he couldn't work on them. We plan to
get him a laptop after the holidays.

Overall, I was very impressed with the work that he did. He was
sufficiently challenged and he worked hard. I also had to push him
quite a bit to make sure he kept pace with the project schedule. Given
his personality, that was difficult at times: ) I am amazed at how
well he works on the computer. I'm proud of him for taking on such a
difficult project and seeing it through. I think he missed out by not
working with a partner, but given his personality, this probably worked
out better for him.

I am so appreciative of your efforts. I believe that ________ is truly
enjoying the learning process at HTM.

Thanks for asking my opinion."

Hey Math

Well everyone, by now you've probably heard from your student about our new math schedule. The way it's worked out, I see the students for Math on Monday and Wednesday, while Ms. Gavan sees them on Tuesday and Thursday. This obviously changes on short Wednesday weeks when Ms. Gavan sees them on Friday and I see them on Thursday, but you get the idea. So in my class, I thought it would be great to use Hey Math, an online math support site from India and the Philippines but (in a move so unbelievably predictable, I'm ashamed to admint I didn't see it coming) not all the students like learning from a computer. So midweek I switched up the program. The new program offers Hey Math to whatever students would like to use it, and allows the other students to sit at the front of the room to learn by traditional lecture as before. This seems to allow each student to learn in the method most conducive to their own cognitive abilities, which was the goal of changing the math program in the first place. In case you were interested, in Ms. Gavan's class they are doing a project (for most it is a bound book) related to the math we cover in my class. This addition seems to be have been met with quite a bit of favor by our students, so I think the change of program has had a definite positive impact in that respect. We'll be checking in with the students at the end of each week to see how their impression of the program changes, and if the overall reaction remains positive before we break, I think we'll invest in a few Hey Math memberships. -Mr. H