Yum Yum

As school approaches the end of the third quarter,  I have taken time to reflect on how second semester has been going.  Basketball finished in the middle of February, and my free time increased what feels like exponentially!  However despite the extra time, I have had plenty of responsibilities to keep me busy at school.

The first and foremost on my mind right now is our school's spring break mission trip to the Philippines.  We leave on the 22nd of March and return the day before Easter.  Please pray for our team and that this is a life-changing experience for my students where they will encounter God like never before.  

There has been much going on in my classrooms the past few weeks.  Professionally, I am trying a new teaching strategy called 'Flipping the Classroom' with my Algebra 2 class.  The basic idea of this strategy is that the students are responsible for their own learning outside of school, while in-class time is spent doing both guided and independent practice (i.e. typical 'homework' as most people would think).   Benefits to this style of teaching are that the students are learning to become self-directed learners and I am able to provide more differentiated, individual instruction to all my students in the class.  We are finishing our first 'flipped' unit this week, and so far I have been very impressed with the work the students have put in learning this unit.  I don't have the strategy perfected yet, but I am very excited about where this could lead in the future.  

I hope you didn't miss one of the most recent, very important holidays of the past week: Pi Day!!  I took a day off of instruction to celebrate the only holiday relevant to a math class.  My students and I ate pies and pastries.  We measured various items (even biblical ones, like in 1 Kings 7:23) and calculated an experimental value for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. We did various activities with the digits of pi, such as making a paper chain where the color of each link corresponds to the number in that digit of pi.  The paper chain covers a third of my classrooms perimeter!  The day I had been looking forward to since I found out I was teaching High School Math was a success! Below are some Pi Day pictures.  

American Sweet Potato Pie 

Sour Cream Apple Pie

 AP Calc girls

High school students can really eat some pie!