UA Institute: Week of December 15th

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Week of December 15th

UAI High School Staff News

Volume II

Issue 18

Week of December 15th 2014

Announcements

Bookends of Celebration. We started the week with Well-Developed news and ended it with good times with the UAI family. We've worked long and hard to make UAI a great school. It was a wonderful win for everyone to finally get the recognition that we deserve, and finally to celebrate with our UAI family.

The Last Full Week of School Before the Winter Break. In between the good times, the kids have gotten frisky. The Chancellor is putting extra emphasis on the 7th and 10th grades, as grades in need of some TLC. She's not wrong. Something happens in the neurological development of kids at these critical stages. That coupled with the social status of a middle grade makes for quite a volatile combination. In addition, the holidays is a stressful time for everyone, and our young ones have not quite mastered handling stress. So to help them this week, we need to make sure that we're on our A-games this week. In particular for this week please

Stick to the system of reminders and call me/Jen/Colleen/Pamela if students cannot correct their behavior after the 3rd reminder.
If you hear rumblings of drama, please outreach to the grade social worker immediately. Don't assume that someone else has done it. It's better for us to be repetitive than to miss something.
Grade teams should coordinate calendars. When all their teachers have tests/due dates on the same date, this exacerbates stress (and subsequent drama). Try to stagger dates as much as possible!

As a final reminder, kids sometimes just want to know we care. So, take a moment to check in with the quiet ones this week and make some good calls home so that those kids can enjoy some extra holiday cheer.

How cool is this (and the questions that it raises). A friend of mine who teaches science at PS295 posted this video on her Facebook page. She called it "How the Chinese Multiply". It is super cool and made me think about the kinds of questioning that could happen. On the one hand, there's the mechanical understanding of the process (e.g. How do you use this method? How can you check you work? What happens if a column adds up to a sum >9?). On the other hand, there are higher order questions like (Can I use math principles like place value or distribution to explain why this works? Wait...why does this work?) Take a minute or two to enter into this same thought exercise. What kinds of questions did this video raise for you? Would your kids develop the same type of questions? How would they see this video and what would be their perspective.

Post by बुटवल अनलाइन.

Sorry for the lack of pretty pictures this week.. Xmas cookie cooking all AM and now I'm late for the Packer game!