Well, Spring has definitely sprung here in the great Northeast. As I sit here massive thundershowers are hitting us. We even have a tornado warning! I grew up in Illinois, where the flat terrain essentially guaranteed that tornadoes were commonplace. But, surrounded by mountains (or large hills as some would insist) here in Red Hook, we don’t tend to see twisters here.
But, enough about the weather (actually I’m going to come back to it eventually). We are heading into the homestretch of the school year. With roughly a month to go before standardized testing sets in, teachers should be heading into full on review mode. To that end, let’s discuss the add-ons for Common Core Algebra I, Common Core Algebra II, and Algebra 2 with Trigonometry. Last year for each of these courses we put out short (10 points each) Unit Review quizzes for each unit. For both CC Algebra II and Alg 2 with Trig we put multiple quizzes out for the longer units as well. We released these quizzes between the April and May add-on rounds from last year.
This year we are releasing the Form B (or makeup) quizzes for all three courses. We organized the quizzes from last year and rereleased them as Form A. We then also released Form B as new content. For each course, both documents, Form A and Form B, contain quizzes for all units. These quizzes will help spot check the students as you conduct unit review. Since Teachers have access to the Word document as well, you have the flexibility to combine quizzes as you like and need to.
We will start up with more add-ons in August! Including add-ons for Geometry.
In other exciting news, eMATHinstruction will host Live reviews for the New York State High School Regents exams!!!
Last year we live streamed reviews for CC Algebra I, CC Algebra II, and CC Geometry (in that order). We did this using only Instagram Live, since that was where we thought we could reach the most students. By the time we did our last review, CC Geo, we had over 20k viewers. Granted, some of them probably weren’t students at all and left as soon as they realized it was a big, old geek (me) talking about math, but still! Over 20 thousand unique viewers. Even if 5,000 were students, that would be great.
This year we hope to live stream it on Instagram Live, Facebook Live, and YouTube Live. We still have to work out the details on that. But, the dates and times have been set:
Algebra I Review: Monday, June 11th, 6 until 9 p.m.
Algebra II Review: Wednesday, June 13th, 6 until 9 p.m.
Geometry Review: Monday, June 18th, 6 until 9 p.m.
Kids will be able to tune in via Instagram Live (at least) and have a chance to comment (briefly) at certain times during the video. They will need to follow:
@emathinstruction
Last year we streamed to my own personal account (@kirkweiler if you want to see me post pictures of my garden), but this year we are only Instagram Live Feeding to @emathinstruction. Have your students follow that to watch. Once we know how to watch on YouTube Live and Facebook Live we will let people know via Facebook.
Finally, back to the weather! In my experience, many math teachers are weather junkies. We like both the predictable, science side of it as well as its probabilistic nature. A neat website to help you visualize the weather patterns, especially air velocity, is a site called Ventusky.com.
It’s a super cool site where those little streaks you see in the image actually move on the screen relative to the velocity of the wind currents. It is especially impressive when you are looking at a hurricane. Here’s a hurricane like pattern off the coast of Japan (thankfully not an actual hurricane/typhoon).
So, check it out if you have the time. It is a CPU drain, so just keep that in mind and close whatever browser window you use to look at it, either on your computer or phone, once you’re done.
That’s it for me for now. We’ll get back to you all with way more news about the Live events as we get closer. Make sure to announce them to your students so they can have a night before (literally) review. You never know who it might push past the passing line.
Mr. Weiler- My name is Matt Blaustein, and I attend Edgemont High School in Scarsdale, New York. We have been watching many of your probability and statistics videos in my 11th grade Algebra 2 class, and I just wanted to say thank you. You make it so easy for students to learn and understand the course material related to these units. In addition, our teacher has expressed a fondness for the six-second musical introduction to your videos. It’s a pretty catchy jingle, and I decided to remix it (I’m a music producer). Here is the link if you are interested: https://soundcloud.com/mattblaustein/kirk-weiler-matt-blaustein-trap-edit . With that being said, thank you, Mr. Weiler, for helping us all out with our studies of Algebra 2!
Thanks Matt. I’ll take a listen to it later.