I had a headache most of Sunday, so I didn’t get much done. But I did get to school early on Monday and met up with a student who was working on a challenge problem I posed. He shared his thinking with me, and I shared what made sense and what didn’t about his thinking. I’m just excited that he was working on this for fun.
Also, in one of my calculus classes, I revealed the students’ new groups (they’ve been with the same people since the start of the year… so about six weeks). It was nice to hear so many students say how much they were sad to be leaving their first groups because they loved working with them. (They weren’t bemoaning their new groups, though…) The fact that they would be sad about leaving their groups meant that the group was actually a meaningful collaboration for them.
I gave a visual pattern to one of my precalculus classes, after having introduced “the hotel bells.”
And as students saw different ways to come up with the number of squares in the nth figure, they started realizing how rich this problem was. And they started seeing things they hadn’t seen before. And bells started ringing. And that tintinnabulation made me so happy.
one good thing 