A Weekly Reflection: Insightful Notes From a Young Teacher

  Every time you go to the dentist, they make sure to remind you to floss your teeth (because everyone does that every day, and after every meal, and before you brush, because it allows your toothbrush to do a better job). For most people, they nod and agree with the dentist, "Yes, of course I floss. Yes, of course it's important. Yes, of course I will." Yet only about a third of Americans floss their teeth. Unfortunately, similar attitudes can be observed when it comes to talking to young teens about online and internet safety.  When I taught 6th Grade Tech class, there was a fun slideshow that took about 2 days for our class to get through on many online safety things: texting, posting videos, commenting on social media, and sharing personal information on scams. It was a light course that related to 6th graders well, but it didn't prevent teens from making the exact errors that were outlined in the course. Why? "Because it's the Dentist's job to tell ...

Google Earth was one new tool that I found really great if I'm bored or want to envision what my next vacation could look like, but I found it difficult to see how I can use it in an 8th grade Math class.  I was able to find some creative ways to use interesting geographical locations as origin points on a graph, and practice different translations. That was the easy part. The difficult part was finding interesting places. I'm not good at geography, never have been, but I really relied on Google searches for geometric anomalies to use for math class. I thought about trying to do a slope problem with Mt. Everest, but as I thought about how a middle school student would try to solve a question like "Use two points on the mountain to estimate the slope of Mt. Everest", I can guarantee they would just do a Google Search, "What's the slope of Mt. Everest?" and get the answer way faster.  Now, on that note, I think the importance of understanding slope surfac...