Cheesecake Brownies

I decided to up the game this week for my learning project by continuing on with a skill I think that I struggle with in baking. I think if I isolate the problems that I have, I can improve in those areas and make baking easier for me. So, I think I’m going to take a few more baking projects in the theme of “adding some sort of filling to a basic food stuffs to make it more of an exciting foodstuffs” before I move onto the real learning, where I try some more advanced baking techniques, like separating eggs, and googling other complex baking strategies.

So this week I made brownies. And I decided the filling I was going to add was cheesecake. So I made cheesecake brownies. I looked through three blogs, and I decided on the blog I used for two reasons:

1. I wanted to isolate the filling problem, so I wasn’t quite ready to also make brownies from scratch, so I used a recipe that called for brownie mix.
2. The photos and comments on the blog were helpful in seeing what I needed it to look like, and also gave me the advice to add chocolate chips.

This is the mix I used, it, as well as the cream cheese I bought, was on sale in groups of two, so I doubled the recipe and saved me some money.

The first thing I decided to do was get kind of funky and add some chocolate chips. Because who doesn’t love chocolate chips?

The recipe said to stir without a mixer, so I was like “but what do I use? A spoon?” and then I decided to be daring and use a whisk because my mind was like “whisks do the mixing thing”. And let me tell you, that was my first mistake of the day. Word of advice to people attempting to use my wonderful blog to make brownies – if you use a whisk, it is too feeble to get through the thick dough so you’ll be scared it’s going to just break into a million tiny pieces in the batter and it’ll be a very stressful experience overall because you are too stubborn to change your mind so you just power through it.  The whisk didn’t break. I suspect it was a close thing.

Then I had to take a break because my dog wanted to go outside and then she came in with her little nose covered in snow and it was just too cute. So I took a photo of it for everyone to share. She, unfortunately, spent most of the cooking sitting next to me all nicely, and was not even rewarded with some baking because chocolate is not good for dogs and I am a good dog owner.

The actual putting the two bowls of batter together was relatively simple. Except for the whisk part. But we won’t talk about that. The batter was delicious by the way, I give it a 10/10 in deliciousness.

My second big issue came when it was time to bake the batter. Here is a photo of it all in the pan. It looks super ugly, do not judge me.

Look at that goop-y mess. This is where I ran into difficulty. The recipe said I should put the brownies in for 35-40 minutes and so I did that. But they were not cooked. So I put them in again, five more minutes. They were not cooked.

It was a real struggle  because I would worry that I was burning the brownies, so I’d pull them out, but they weren’t cooked so I’d put them back in. ‘Twas a vicious cycle. I think I cooked the brownies for about an hour before I was okay with the amount of cooked they were.

Look at those awful brownies. They look so gross, Sarah.

In the end, the brownies were a little overcooked along the edges, but it was perfect in the center, and they tasted great! I think I ate way too much. Coincidentally, the brownies were cooked right before Valentine’s Day, which is awesome. I used to make (aka, make my Mom make) brownies on Valentine’s Day and I would give them to my single friends. Singles Brownies on Valentine’s Day because we all deserve chocolate on Valentine’s Day, so let’s remove the negative stigma of being single (#singlelife) because sometimes people don’t want to be in a relationship but they also want brownies.

So I will probably give brownies to some people. Not necessarily single people. Seems like too much of an effort to go searching for single people. Also seems a little aggressive.

For the lesson plan part of the learning, I chose to look at Math 9.

I thought, because I struggle with figuring out how long something takes to cook, we could use graphing of linear relations to find out how long it would take to heat the entirety of the brownie.

Outcome: P9.1

Demonstrate understanding of linear relations including:

• graphing
• analyzing
• interpolating and extrapolating
• solving situational questions

 

I think it could be pretty inquiry based, seeing as there is no real correct answer, as there are outside factors that affect it, and it won’t really be a completely straight line. But students could either make their own assumptions based on cook times in recipe books, do small scale tests and extrapolate the data, figure out what it means to be “fully cooked”. I think it could be fun, and maybe it would solve my problems with baking times.

I think it would also create some interesting discussions – what data in real life is actually linear? Do we ever have instances where we assume as such and are proved wrong? What do you think factors in to how fast the food cooks? Do you think all factors can be accounted for? What are some ways to account for outside factors? Can we eliminate some factors?

I always like questioning. I did a lot of questioning with my students because it was fun to hear what they had to say.

Do you also stress about baking times, because boy, let me tell you…

Have a great day, don’t feed your dogs chocolate, but pet them or something.

Witty Title Invoking Thoughts of Both Revision and Lesson Plans

I have always like editing. It’s something that I find comfort in, the fact that I can make mistakes, that nothing is ever perfect, and so I can always go back, make adjustments, tweak a few problems here and there and something can be improved. I like editing in the writing sense, in the video sense, in the everything sense. Looking something over and trying to make it better. When I was in High School, we had a teacher who let us rewrite assignments to correct grammatical errors, and so I used to spend my English classes with a stack of fifteen or so papers from fellow classmates, just marking up their pages with a red pen and a song in my heart and I was happy, because I could see improvement happening, magic occurring, right before my eyes.

The only problem is, it is still work, and as such, I have no motivation to do any real work when I could be going to watch the 30th anniversary showing of The Breakfast Club instead.

But I have put away some time now to look at my first lesson plan, look at what I did originally and how it was received. I have had the opportunity to do some more editing of my own, and I have revised my first lesson into LESSON 2.0, so much better, so much improvement, so much wow.

I have made changes that I think, have greatly streamlined the lesson and made it easier to adapt. And I added assessment, which is a pretty big deal, cough. Originally, I had the students writing out notes that they copied from the board. Through notes from my co-op teacher, I have decided to adapt the idea of the notes a little bit, and turn them in to a graphic organizer for the students to fill out. The reason for this choice is that it gives students more guidance and more of an idea of what the lesson is going to cover without giving away the information I want the students to come up with on their own. The original idea of the lesson, leading the students to discovery, is still intact, but is more structured and more linear to work with.

I also added a section on Treaty Ed, which was actually quite easy to incorporate. I was already talking about the history and honouring of one culture, so it was simple to connect the African American’s honouring their ancestors during Apartheid through gumboot/step dancing with the Aboriginal peoples using dances to honour their religion and their culture. In a later lesson, I did go into more detail with that concept, but it was still useful to bring in the concept earlier, because it makes the lesson more applicable to the students, because the students know and understand more about the Aboriginal people of Canada than they do about the people of Africa and Apartheid.

Another section added was assessment, which is really important, and it is kind of terrible to have missed it the first time around. The assessment is in the form of an exit slip, although I allowed for differentiation and the students can also give me responses orally if they prefer, an idea that I decided on due to the particular learners I have in my field placement, and the adaptations that are made for them. The exit slip allows for a more complex level of learning, hitting on a higher level of Bloom’s Taxonomy and having the students make connections. The students are now analyzing the data they are given, and asking themselves why it is significant that different religions and cultures dance.

I believe that the lesson is improved. Does it still need work? Yes, I think that anyone could take what I’ve created and add many improvements based on their own knowledge and abilities. But using my abilities and knowledge? I think that I have made changes that make sense to me, and have made the lesson better. Without destroying the integrity of the original lesson, because I was honestly quite proud of the overarching theme of my lesson and I’m happy that the lesson now reflects what I was trying to teach better.

Sarah

Teaching

The last class we had for EMath was mostly a work period, but I do have one thing that I would like to discuss quickly. And that is the note that stuck with me the most from our attempted lesson plans last week. I really liked the point that was made about what we teach, and how we decide what the class needs to know.

During our lessons, I felt bad for those of us who had to go up to the front and attempt to engage our class in a lesson on math. Our class was noisy, we were rowdy, we were having too much fun. And a lot of that came from the fact that we had all taken the math lessons being taught before. We already knew the lesson, we already knew the material, and we already knew the next step to take in the next feasible lesson in the unit. As such, we were intensely distracted. Now, I know that there were other factors that were in play with our lack of focus, but it was an interesting lesson that can be brought into a classroom.

What do we teach? What do we omit from our lesson? A lot of our lesson planning should come from the skills of the students. What do the students need to know? What do they already know? If you have an advanced class that is all ahead of the game, you should not expect your students to sit silently and listen to you explain concepts that they already grasp themselves. If you have a class that is struggling with math, you cannot force them to truck on ahead because they will simply not keep up. This is another big reason that I am pro adaptation in the classroom, and strongly believe in improvisation being a key skill that every teacher needs. There is that one chart that illustrates the research of Vygotsky and his Zone of Proximal Development:

That tells us that students should be met with an equal level of challenge to their competence in an area. If we do not recognize the level our students are at, we cannot effectively teach them. This is why we cannot always rely on the same lesson plans and the same lessons to teach to every class. There is no be all, end all way to explain derivatives. There is no secret method of factoring that will be useful to every student. This is why problem solving is so effective in a classroom. It plays to the strengths of the students. Good problem solving challenges students while giving them reasons to explore without the looming threat of failure if a question is not completed in the ‘correct’ way.

For myself, I am excited to go into a math classroom someday and actually teach math. I want to see the way students learn. I want to challenge myself, learn new things. Find new ways of teaching that would never have worked for me as a student, but are immensely effective for others.

Unit Planning

Today is a day of great struggle. With only six more weeks in the semester, and only six more weeks that I will be living in Regina for this year, I find it hard to focus on the important things that still need to get done, instead of the always enticing knowledge that soon I will not have to sleep on a tiny mattress on the floor, and eat food prepared by me, uncaring and just needing something to eat before I waste away of nourishment. This time of year is always hard, because with the end of school looming, I want to be able to put all of my focus onto the most important parts of my life, as in, homework and doing well, but distractions provide so much entertainment, it is hard to tune it all out. So, struggles, because I so badly want to care, but my lack of an attention span makes every moment of focus a struggle.

Oh, and I am making supper as well, in case you were all concerned I wasn’t multitasking right now.

My biggest struggle that I am having right now, when we are at the end of our EMath journey, and are focusing our attention on unit planning is the concept of focus. I have so many ideas and strategies that I want to try out or work with that it is so hard to just pick one concrete idea and just stick with it. It is one of the biggest reasons that I rely so heavily on improvisation when I am teaching. I have no idea what I really want to do, and how I want a lesson to go that I make up about fifty different outcomes for a lesson without giving myself any direction so that I am prepared in case of any emergency. A student is falling asleep? I have prepared a whole section of dialogue just for that occasion. I am sort of a contradiction – I hate concrete planning so much that I over plan to the nines. I create so many scenarios and options that it is so hard for me to pick what I want to do. Which is why having the assignment be a group project is both a blessing and a curse in its own right.

Blessing – I have other people to bounce ideas off of and to actually make me buckle down and commit to an idea and making the idea work. Together, we will have to create a unit plan that we all approve of and are all happy about, so, in turn, it makes it easier on all of us, because we have a person there to accomplish where we fail. Where I am bad at planning, someone in my group will be excellent at specifics. Where someone struggles with ideas, I can come up with a book full in an instant.

Curse – Whenever I did group work in high school, it was very much of the same that other students that took initiative had to face. I did the entire project by myself. So I have gotten very goof at relying on me, and knowing that I will be there to take care of the work. I have trouble with delegation, I feel bad asking others to do something when I could also do it, so I often decide to just do the work myself. Learning to give responsibility away and to not take on the entire project will be a struggle for me, but a good struggle, because it is essential to work in a team when I become a teacher. I will learn how to trust other people besides those that I have worked with for years.

So, honestly, even though group work is always a struggle for me, and focused planning is also hard, I am excited, because I love math, and I love teaching math, and creating a unit plan is going to be extremely challenging and rewarding. I cannot wait to see how our finished product works out. It will also be a load off my mind, because now is when all the homework comes up, and I can tell you now, not all of my assignments will be as fun as this one.

Making Plans

I have always been a completionist throughout my life. Now, I know that the term generally refers to trying to get 100% in a video game in relation to doing homework or something, but I am appropriating the term to use here, because I deem it appropriate.

We have finally completed a lesson plan in our EMath class, and I am feeling so much better now because of it. I hate leaving things undone, and we had been working on the lesson for a while now, without there being any real resolution, but we made it, just in time for our Reading Week break. I have two points to make before I can get to my break proper.

1) Team Teaching – I think that team teaching is a very intriguing concept because it is so contingent on the two people working together. I have team taught many times before, both as a drama teacher, and in the schools for our practicums. I find that it is not as difficult as I always think it will be, but I have also always been blessed with the honour of teaching with people I explicitly trust and now will not let me down. My practicum partner this semester, for example, is my best friend, who I have known for eight years. I am happy that being in our EMath class, I have the opportunity to work with people I do not know as well, and so I can see if team teaching does become more difficult when you do not know each other that well. So far, it seems to be going okay, however, it is still difficult when we think very alike, and so we both get stuck in the same section of a lesson plan. Ryan and I spent a great deal of time getting the first part of the lesson smoothed out because both of us didn’t quite like any of the beginnings we were forming.

2) Implementing Problem Solving – is harder than it looks. We have been given many examples of how to do problem solving effectively. We have done a few questions ourselves as well and after doing it for so long, we start to think that we have a solid grasp of how problem solving works. And we are learning the skills to do so, and we are definitely improving. But it is still apparent that we have a ways to go. I am saying “we” a lot, when I really mean “I”. I cannot speak for anyone else, I haven’t seen any other lessons. Perhaps it is just me who thinks that this is much harder than it looks. I think the part I struggle with is figuring out how to make questions that are grade appropriate that are not too hard or too simple for a person to do themselves. I think, with practice it will get easier, so I am excited to work more on our lesson plans and see how our skills develop.

Well, that’s all I have for you today, so TTFN!
Sarah

Drive and Determination

Today’s post is all about motivation. How do we get our students to learn? How do we get them to want to learn?

I ask this question, because one, I am already at risk of repeating myself, at least this topic gives me a way to field my comments into one area, and two, I currently have a tiny puppy on my lap, who keeps tapping me with her little paw every time I try and type words out, and when I look at her, and try to tell her I’m working, she wags her tail and nudges her nose up for pets. My determination and drive is slowing, so I must get this done quickly, for fear I will never finish.

Giving students incentive is always difficult. If a student does not care about what they are being taught, then they do not have any drive to learn the material. The key to getting students’ attention is to make your lesson about information that is partly what they know, or what they are interesting, and the other part is things that they desire to know, or figure out.

As a part of the EMath class, we wrote out activities that were examples of problems that could be used in different lessons, based on Outcomes and Indicators from the Saskatchewan Curriculum website. The first one we used was the unit on puzzles and games. The activity we created revolved around the students coming up with strategies to efficiently win different games, such as Tic Tac Toe, Mastermind and Connect Four. We also added the use of video games for students who are interested in gaming, and would be more intrigued by figuring out strategies for fighting certain bosses, or the most efficient way to progress through a more open-world game. Giving students a choice on which game they would like to look at gives them the option of picking a task that they would more readily enjoy, instead of forcing them to learn pattern recognition, and permutations and combinations through the means that the teacher finds most interesting.

The second unit we worked with was unit prices and exchange rates. The question we devised was a simple example of many questions that could be formed. It is another area where you can encourage students to learn using objects or information that is significant to them. The question involves comparing the price of hot chocolate from Costco to the price of hot chocolate at Wal-Mart, but the students could use any object available at multiple stores for money. They could compare pizza prices and sizes at various fast food restaurants. They could compare the prices of books or games at different stores. The question lets the students do research and come up with an answer that is relevant to themselves. If they do unit pricing with anything, they will know where to buy what they like to get it at the cheapest price.

Allowing choice to students, and devising questions that have real world application, and let the student utilize the information in their lives, gives meaning to the work that is expected of students. Students have drive and determination when they are given a topic that they care about, or the find to be informative. If a student can see why they are learning what they are, then it is easier to convince them to focus on the subject matter, and become informed.

Now, I shall go back to cuddling my puppy. She is very happy to see me when I go back home.

Good Questioning

It seems that, as I progress through my EMath class, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that being an effective and efficient math teacher revolves around one’s ability for questioning. How to make good questions is the focus of problem solving. Students should be asking themselves why, and they should not be relying on their teachers to provide every answer for them. Asking questions means harboring curiosity, which means that students have the ability to wonder, and reflect on what they are learning and, in turn, the students will then desire the knowledge and skills needed to come up with an answer to their questions.

One of the biggest reasons that math has progressed as far as it has is because of the question of why. You have examples of great mathematicians who were simply curious. Fibonacci who studied nature and its patterns, Gauss with his work in statistics and various other fields. Math is a study of connections and the ways in which we use the connections to solve more and more complex questions.

Now, after that great moment of introspection and worldly discovery is over, it is time for me to discuss how we simplify the notion that math is a great part of the universe, and apply that to a simple classroom.

We have begun to explore new ways in which to inspire creativity and insight in the classroom by creating lessons and questions surrounding different outcomes and indicators we get from the Saskatchewan Curriculum Guide. As mentioned in previous posts, starting with the bigger picture and then finding activities to fit what needs to be taught is a very helpful way in which to ensure the curriculum is being followed and to have a starting point for what you want to teach in your lesson.

An example is when we had to come up with a lesson around currency exchange and unit pricing. There is a very obvious way in which you can apply the scenarios to real life. Ask students to research prices of the same item in different stores. In different countries. And then research why the costs differ. When a student is able to produce results that are directly applicable to real life, then they leave a math class feeling accomplished, and as if they learned something. Teaching a student a complex math formula can also lead a student to a feeling of learning and accomplishment, but without giving them a feeling of usefulness, that accomplishment may be diminished.

One of the points we also discussed in class was the fact that students like to feel like they are intelligent. A way of making them feel good about themselves is to balance a question between knowledge the students already know, and knowledge they have yet to learn. If you give students a way to apply past learning to a question, they will have a starting point with the question, and it is easier to encourage deeper thinking. If a student gets a question that is an entire page long, has words they don’t know, references cities they’ve never heard of, and the first part of the problem requires math they have never learned, they will become easily discouraged, and will give up before even trying. If a question has simple instruction, is brief and to the point, and slowly eases the students in to learning, then they will feel better, and be more willing to work, knowing that they at least know how to do the first part of the question.

The purpose of teaching is not to scare students, or make them try to be smarter than they are capable of, it is to challenge their skills, and give them motivation to succeed.