I bought our Christmas tree today. The teenager who sold it to me at the VFW assured me it was a good one and would last the season, “no problem.” I’ll take his word for it as I’m not quite done with my Arborist degree. The kids love the day I bring home the Christmas tree, for obvious reasons. After I set it up in the stand I took out two brand new boxes of tree lights (since I stepped on last year’s lights, rendering them usable, but dangerous).

The kids were super excited! New Tree! New Lights! My daughter Ellie saw the lights and asked, “is two boxes going to be enough?”

Why?

Why does she do this to herself? Shouldn’t she know better by now? I’m sure you can imagine her excitement when she looked at me and saw that “I’m going to end up blogging about your question” look on my face.

So I directed her to the box, which outlined the capacity of the string of lights thusly:

We had two boxes, and she’s 12 and pretty good with arithmetic, so she quickly arrived at the fact that we had “approximately 123 ft” of lights. At this time I did what any self respecting father of 4 who also has a deep passion for mathematical questions but also has a penchant for self preservation would do.

I put the lights on the tree. Is there adequate lighting?

Here’s the ornament I made in Kindergarten

And this “ornament” is me at 21. I keep my old college ID around for emergencies.

And this is how I think most people see me these days.

You see, you can’t do the math problem BEFORE decorating the tree and live to see another day. You’ve got to give in to the beast that is “the holiday season” and put your questions on hold until after the practical matters have been completed.

Now remember, Ellie asked if I’d have enough lights for the tree. I rephrased it as ” Will these two boxes give the tree adequate lighting?” Adding the word “adequate” puts a degree of ambiguity into the question that allows other students to discuss what “adequate lighting” really means to them, based on their own Christmas tree experiences and preferences.

To turn up the math dial a bit (as Dan Meyer would say) here’s some information.

The tree is 90 inches tall, floor to top tip. But the green lit portion of the tree begins 2 feet off the ground, so the green portion is only 66 inches tall. In a stroke of mathematical genius (luck) the tree is also 66 inches wide at its base. Since no one ever puts the lights on the very very outside of the tree surface, we’ll hypothesize that the tree is a cone (which it is not…but whatever).

Now the fun really began. I wanted to start in on the math. I wanted to follow the path of the lights. I wanted to draw a cone, start measuring surface area and distances and spirals. I wanted to get super Mathal (it’s a word). My daughter, on the other hand, drew from her own experience and coupled it with a desire to end this conversation and said “I saw a cool thing at the store. Check it out.” At which time she took out my computer and found this:

Looks like the good people at Kmart have already done the math for me. According to them, this 6 foot tall tree (6 inches taller than my green one) needs only 250 lights to create this spiral. Each box of our lights had 300, albeit in leaf-like pairs. At that, Ellie said, “I guess it makes sense that the two boxes were enough. Bye” And she walked out of the room.

If you’ve read Instant Relevance, you know that I love moments like these.  Sometimes I lose the value of the moment by trying to make it about my love for mathematics, when really, it was just a great conversation about possibilities. Take the time to engage in the great conversations with your students, and when you can, take the next step to make a strong lesson plan out of it. But remember, you don’t always have to do both to #MakeItReal.

To my friend Alice Keeler: you may need some more lights.

When Parents Want To Help

When it comes to math homework, parents often feel that they HAVE TO HELP their kids get everything right. Many parents take on the role of Untrained Math Teacher at home as well and can often undercut well planned lessons and units. This can often cause more damage, frustration and distress than we want. A major message of my book, Hacking Mathematics: 10 Problems That Need Solving, is that questioning is at the heart of learning mathematics, not answering. So here’s an infographic for you to share with parents who want to help their kids that will teach them how to promote questioning and will keep the learning in the hands of their kids and the teaching in the hands of their teachers.

Share and share and share!!!

And if you want this in another version, here you go!

Homework Help JPEG

Homework Help PDF

Ok, so I’ve seen or been asked the following question A LOT of times since the Annotate Meet extension came out, and to be honest, ever before that.

How Can I Annotate Or See Students When I’m Presenting Google Slides Full Screen?????

Long story short, it doesn’t look like you can. So here’s my solution.

DON’T PRESENT SLIDES IN FULL SCREEN!

Then what do you do? This. I’ve created a bookmarklet called No Pane.
1. Click and Drag this link to your bookmarks bar.

No Pane by Denis Sheeran

2. Open any Google Slides presentation.
3. Click the No Pane bookmarklet and watch your Side Pane Disappear!!!
4. For more visual clarity, click VIEW and turn off the Ruler and the Speaker Notes.

Today was a hard day, for a while. Our dog, Scout, has been with us since 2007. She’s a bichon-shih tzu mix and is a sweet, docile family pet.

In fact, we’ve had fish who’ve made more of a commotion than Scout does. She hasn’t been herself, so I took her to the vet yesterday for a checkup and a grooming. This morning, when I was cleaning up an accident she had in the kitchen, the vet called to tell me that Scout was suffering from massive kidney failure. The vet mentioned a bunch of numbers that were way off the charts and suggested I bring her in. I’d anticipated that this may be coming from her recent symptoms, but nonetheless, having a conversation that included the phrase, “there’s a chance she may not recover from this,” was not high up on my Quarantine To-Do list. I woke up my wife and told her where we were going, so she got up to sit with Scout for a while before we left. Scout is still at the vet for care and observation, so I’m waiting to hear more in the next couple days. 

My wife wrote on Facebook that “This has been a very difficult day.” No other details other than we’d gone outside in the rain to play for a while.

This is where something unexpected, something magical happened. Someone commented on my wife’s post with a simple, “Hang in there. Sending you all loves every time I drive up and down the street.” That person was my elementary school music teacher. She grew up a few houses up the road from where we now live and her parents still live in that house, so she visits often and brings them things they need, especially now due to Covid-19 measures. My wife is now an elementary school music teacher.

I thought to myself at that moment how funny it was that my elementary school music teacher may have played in the rain on this street, too. And that now, 30 years after leaving that school, she would reach out to my wife with a simple but strong message of kindness and support. 

But it doesn’t end there. About an hour and a half later there was a knock on the door. Yes, really, a knock on the door. When I opened it, there she was…my elementary school music teacher, wearing a mask and bearing a gift. A board game she had two copies of that she thought would make a great escape for our family tonight. It’s from 1987…a year when I was a student in her class. As soon as we finished dinner the family dove in to play. It was fun, challenging, distracting, and full of the love of a kind friend. Just what we needed. 

Never…NEVER underestimate the power of kindness, both in word and in deed. And never, NEVER underestimate the long lasting effect of an authentic teacher-student relationship.

To my teacher and friend, Ms. Smith, thank you. You are still the wonderful human I always knew you were and always told people you were. And thank you for modeling friendship, kindness, and connection for my children, too. At a time when we were struggling with the absence of a family member, a friend stepped in.

That’s love.

I get asked “What are your tips for teachers thinking about remote teaching now and into the fall” pretty often. I’ve responded in different ways and have heard some other great responses, too! But here are two perspectives I’d like us all to consider. 

I hear a lot about people saying teachers need to have grace with our kids now. Let’s relax and lower expectations for our kids because we don’t have any idea what their home life is like. I agree and think this is totally on point right now. But that means teachers need to think about the kids coming to them this fall. They will be the first group of kids to have ever gone through PANDEMIC CLOSURES FOR SCHOOL. They will have missed a third of their school year! And they won’t be the same kids as the kids you usually get every year. Next year’s classes will be brand new classes. Remember this: These are not the same kids and you ARE NOT teaching the same material. Don’t take those kids who are in Algebra 1 now, walking into Algebra 2 next year and think they’re going to be prepared to take your old version of Algebra 2. They’re not. Change your curriculum. Change your approach. You’ve got a whole new world to build. I’ll help you build if you want. But we’ve got to recognize that next year our new kids can’t be treated the same as in past years just because it’s September.

The second thing I want to point out is this. I’ve seen amazing posts from teachers during all this. I see bitmoji classrooms, virtual choirs, and creative solutions to difficult problems. But hear this. A LOT of other teachers see these same things… and HATE them. Every time they see a post about things like this their stomachs turn. It’s not jealousy. It’s not actually hatred. But it may be because these posts make them feel inferior or feel like they’re not as good at their job or are less professional than those teachers who are doing them. Don’t stop posting these because we need positivity, we need creativity, and we need success stories! But, we also need to realize that a lot of teachers are feeling their identity as professionals being slapped in the face during this time. They’re unsure of themselves. They’re not sure what it’s going to be like when they go back and what people’s expectations of them are going to be. Let’s be open to understanding and considering that, thinking about those perspectives of teachers. They’re coming back into school not exactly sure who they are as a teacher anymore and not exactly sure what people expect from them and totally unsure of what the new standard for “Distinguished Teaching” is. It’s going to be powerful for us as leaders, teachers and everyone who enters a school to recognize that we are all walking into our buildings, hopefully, as CHANGED PEOPLE and each of us needs to go get to know those new people for who they are now and to go work with those people to build a new situation and a new culture at our schools, for our kids and for the future of education.

I got glasses when I was in 4th grade. I don’t remember the moment I got them and whether or not I was happy about it. I just know it happened in 4th grade because the plastic school bus that my mom hung on the wall that had all of my annual school pictures in it has me with no glasses in 3rd grade and some glasses in 4th. I’ve had glasses ever since, except for a brief stint from 11th grade to sophomore year of college where I wore contacts…also cataloged by the school bus photo collection.

The second oldest child of my four needed glasses before she was 2 years old. We noticed that she would put her face right up to stuff in order to see it and every time we’d walk more than a few steps away from her she’d cry as if we’d disappeared entirely. After realizing that it was more than just a dramatic baby, we took her to the eye doctor, then a retinal specialist, and came to learn that she’s got healthy retinas, but the most severe nearsightedness/astigmatism combo I’ve ever heard of. If you know anything about prescriptions, how does -15.5 in the left eye and -17 in the right sound to you? That means that without glasses when I’m five feet away from her, I look like this:

So when she got glasses, at 2 months shy of 2 years old, the doctors told us that we should keep an eye on her because kids usually put their glasses down and break them. Well, not this time. For likely the first time in her life she was able to see us, her room, her house, her dog, trees…everything. Never once did she break them, because she never took them off except to go to sleep, and even then she wasn’t happy about it. First thing in the morning every day her first word wasn’t “Dada” or “Mama” but instead…”Gasses”…which I assume meant glasses, unless she could see the air or something.
It shouldn’t have surprised me to find out that our older daughter needed glasses a few years ago, but it did a bit. And it shouldn’t have surprised me to find out that my 8-year-old son AND 6-year-old daughter needed glasses, too, which I learned late in December of 2019. My youngest daughter has the second-worst prescription…-9.75 in her left eye.

Why is it Denis’ Glasses Story Blog Post time? Because analogies rule, and it’s now the year 2020. Everyone in my family needs vision correction.
Me: Myopia and Astigmatisms, both eyes
My wife: Myopia, both eyes
My 15-year-old daughter: Myopia, both eyes
My 13-year-old daughter: Severe Myopia and Severe Astigmatisms, both eyes
My 8-year-old son: Amblyopia, left eye
My 6-year-old daughter: Amblyopia, left eye

We all need vision correction. We all have vision correction for slightly different reasons and for varying severity. Professionals have studied how to fix the problems we have and have given us a range of choices to pick from; glasses, contacts, surgery, eyeball replacement (not this one).
We all look back at the moment we got glasses and have said “how did I ever see without these? The world is so much more clear now.”

I write this blog for teachers and school leaders, so let me ask you teachers and school leaders this:
What’s your vision for your students, your staff, your school? Is it clear? Does it need correction? Is it mildly nearsighted or blurry beyond recognition?
Will you seek vision correction now, heading into the new year, or will you look back at the end of 2020 and say “I should have seen this coming.” Don’t have 2020 Hindsight. Have a clear 2020 Vision.

So, I seem to have a thing about blogging when it snows. Today is no different. We had a snow day today and I took out the snowblower to clear out the 8-10 inches of snow in my driveway. Things were going well for a while until, without explanation, the snowblower’s forward moving gear stopped working. For some, this wouldn’t be an issue, but I live on a decently steep hill and have a decently steep driveway, so without forward propulsion, I’m not going to get much snowblowing done. I took out the shovel to get going manually, but as I began to move the snowblower into the garage, I noticed that the Reverse gear was working.

Why on earth would only the REVERSE gear work? No, really, I’m asking. If you know, tweet me instructions to fix my problem @MathDenisNJ.

It was at this point that I remembered something my third grade teacher, Ms. Dalrymple, had said to me. It was January and we little third graders got to bring in one of our Christmas presents for Show ‘n Tell since back in the 80’s you could still talk about Christmas in school. I brought in my favorite gift, a remote control car my parents had gotten me. I was so excited when I opened up that gift that at age 42 I still remember it vividly. BUT…it was one of those remote control cars that wasn’t all that remote. The “remote” was connected to a wire that was connected to the car.

The interesting thing about this car is that it goes forward and backward, but only turns when it’s going in reverse. So you race ahead, back up and turn at the same time, then race ahead in a new direction. I complained a bit to Ms. Dalrymple that “it doesn’t turn when it’s driving.” Her response to me was what I remembered this morning in the driveway.

Don’t focus on what it can’t do. Make the most of what it CAN DO!

So I took the snowblower, turned it around, backed it up the driveway and let gravity and some back muscle push it down the driveway until all the snow was gone. Then I did the neighbor’s driveway, too, because even though the forward gear wasn’t working, JUST LOOK WHAT IT COULD DO!!

Teachers, as you look at your students, do you look at them for what they can’t do, or do you celebrate and make the most of what they CAN DO?

Leaders, as you look at your faculty and staff, do you look at them for what they can’t do, or do you celebrate and make the most of what they CAN DO?

What kind of culture will your school have if you focus on what the people who come through your doors every day CAN DO? Think about that, then #MakeItReal