I am an Intermediate/Senior (Grades 7 to 12) Mathematics Honours Specialist teacher in Toronto, also qualified to teach Computer Studies; I also have additional qualifications in Special Education and English as a Second Language. I am currently employed by the Bishop Strachan School in the Mathematics department, teaching grades 7 to 9. Some relevant sections from my resume are on the left-hand side of this page. Please feel free to browse around and leave me a comment – all comments are screened and are not made public unless you request it.
Stats Canada site on Social Justice
October 28, 2009 at 11:40 am (Uncategorized)
This site collects data to investigate and analyze social justice issues.
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/edu/edu05_0022-eng.htm
Math brochures for parents and families
October 25, 2009 at 10:14 am (Uncategorized)
I just discovered these online resources for parents/guardians and families. They cover commonly asked questions like “Why are students using calculators?” and “Why does the math that my child brings home look different from the math I remember? “
http://nctm.org/resources/families.aspx
New France reference
October 14, 2009 at 11:29 am (Uncategorized)
Miquelon, Dale. New France, 1701-1744: A Supplement to Europe. Toronto: Mcclelland And Stewart, 1987.
Ratio and Proportion online games
September 14, 2009 at 3:19 pm (Uncategorized)
http://www.4kids.org/games/ has a couple of ratio and proportion games (specifically Ratio Stadium and Dirt Bike Proportions). They are multi-player games that look very simple to set up for four students to play against each other. The would be good for just a ten-minute filler; the numbers are very small and meant for younger kids, but it might be a fun way to start class before diving into “If You Hopped Like a Frog”.
A recent round-up of articles and other links
September 6, 2009 at 5:19 pm (Uncategorized)
Collaborative Inquiry as Professional Development; from the Indiana Paraeducators Support Project.
Differentiated Instruction; an interview with Carol Ann Tomlinson.
Hippocampus Algebra; good reviews of Algebra I and II (roughly equivalent to our Grades 9 and 10).
Curriki; lots of resources to find, led me to Hippocampus.
Algebraic Problem-solving with Spreadsheets; ideas for a Grade 9 course.
Gender in the Classroom; a Google Books window.
Adding It Up; online book.
Rubric for class participation from Carmel Schettino.
Rubric for Journal Entries from Carmel Schettino.
Gapminder; fabulous data visualization tool.
Women and Math, the Gender Gap Bridged; important research on countries where girls do as well as boys in math (Iceland, Turkey).
E-Stat for Education; tons of Canadian data.
TI Tutorials; good for new students who need to learn to use the graphing calculators we use.
<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/national/blog/special_feature/brain_gains/how_exercise_promotes_learning.html"How Exercise Promotes Learning; CBC National special feature on a school in Western Canada that increased student success through exercise.
Dinner
April 17, 2009 at 7:39 pm (Hobbies)
Tags: food, veggies
Tonight’s dinner was a “soup” adapted from an Epicurious recipe for Beet and Cabbage Soup. It read like a Mexican borscht, but turned out like a hot vegetable puree for me.
The veggie mix above is a Cylindra beet, a red onion, 3 stalks of celery, and a quarter of a very small head of cabbage. After sauteing the veggies in vegetable oil for about ten minutes, I added a container of frozen turkey stock from the freezer, and boiled it all for an hour or so, until the veggies were soft enough to puree in the blender. The only other ingredients were lime juice, stirred in at the end, and tortilla chips to crumble into it.
The garden is in!
April 5, 2009 at 5:57 pm (Uncategorized)
We constructed a 4′ by 4′ (sorry, 1.2m by 1.2m – old habits die hard, and gardening was always done with my parents in Imperial measurements) bottomless box today and set it on a former flowerbed, to become the first of our square foot gardens. The official square foot garden method says to fill the box with a mixture of peat moss, coarse vermiculite, and compost; since I’ve read that the current stores of peat moss in the world are holding as much carbon dioxide as the rain forests, it seems like a good idea to skip that and go for a closed-system approach in our backyard garden. We turned over the soil in the box and added the compost from the composter, and planted in that.
There’s, of course, not much that can be planted now, but we planted a square each of peas, spinach, and beets, and half a square of radishes.
Most of the point of growing vegetables is to be environmentally friendly, so we’re relying on scavenged materials. The sides of the box are leftover siding material from the shed, and the grid strips are from old lattice I pulled apart.
You can just see the tulips coming up on the left-hand side of the picture – I hope the squirrels don’t eat them until after they bloom, this year.
Electrical usage
April 5, 2009 at 5:22 pm (eco-minded)
Our “Kill-a-watt” device has this to say about the electrical usage of my school-issued laptop, which I left on for several days as a test:
66:41 hours:minutes
1.25 kWh
max watts 99
No conclusions to draw here, just collecting data for later comparisons.
Seasonal Produce – March
March 23, 2009 at 2:50 pm (Hobbies)
Tags: food, veggies
March and April is the hardest time for me to stick to seasonal produce. At this time of year, before the spring greens and first asparagus become available, ’seasonal’ mostly means fruits and vegetables that have kept well over the winter. For fruit, this means apples; I’m getting tired of eating them plain, but we’re still eating them cooked in oatmeal, or sliced to top off a toasted bagel with peanut butter. (That last is a great afternoon snack).
Root vegetables such as parsnips, potatoes, and sweet potatoes are still holding their own. I haven’t yet mastered the art of the slow cooker, but parsnips don’t need much cooking anyway. They, along with sweet potatoes, are our favourites when they’re roasted in the oven with a little bit of butter, lemon juice, and honey. Potatoes are always welcomed plainly boiled and mashed. Beets are a new addition to our repertoire.
Cabbage and squash are other good winter vegetables. The Smitten Kitchen’s Warm Butternut Squash and Chickpea Salad is the best use for butternut squash I’ve come across yet. Cabbage shines in cabbage rolls, bubble and squeak (with the potatoes mentioned above, usually augmented with bacon or served alongside pork chops), or sometimes in coleslaw.
We’re still a month away from pulling the first radishes from the ground, and tearing off the outside leaves of our first spinach… although I’m already looking forward to those first tastes of spring!
Seeds!
March 17, 2009 at 8:46 pm (Hobbies)
Tags: garden
My son and I bought seeds today, at Bill’s Garden Centre, which is so far my favourite garden centre in the city (to be fair, I haven’t visited many). We’ve just started cabbage, cauliflower, peppers, and tomato in individual yogurt containers in the kitchen – just one of each, since we’re going to try the Square Foot Gardening method.
We also have zucchini, broccoli, pumpkin, corn, swiss chard, turnip, beans (yellow, green, and bush), beets, spinach, radish, onion, carrot, cucumber, melon, and pea seeds. I figured that lots of people must come in and buy an optimistic number of seed packets at this time of year, but the woman behind the counter joked that we must have a farm. We’re only planning 2.7 m² (30 square feet) of garden, including the 60cm paths in between the two raised beds. We’ll see!
