Collaboration day 2: change of venue

We had planned to meet at the school at 9:00 AM.

Around 7:45 AM, I got a text from Kate, asking me if I'd seen the district email about internet outages.  We wouldn't have the internet at the school.

I said, "We can meet at my house.  We have WiFi...and AC."

So they said sure.

And I spun into triage-deathbed-repentance tidying.

We haven't had people over in any way shape or form since March. (Besides Braeden and Anna that one time and they aren't really "company.")

The main floor is usually easy enough to straighten up but I realized that since we were doing some different online classes, Janelle may need to use my office.

It's not really a public space so I did some mad stashing and straightening.

In the end, our house was I-had-an-hour-to-make-it-look-good clean.  It was OK.

It was weird to have my teacher friends in our house.  Like worlds were colliding.  Adam emerged from his office shell shocked a few times.  He is in such an intense busy time, working crazy hours and barely coming up for air.

He was a good sport about having three loud mouthed teachers in his kitchen.

In the afternoon, Kate and I did the online class Janelle had done earlier.  There were three math tasks for us to do, the first two were easy and basically familiar and the last one was pretty much nonsensical.

I figured out how to do it but I had no idea how or why it worked and that was the point.  We were supposed to see that you can know how to do something but not understand why.

We're supposed to teach why and teach so children can conceptualize and represent the math.  I'm still in the process of wrapping my mind around the whole common core math stuff.  It's different than how I was taught, but I think it's good.

It's how Adam just naturally does math and it's why he's so good at math.  It's why I can ask him any math problem and he can just spit out the answer faster than it would take me to pull out a calculator.

I showed him the third problem that was so crazy town to all of us.

He said, "Hmm."

Then he said,  "Oh."

Then he explained it to me because it all made perfect sense to him.  He was gesturing with his hands showing me where the numbers were on a number line and how they relate to each other.

He conceptualized and could represent the problem and all I could think was, Adam is smart.