Open House

Normally I can't stand Open House.  I understand Back To School Night in September, but not Open House in April--at least, not for high school, I don't.  I get the elementary school purpose of it, but it's not any fun for so many of us in high school.  But it's in our contract, we've gotta do it, ugh.

This year our math department tried something a little different.  Instead of each of us being in our classrooms, we set up a couple tables outside our department chair's room.  Each of us brought something as an example of the work our students do--I brought a bowl of M&M's and a description of my statistics class' Chi-Square Goodness of Fit Project.  I hooked up my 70" flatscreen tv  (yeah I do!!!) out there next to our tables and our department chair, for example, had a looping slideshow of his students working on their "indirect measurement lab" outside (using indirect measurement to determine the height of the flagpole, for instance).

All the math teachers were in one place.  We could see what each other was doing, it freed us up individually to go see what other departments were doing (I was amazed at some of the ceramics work a couple of my students had done)--and if a parent had a question about which class their student should take next year, well, here are the teachers right here who can tell you about your options because they teach those classes!

I haven't found a teacher yet who didn't prefer it to being caged in our classrooms.  It actually made the evening tolerable.