Celebrating Every Day: #Teach180

Before the start of this school year, I discovered the #teach180 hashtag via the post Sarah Carter made about it. I had no idea about its existence last year, and I have been so glad to be a part of it this year.

I decided to participate. This year is my 4th year teaching, and in August coming back to school it was the first time I finally felt comfortable – maybe comfortable isn’t the right word, but like I knew what was going on, what to expect, and had plans ready. So I took this chance to push myself to become better, and to start to network with other teachers across the country (and world!).

And so I was off!

I’m going to include some of my favorites of my own #teach180 posts from this year as I talk about the experience.

Every year, my kids are still talking about Slope Dude in April and May when we watched the video in August, and this tweet made Sarah’s roundup of tweets from the first few weeks of school.

At first, I sort of felt pressure to make sure I was doing really cool things. Well, no, not even really cool things. Things that looked really cool. So I could take a cool picture to post on the internet.

Some of the time, that actually resulted in me thinking of a new and helpful way to explain or organize content!

Or, sometimes it resulted in a really fun new activity!

But sometimes, it just resulted in a lot of extra stress and days spent staying late at school with me thinking, “I have such a boring day planned tomorrow I’m not going to have anything cool to post for #teach180!”

Then I realized how silly this was. And at some point, I gave myself permission to just post a picture of a worksheet if I needed to. Or some grading. Since then, there’s been nothing but LOVE for #teach180! I regularly scroll through the hashtag and find the GREATEST ideas to use in my classroom – and it’s especially cool since, in math at least, a lot of the curricula have vaguely similar sequencing/pacing, so often I open the hashtag to find an activity over something I’m getting ready to teach the very next day!

(Like this paper airplane box and whisker plot one, which got so many students not in my class to ask about the tape on the hallway floor!)

I’ve gotten a ton of questions about my Sports Statistics course (which I developed the curriculum for myself, based loosely on the first 2/3 of the AP stats curriculum), which has been really fun to share with the world.

It’s also been a cool way to share good tech tips:

Occasionally, I’ve brought my coworkers into my posts for the day, because I love using this hashtag to show off my really amazing school:

And here are just some more favorites:

It’s also been a great motivator to keep things going now that we’ve hit that end-of-the-year time when everyone is kind of like “ehhhhhh” and all the students are asking you about their grade every five seconds. It’s sort of preventing me from the urge to just coast into the finish line.

All in all, it’s a really amazing hashtag and I’m so glad I decided to participate. I am 100% going to continue it next year, and you should join! It’s also a great way to get started on twitter, because you’ll be forced to post at least one tweet per day, and you know other teacher’s will be finding your tweets through the hashtag and will want to follow you!

Author: missmastalio

Math teacher at an alternative high school. Living the best life.

One thought on “Celebrating Every Day: #Teach180”

  1. Pingback: Monday Must Reads: Volume 4 – Math = Love

Leave a comment