Two ideas that struck me

From chapter 9 in our methods book, I found two ideas that really struck me as worthwhile.  One pertaining to gender equity said that, in general, girls are less comfortable with calculators and technology than boys.  I remember during my freshman year of college when I started my engineering classes that all of the boys were eager to program on computers and I had no experience with any programming.  Not only did I feel intimidated by the boys already having the knowledge, but I felt that somehow I had missed something in high school that I was supposed to learn, and it made me reluctant to ask for help.  So this tidbit of information really struck home with me.  Today during a practice session with linear functions, I encouraged the students to use our graphing calculators.  Two girls chose to use them, so I felt like I made a step in the right direction.

The other idea I liked was to find mathematical problems from different cultures to share with my students. With our diverse student population ranging from Vietnamese to Ukrainian to Gabonese, I'm eager to search for useful math ideas that will shed light on their various cultures.  I think it will be healthy for all students to see the ways math is used in different situations.

Catching up is hard to do

Students who have realized that the end of the trimester is only a few days away are now bringing in missed assignments they think will bring their grade up.  However, our standards-based grading only counts tests and quizzes for grades, so showing us their homework doesn't affect their grades.  Other students are asking to retake tests, so we have set up times before and after school, as well as during lunch tutorial, for students to come and take a different version of their unit test.  It seems odd to me that students who go to the trouble of taking another test have not made an effort to study the questions they missed on the first test. In some cases, the students miss questions that are very similar to ones they got right the first time.  Or they'll get the same questions wrong that they missed the first time (not every question is different).  I wonder if it's due to parental motivation that the students are retaking tests; it hasn't brought up anyone's grade so far.  We had one student planning to retake the test tomorrow, but now school is cancelled due to snow.  There's always next trimester!

It doesn’t count if it doesn’t stick

I saw this comment today when we had snow predicted (and school got out two hours early), but when I first read it, I thought about how appropriate it is for teaching.  In teaching to the students, it doesn’t count as valid teaching if the concepts don’t stick with our students.  We are working on how to make similar figures in 7th grade math, and I’m stressing that similar figures need to have the same scale factor for each dimension.  I keep asking “what number do you need to multiply by to go from the old figure to the new figure?” and defining this as the scale factor.  We did multiple examples with both rectangles and triangles, and demonstrated the scale factor is bigger than 1 when we are going from a small shape to a large shape, and the reciprocal going from the big shape to the smaller.  At the end of the class, I gave the students an exit ticket with two sets of triangles: one set was similar shapes because each side was multiplied by 2 to get the other side, and the other set had triangles whose dimensions were changed by an addition of 1 to each side.  Five students out of 24 got it wrong, so at least the majority were following along.  But for those five, why did they think those triangles were similar?  The right idea didn’t stick.

Low point

So I'm gone from home more than 12 hours straight due to teaching school and going to school, I haven't seen my husband today since he was gone at a meeting by the time I got home, I've had an hour-long fight with my son about one thing after another, there's two loads of laundry to fold and I'm wondering for the umpteenth time: what did I get myself into?  I have a lesson plan to write for tomorrow, another one I need to change based on what happened today, a unit plan to write for methods and I'm beat.  Why did I want to do this?  This is too much!  I hope the sun shines tomorrow because I need it!

Finding mistakes in my teaching

My cooperating teacher and I have been co-planning our classes together, and I take her plans and flesh them out into more formal plans for methods class. However, I'm only doing that for the Algebra and CMP2 classes, not for our Study Tech class.  So when I started teaching Study Tech today, I realized that I didn't have a detailed feeling of where our class needed to go.  Frequently, we are previewing or reviewing concepts these students will see in their CMP2 class.  We were working on equivalent fractions today, something all of the students struggle with to some degree.  I reviewed the worksheet that they had for homework by asking students how they solved the problems, and then we gave the students another worksheet to practice with positive and negative numbers.  After 5 minutes of working with the students, I saw they needed more scaffolding, so I asked them to write down each time the fraction they multiplied by to get the equivalent fraction (ie, 5/5, 3/3, 8/8, etc.) Most students kept working on the problems, but in going around to assess their progress, none of them were writing down the intermediate step.  I didn't make that step mandatory, so they weren't doing it, even though it would have helped most students understand the process. I wish I could go back and reteach this lesson, making sure that students write down the ratio they are using to find their answer.  Next time, I'll know!

Start with the basics

We gave our Study Tech students an online assessment that was targeted to material taught in the 6th-8th grades, and many of them did poorly on the test.  These are students who got a 1 on the MSP test at the end of 6th grade.  Because we want to clearly define where they are now in order to show improvement later, we also gave these students the online assessment for grades K-5.  Several of our students scored at the 3rd or 4th grade level in certain subjects, particularly working with fractions and finding equivalent fractions.  This topic is going to come up again in later math, so we really want to make sure they understand this basic idea.  Our realization that we need to go back to concepts they should have learned in 3rd grade opened our eyes to the level of basic math skills these kids are missing.

What is your math identity?

Last Tuesday's methods class touched on the concept of math identities: what is your relationship to math?  How do you see yourself - good at math or not? Does the idea of solving math problems bring you peace or anxiety?  The article we read really got me thinking about our Study Tech kids, students who struggle at math and have been labeled as "not meeting standard."  Every day, I aim to make math relevant for these students because they clearly believe that math is not important to their future. If we can show them how math is relevant, then I think they may be more self-motivated about their learning.  In particular, there is one student who I'm tutoring who is bored or sleepy during every class. He can do the work, but has trouble getting started.  We gave students a sudoku puzzle to do after finishing a quiz because they needed to stay quiet as the other students worked on their quiz.  I was surprised and delighted when I handed my tutored student a sudoku, and he said "Oh, I love these. I have a book of them at home."  Now I have a hook to work with! I want to give these students a chance to see themselves at mathematicians, so they will have more self-confidence to tackle math problems.