This Is What It's All About

There are days when every teacher wonders why we do what we do.

Every once and a while everyone in class is engaged in the lesson. Everyone has questions; questions that pertain to the lesson. "Why did that work?" "How did you get that?" "No, no, the scale factor is 1.5, not 2, isn't it?"

Today was such a day.

We started class with a Powerpoint lesson where my kids had to draw pictures, think, redraw pictures, think some more, discuss with their groups, and solve the problem. Then, I asked my kids to solve a similar problem...same mathematics, different numbers.

Kids were engaged. They worked together. They asked questions. They had multiple ways to solve the problems...some worked and some didn't. The kids figured out why some worked and why some didn't. I just asked the questions. I let the kids figure out what was right and what was wrong. They did all the heavy lifting.

After the Powerpoint we went right into the homework. We had been working on it for several days. We spent 25 minutes talking about different homework problems. We must have worked five or six problems total. The kids asked the questions. I got them started. "Why did that work?" "Can't I just multiply?" "Could you show me how to find the scale factor again?" Some of them just had that look on their face. Everyone who has ever taught knows the one...the "What did you just do?" look. I made sure those kids especially got their questions answered.

It's been a while since the whole class was engaged the entire hour. It really was the whole class. It really was the whole hour. And it was a split class for lunch (we work for 25 minutes, go to lunch, come back and work for 35 minutes). And it's a co-taught special education class (which is usually one of my better classes anyway).

I talked to my co-teacher at the end of the hour. This is her third year teaching. Her parents are both teachers in our district. She graduated from our district. She's very familiar with our district and very comfortable with our kids.

I told her this is what it's all about. Everyone was "on" today. Everyone was engaged. Everyone was learning today.

This is what it's all about.

A Great 3 Days!!!

I had 3 great teaching days in a row in virtually every class I taught. Kids were engaged in the lesson. They discussed math and the lesson at the appropriate times. They stayed focused. They asked each other questions. They asked me questions. They saw the connections. For those few short minutes every day my kids were learning math.

What was my secret? Was it a full moon? Was it no moon? Was it the song and dance number I did? I definitely did not do a song and dance number.

I think the structure of my classroom finally kicked in and my seventh graders finally made the adjustment. The lessons I taught had plenty of student involvement. The Connected Mathematics lessons gave students plenty of opportunity to work together, to solve problems, to collaborate, to ask questions of each other, and to show each other how they had solved the problems.

Can I recreate that same identical situation the next 24 weeks...probably not. I can give my kids the opportunity to be successful. Believe me, I'm going to try.

A New Week...More Fun

This looks to be a great week as kids get a chance to work on their Stretching and Shrinking project. Sixty-two minutes in one class period of tables, graphs, drawing, figuring, stretching, shrinking, and rubric checking. There is a lot of rich mathematics being discussed. Kids have drawn their own picture and are trying to figure out how to stretch it, how to shrink it, what non-right angles look like, how to find the area of part of their picture, and so on and so on and so on.

Stay tuned.

Good Noise and Bad Noise

Noise. There's good noise in class and bad noise in class. Good noise happens when kids are engaged in their own learning, when they are asking each other how to work problems, when they are collaborating to find a solution.

Bad noise happens when kids are off task. It's my job to re-focus my kids, to keep them on task. Some groups are more challenging than others. About every 10 years or so a group rotates through that is very immature. They are mostly just young for their chronological age. They just haven't yet caught up to being a 7th grader. They will; it will just take some extra time.

Not everyone in a particular class can be classified as the immature student; it's just that some years...occasionally...the immature group is larger than usual.

I work very hard to not teach less mathematics than other years. I do stress structure in my classroom, more so than normal. The routine molds the group as we, as teachers, prepare them for 8th grade. The structure, the routine is most important.

A Tragic Pumpkin Accident

A few days ago I used technology to reinforce my message for the day. After a tragic pumpkin accident at our house, I decided to make lemonade out of my lemons...er, apple cider from apples...well, it all sounds better than pumpkin-ade from pumpkins.

I have been stressing to my students that I can't flip open the top of their head and pour in the mathematics of the day. My students have to actually participate in their own learning. Then I had this great idea based on our tragic pumpkin accident. A pumpkin fell from the counter and split along the mouth line. I completed the pumpkin-cut at the equator and began photographing. I couldn't figure out how to attach the Powerpoint to this blog, so I included the last picture. The person is me trying to teach math. The pumpkin represents my students' heads. The red Kool-Aid represents math. The captions reads: It's too bad you don't have a flip-top head.

I also used the Powerpoint to introduce the similarity concept. We compared "actual" me to the pictures of me. Two birds...one stone. Fantastic!

Calculator Day

Calculator day is one of the funnest days of the year. We use the Ti 84 calculators. Surely, this is one of the greatest inventions of all time...right up there with sliced bread and WD-40. This calculator can do so much so fast that I can actually teach the math behind the arithmetic and teach the meaning behind all of those tables, graphs, and equations math teachers are so famous for.

Virtually everything we did today was a new skill for kids. We typed in equations. We read tables. We compared graphs. We found answers to contextual questions, not just if x = 3 find y. We discovered what the x = 3 means and what the value of that pesky "y" is and what it means. See, there is a reason for doing all of this math.

I could tell kids were really learning and internalizing stuff today because I have never had it so quiet in my classroom. Normally, there is some conversation. Not today. Kids asked pertinent questions. They listened. They took great notes.

We are finally using the calculator as the second most powerful tool in our tool box...after our brains.

Just Listen To Them Talk

Once kids start actually talking about "the math", they say some pretty incredible things. I have my kids sit in groups of five. Daily, we discuss how to solve a particular problem.

My job is just to keep them talking about "the math". Today, we were trying to write rules and equations for distance = rate x time problems. Kids feel very comfortable explaining things to other kids...usually more comfortable with the small group than with the large group. Just listening to them explain how they came up their answers and what they thought was wrong is always incredible. Sometimes I clarify what they say...mostly I try to keep my mouth shut. I try.