I’ve even caught myself cutting off some students questions towards the end of class cause I have to finish the lesson so students know how to do their homework. Teaching a lesson up until the bell and not giving students time to start the work in class is really frustrating for me. Plenty of students do not have parents at home to help them or if they do I often get the “I’m not good enough at math to help them” line.

The saddest part so far is that I simply don’t have answers. I try to cut things, move fast here and slow down there, and I still feel like I am fumbling through. Flexibility is an important characteristic of a teacher, but it is definitely had to change an internal clock that has chimed regularly for the past 4 years.

My hope is by the end of this year I will have tried enough variations to figure out a system that will work for next year… here’s hoping.

My district is no where even close to carrying out Apple’s vision of an iPad in the hands of every student filled with interactive text books.  It is not my district’s fault. Apple doesn’t cut insane deals on iPads, schools have to pay almost the full $500 price tag per iPad and then invest the thousands of dollars to fill them up with Apps and Books. How do districts have a chance?

Apple is only pushing a wedge that is separating the monetary affluent schools from the schools that simply aren’t. It is frustrating and sad, but we will continue to teach and reach out to kids no matter what technology is in our classrooms.

The fear though is that students are no longer young people with faces and personalities, but numbers on a spreadsheet. A lot of this comes in when you are expected to report your data back to others or you are talking about your data. Your students become numbers – we are distilling the job down to its most basic form to compare.

I don’t know the alternative to this, but just be wary that when you are thinking of your classroom, how you teach, and who you teach – make sure that you are thinking amply about your students and their needs and not just the numbers on a spreadsheet.

The big point of the lesson is trying to get students to see that taking the discount off in two steps will get a different result compared to taking it off in one step. This lesson had students take a more inquiry based approach (which I will be writing on plenty in the future) as most students assumed that the discounts would result in the same price.

Doing it through the activity allowed them to find out which one saved more and conjecture about why it saved more. This worked out really well for my moderate to advanced students and not quite as well for my low students. This is partially my fault as my low students were struggling to find the percent discounts as I did not properly scaffold this skill for them – definitely something I will change in the future. I like this method of approach for students that have a firm grasp of content as it allows them to explore the learning possibilities themselves. I will continue to experiment with this approach and see what role it can take in an every-day class environment.

This is the reason I look for Math everywhere as you never know where you will find something that will make a perfect teaching lesson.

The problem is I have discovered this is a skill I need to teach to my students. First, I think students are often over confident in what they find challenging. They are quick to assume they got something right – especially on multiple choice tests. Secondly, they have difficult putting into words why a problem is difficult. They can act like it should be assumed that because they are not able to do the problem then of course they cannot tell my what’s difficult about it. They equate knowing what’s difficult or challenging with knowing how to solve. This is a problem.

Students need to recognize what they know about a problem, how to try it, and then when they can’t come up with a right answer they need to recognize where the difficulty lies. What is the hurdle that they cannot get over. Even if it’s as simple as ‘I know I am solving the proportion right, so I must be setting it up wrong” or “I am unsure if this is the correct number for the denominator.”

We need to get students to question themselves – not to the point of self doubt, but to make a more complete learner.

The majority of my students sit in mixed ability groupings in which they do new lesson work when time and behavior allows. I normally do similar ability behavior only during specific differentiation days. As I work towards differentiating on a more regular basis I guess I shall try same ability groupings more often and see how the results compare.

Opposing research has made it so I have to do my own research in my classroom which I guess is not such a bad thing. It is possible that also depends on the students in the class and their interactions, we shall find out. Anyone have experiences to share?

I find myself constantly battling the direct instruction, teaching at a white board (whether it is interactive or not) mentality. It is how I learned and I learned pretty well. It is how all my friends learned and a lot of them were even better than me. I think the problem is that direct instruction works. I know I can get certain results with it and it is comfortable to me. If I want to go beyond those results – or better yet – engage my students in a profound way, the focus needs to be off of me in the front of the room and shifted to make the student the center of the learning.

Teacher turns facilitator.

How would this look fully realized?

I think groups, stations, experiments, etc. aren’t answers but rather pieces. Forming them to make a unique math classroom experience is something we must all experiment with. Resisting what is easy and natural is the start. What do you think?

Do you have any books that you would recommend? Even if you come across this post 3 years later – please leave a comment with a book recommendation!

All that being said, we should be doing everything we can to continue to learn, get better, and discover ways to make our classroom and instruction the best it can be. That is hopefully what this blog will assist in doing for me and anyone else reading.