(Of course it's not finals week at this school. This is my new district, where not only isn't it the end of the semester, but the middle school follows the trimester calendar anyway.)
8:15 -- Homeroom leads directly into first period. For the morning announcements, the class actually recites the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish.
First period is the first of four Spanish I classes. The students begin with a Warm-Up, which is known as la campanada. Then the students read a short story in Spanish and then complete a worksheet based on the reading. If they finish early, there is a project for them to do on Chromebooks.
Note that Spanish I is a high-school level course often taken by eighth graders, just like Algebra I. In fact, on University of California applications, there's a space for students to list both math and foreign language courses taken in seventh and eighth grade. Thus it follows that there are many of the same college-bound students in this class as in the Algebra I class from before Thanksgiving.
9:20 -- First period leaves. I mentioned the period rotation at this school before Thanksgiving. It's tied to the days of the week. Since today is Thursday, the rotation goes 1-5-6-2-3-4.
Fifth period is the teacher's conference period. Special holiday treats are being served in the lounge, which teachers and subs enjoy during our free period. The break period leads directly into snack.
10:30 -- Sixth period arrives. This the second Spanish I class.
11:25 -- Sixth period leaves and second period arrives. This is the third Spanish I class.
12:20 -- Second period leaves for lunch.
1:05 -- Third period arrives. This is the only Introduction to Spanish class -- a trimester class for eighth graders deemed not ready for Spanish I.
It's also my only "math" class of the day -- for you see, the students are learning how to count numbers in Spanish. They must add, subtract, multiply, and convert from digits to Spanish and back.
One student has trouble with the worksheet -- he tells me that he can do the math easily, but he doesn't know enough Spanish since he just started learning the language this trimester. I know only a little Spanish -- particularly the numbers. So we work on four problems together.
(By the way, as a math teacher, I at least want to learn how to say numbers in other languages. I'm still upset that back when I was tutoring a young Korean girl a few years back, I didn't ask her to teach me how to count in Korean.)
2:00 -- Third period leaves and fourth period arrives. This is the last Spanish I class.
2:55 -- Fourth period leaves, and I go home to write this blog entry.
The main management issue occurs when I put the Chromebooks away and close the cart. The problem is that the cart automatically locks, and it won't open without a key. This ends up ruining the later periods, from second period on. Students in those classes start talking loud and playing around the last few minutes -- they have nothing else to do since the Chromebooks are locked up.
And it especially becomes a problem in third period. These aren't Spanish I students, and so they aren't as well-behaved as the college-bound eighth graders. Some of them start throwing pens around at each other. The best-behaved class of the day is sixth period, and next best is first period -- the classes that meet before I accidentally lock the Chromebooks.
It's obvious what I could have done better today -- not lock the Chromebooks. I should have known that the cart would lock if I try to close it completely. This is why the regular teacher originally left it ajar for me, and I should have done the same until after the last class has concluded.
Today is the second day of finals week. It has been my tradition on the blog on the second finals day to explore the Math Twitter Blogosphere, or MTBoS.
But I must admit that I feel somewhat detached from the MTBoS. Since I left my old school, I am no longer a math teacher, and so I can't truly be a member of MTBoS. If I'm ever hired again to be a math teacher, I'll rejoin the MTBoS once again.
In the past, the main blogger I'd link to on MTBoS Day was Dan Meyer. I used to call him the King of the MTBoS as many other bloggers use his lessons -- notice how many of Meyer's 3-Act lessons appear on Stauver's pacing plan. But I no longer consider Meyer the King of the MTBoS because he has rejected the MTBoS label. Instead, Fawn Nguyen is now the Queen.
But last month, Dan Meyer wrote a thought-provoking post that has drawn dozens of comments. Let's look at this post in the link below:
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/2018/that-isnt-a-mistake/
Meyer tells us that we should be careful when students that they've made a mistake. His example involves filling out the y-values on a T-table with values of a linear function. The students make a mistake because they don't see that the given x-values are 0, 1, 2, 3, 10, 15. He emphasizes:
We just don’t understand what they meant to do.
Our students offer us windows and we exchange them for mirrors.
I've mentioned this before. Human beings aren't logical -- we don't respond well to criticism. If we're told "You're wrong," we're more likely to shut down than correct ourselves.
I understand this as well as Meyer does. The only ones who seem to disagree are the traditionalists, who would prefer that students be told "You're wrong" emphatically. Students need to be led back to the correct path as quickly as possible rather than allowed to continue in the wrong direction.
One of Meyer's "featured comments" is by Sean Kelleher:
Sean Kelleher:
There is a difference between correctly doing what you intended where that is the wrong path to an answer because you haven’t fully understood, and following the correct path because you have understood but tripping up along the way. I think Dan is rightly and helpfully drawing that distinction, because recognising it in a student’s work is vital to how we help the student develop. Calling both “mistakes” hides that distinction.
And Meyer's final comment in this thread is in response to "Derek":
Derek:
Or is it okay in this case to say you did a great job of understanding and you recognized what I wanted you to recognize but you simply made a calculation error?
Dan Meyer:
Right. If I’m confident that students didn’t do what they meant to do, I don’t have a problem making that observation, telling them that their intent makes a lot of sense to me, that they just need to make sure they enacted it correctly.
In a follow-up post, Meyer clarifies how to avoid telling students that they're wrong. The students just gave the right answer to the wrong problem -- the one where the x-values go 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5:
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/2018/mailbag-what-do-you-do-with-the-ideas-you-used-to-call-mistakes/
Yesterday, in trying to solve the "eighth grade Pythagorean Theorem" problem, I ended up solving a different problem along the way -- the desired radius is sqrt(3), but the length of a slightly longer segment is 2. Knowing the wrong answer -- that the longer length is 2 -- gave me a clue as to what the correct answer is -- that it's less than 2.
In this comment thread, there is another "featured comment" by cheesemonkeysf:
cheesemonkeysf:
I find that I have to keep insisting that they restate the question in their own words. The culture of “right answer” is filled with shame and shaming, and students will try repeatedly to just give me the “correct” answer to the original question. But this is a missed opportunity for developing understanding, in my view.
And here's a response:
Evan Rushton:
I appreciate this contribution to the thread Elizabeth! I find your response resonates with my classroom experience using CPM with English Learners. However, I was unable to develop a culture in my class where students would re-read prompts or critically analyze text without me demanding it… and I couldn’t be the language support each of my students needed every day.
What might you suggest for a teacher struggling to ask “students to restate the original question/problem in their own words (i.e., What is this question *actually* asking for?)” Is this something you ask of all your students on every prompt? How does it become part of the class culture?
One thing I like about the MTBoS is that it's easy to follow the commenters on Meyer's blog -- clicking on their names often leads to their own respective blogs. For example, Sean Kelleher's own blog echoes Rushton's comments above:
https://maths4eal.net/2018/12/08/a-question-of-resources/
At the MAV Convention on Thursday, the team from Sunshine College, Thao Huynh and Alex Mills, gave an excellent presentation on how they use reciprocal teaching to scaffold their students into worded problems. To get us into thinking about the language demands of a maths problem for their EAL students, they gave us this problem to solve:
The problem in this example is in German, and Rushton refers to English learners. But change the language to Spanish, and it's just like the guy in my third period today who has trouble understanding the math problems in Spanish.
I notice that CCSSIMath -- the traditionalist who first posed the Pythagorean problem this week -- is now posting under the MTBoS hashtag -- one of the few traditionalist members of MTBoS. Most members of the MTBoS are more aligned with Meyer than with the traditionalists.
Here are the links to the other MTBoS blogs mentioned above:
http://cheesemonkeysf.blogspot.com/
http://evanrushton.blogspot.com/
Let's conclude this post with another YouTube video from Square One TV. It's the near-seventh anniversary of the day that the "Mistakes Song" was posted, and it's certainly relevant to today's post:
No comments:
Post a Comment