Day 30

30 days ago I was boarding a plane on my way home from NCTM.  I was excited and ready to transform my classroom.  I had so many ideas that I couldn't wait to implement.  I had these grandiose visions that I'd come back and transform my students into math enthusiasts.  I couldn't wait to see them excited and eager to do math.

Over the past 4 weeks I've increased discourse, empowered students to discover and work towards learning before direct instruction was provided.  The main topic we’ve covered is surface area.  We have approached the topic by looking at nets, estimating how many post its would fit on a filing cabinet in a 3 Act Math lesson, creating popcorn boxes.  Woven into the hands on activities I've had them working in pairs to solve more traditional problems.  They have demonstrated their knowledge by teaching their peers.  I've seen average and struggling students become leaders as they helped a struggling partner and “taught” their partner how to work out problems.  

Most days I thought had gone great!  I was having fun, and so were the kids.  We had our momentum broken up a few times with state testing, but overall I was feeling great.  I went to work this morning excited for another week, and even more excited to begin lesson planning for a support class I'm teaching during summer school to help students prepare for high school math.  I couldn't wait to plan out all these great hands on, growth mindset lessons.

But as you many suspect, every high meets its equal low.  About halfway through my day, I seemed to dive into mine.  I had given a quiz on surface area, and as I'm looking through them, my scores were low…..VERY LOW.  Several zero percentage per class low.  At first I tried to justify this by looking at the students who did poorly and how much work they had done.  I saw a trend,  most of the zeros hadn't done ANY homework all chapter.  Sigh of relief, this exonerated me, for a minute.  After all now I could pass the blame.  They weren't working, so it's their fault.

The more I thought about it, the more bothered I became.  Wait a minute, at NCTM I had found the magic fix.  My class would be more engaged, so the kids would learn and everything would be wonderful!  But it wasn't.  I was lied to, no I was doing it wrong, see I should have just stuck to my tried and true routine.  I'm obviously not a good teachers.  Throw everything out the window…. Back to what I've always done.  These and many other thought went through my head.  I wanted to cry, then I wanted to scream, then I was just mad.  

Sometimes in the heat of the moment the best thing to do is nothing.  So I went home, played with my little girls and did some thinking.  Where would I go from here?  I had two apparent options:

• Give up, and return the the routine that I have been doing for the past 10 years
• Persevere and keep trying

My gut know that option 2 was the right one, but option 1 was so much easier.  Even as I'm typing this I have this little voice telling me stick it out, stick it out.  After all isn't that what ewe always tell our students.  How often have I told them that math would be hard, but if they stuck it out and kept trying it would get better.  Didn't I owe it to them to follow my own advice.  Don't I owe it to all those kids I'm getting this summer to try and teach them how to be thinkers?

So it was a rough day.  I'm exhausted, frustrated and discouraged, but tomorrow is another day and I'm going to try again.  And even if I only reach one of them, engage one of them, inspire one of me to enjoy math, the. That is one more than I had the day before.

Day 31 here I come.  Are you ready for me, because I'm not giving up!

Volume is so much more fun with popcorn

So the school year is rapidly winding down, state testing is coming to an end and the students and myself are hitting that wall.  I am trying to find innovative ways to make these last few weeks run smoothly, and they in typical middle school fashion are shocked that we would actually have to "do work".  After all state testing is over, so basically there is the point of learning, right?

I have one final topic to cover in the last 14 days of school: volume.  While at NCTM and bouncing ideas off of my fellow colleagues Fawn Nguyen's blog (http://fawnnguyen.com/) was mentioned and in particular her volume lesson that was amazing.  So I went to her page, read the blog and immediately have started to follow it.

What I loved most after reading her blog, was how adaptable this lesson was, I could keep it very simple, or lead them towards maximizing volume (a calculus concept), plus there was food involved which is an instant win in middle school.
I paired the students up and handed each pair a piece of computer paper.  I explained that they needed to make a popcorn box as big as possible.  The only rule was that they had to do so by cutting the corners in order to create flaps that would fold up to form the sides.  Immediately one group raised their hand and asked: "Does big mean it can hold the most, or it has the biggest surface area?"  WIN!  In the past 3 weeks they had caught on to the idea to ask clarifying questions.  So I replied that they wanted it to hold the most popcorn.


Students began working, some immediately measuring and cutting, others discussing and drawing out possible plans.


Once they had all formed their boxes I displayed them for the class and we discussed which appeared the biggest?  How could we figure it out?  Find the volume they replied.  So while they calculated volume (I prompted them with the formula that we had discussed in an activity earlier that week) I filled their boxes with popcorn.


Then I sent them home with an extension for homework.  We talked about what we learned: the corners must be squares.  Then we talked about all the different boxes that could have been created.  Which one is the best?  How could we figure it out.  So we went through the first option (using only whole measurement), 1cm squares cut form each corner.  They recorded the volume in a chart that I provided, their homework is to come up with all the possible boxes and decide which is best.  So we will see what comes back on Monday!

My big take away is that my kids are talking, and excited to do math.  Since my return I have had numerous comments on how class is fun.  Is everyday perfect, certainly not.  Do I have those student who are off task, absolutely.  But I've decided they wont be my driving force, instead it will be the ones who are suddenly seeing a point to math and taking an interest.

My First Act

Setting the scene:  As soon as I got back I talked to my students about how I had learned so many great things that I was excited to try out in the classroom.  One of the first sessions I had attended was on 3 Act Math.  I had seen this topic presented in staff developments before, but the idea of making videos and coming up with lessons just seemed so daunting.  But at NCTM I discovered that teachers really want to share resources, and there were so many lesson already out there to get me started.

So after returning to my classroom, I made one simple change and took my 6 rows of desks and pushed them into pairs.  This was my way of forcing myself to develop and encourage discussion between my students.  I knew that if I didn't give them good guidance this would simply lead to a lot of “noise” in the classroom.  So I dove right in with a 3 Act Lesson that I found on Andrew Stradel’s site. https://docs.google.com/a/simivalleyusd.org/spreadsheets/d/19sms4MpuAOO71o4qFPJyVKK-OGLnNegMgSL6WAwIdb8/edit#gid=0

I was about to introduce surface area and decided to do the file cabinet activity with my students.  

The introduction is a video of someone covering a file cabinet with post it notes.  It shows the cabinet partially covered and poses the question:  How many post it will it take to cover the cabinet?

I then had my student talk about it and come up with a list of information they felt they would need to answer the question.  They were talking, and for the most part it was about math.  No one was sleeping, no one was begging to go to the bathroom, they were all discussing and making predictions.  Then I gave them the dimensions of the cabinet and told them to come up with their best “guess”.  

So after about 20 minutes I drew a chart on the board to track their guesses, well here I discovered that I needed to help guide them a little more.  The first group looked at me with wide eyes and asked: “we had to actually come up with a real answer?”  As I went around I discovered only about half of the groups had used any “math” to get their guess.  

Time to redirect, so I explained that this would be a competition and the groups with the right answer would win a prize, and sent them back to the drawing board for 10 more minutes.  They started sketching the cabinet, calculating how many post its would fit on each surface.  Some asked to replay the video, was the top being covered too?

After 10 minutes I recorded each group’s’ guess. The kids were reacting to each other's answer, asking the groups how they got it.  So I called up groups who wanted to explain their reasoning to come up and show how they got their answer.  Then we watched the solution, and the reactions were exciting.  Kids cheered as they discovered their answers were close.    They were ALL engaged and listening.  

At the end of my first week back during my 7am class I overhead a few students talking about their teachers and teaching styles.  (This class is an RTI class that they take as an elective).  One of my math students was explaining to the others that in Mrs. Van Keulen’s class they now had to do all the work.  That they got to talk, and explain and that it was fun.  She said that she was learning so much more now, and that she actually had to think.  

So there have been bumps, and I have been frustrated at times, but overall I am having more fun, and I think the kids are too.