Parent's Academy

After a handful of years staying home with my children, I returned to the classroom and was met by the dreaded Common Core.  Most of my friends have children younger than my own and I hadn't heard much opinion, either positive or negative.  It didn't take long before those opposed to the new standards voiced their opinions.  Thankfully, I had the opportunity to form my own educated opinion first.   Here's the thing: the standards are not bad and the math is not different.  I promise.  The standards are designed to more deliberately develop student number sense.  A good amount of time is spent really laying the foundation for thinking about numbers and how they come together.  Math is much more than this, of course.  While the Common Core State Standards, CCSS for short, are not bad, sometimes the way we (or texts) go about delivering them to students is not so great.  Case and point:

This problem was on my 2nd grader's homework.  All I could think over and over again was "WHO CARES ABOUT THE PAPER CLIPS?"  If I'm thinking this as a math teacher, what are non-math teacher parents thinking?!

Several years ago, I implemented a Parent's Academy where I host adult homework helpers in the classroom where their students learn.  Humor is mixed with content knowledge to acknowledge their struggle and concern, teach them WHY things are different, and how to effectively help their students on their own (more positive) math journeys.  The program was relaxed and well attended.  Parents asked great questions and made connections about their own math experiences.  They quickly realized that it was low stress and informative.  Not only were parents exposed to this "new math" first hand, they were able to form an ongoing relationship with me as the classroom teacher.  Parents knew that their students could have their questions answered (guidance, facilitation) via email or other online resources after school and encouraged self-advocacy on the part of their learners.  The home-school connection was powerful.

As I embark on a new professional journey this year, I hope to bring back the Parent's Academy to help enhance a positive math experience for my students.  It takes courage for parents to set aside their own math anxiety and frustrations and attend a math class at night, but hopefully they will see it's worth and have a little fun along the way!

Are our students really thinking?

For the past three days, I have been setting up my new classroom.  There is quite a bit of bulletin board space and so many options for their use.  As of right now, there are two small boards for students to display work that they are proud of and one larger board that is split in half.  One half is dedicated to fraction related vocabulary and I couldn't quite decide on what should go on the other half.

Inspiration came in the form of the book Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You'd Had by Tracy Zager.  This is a wonderful resource for K-8 teachers, whether they love math (like me) or are just beginning to cultivate their "like" for math.  Zager was talking about Dan Meyer's 101qs, a website dedicated to his 3 act tasks, and focused on question posing.  Question posing is an important skill for our students.  It really requires a great deal of thought, and too often our students do not exercise their ability to think.

I settled on an image of soda bottles and began planning the bulletin board, but was still unsure if this is the direction I wanted to take it and if it was the best use of space.  My resident 5th and 3rd graders passed by, so I asked them to tell my the first question that came into their head when they saw the image.

It took the 5th grader four tries to be able to ask a question!  I was shocked.  His initial response was "I think it's addition."  From that instant, it was clear that this bulletin board was a great idea.  Many of our students are so interested in getting an answer, or better, a correct answer, than hearing (or reading) what they're being asked to do.  I've seen it over an over again.  They just don't think, and I suspect that is because enough of us are not asking them to.  We lead students directly to the solution with lots of scaffolding and remove the need for thoughtful mathematical decision making.  What fun is that?  Incidentally, I suspect that my 5th grader perceives a "correct" answer as the answer that I want to hear, which is a problem unto itself.

This image was chosen specifically because it could easily be physically created in the classroom for students to answer some of the questions they've generated.  I cannot wait to see what they come up with, and even more, to foster their development as thinkers!

Labels are Important

And so it begins.  My excitement is difficult to contain.  This year, I have been granted the opportunity to change grade levels and districts.  After many years of teaching primarily 7th grade math, I'll be getting to know some 5th grade mathematicians.  Using what I know about the math that 7th and 8th graders need to know, I hope to inspire a love of math and learning in this new group of humans I have been entrusted to educate.

This week, Building Math Minds is hosting a Virtual Math Summit, where Pre K - 5 educators are engaging in cyberspace about many ideas that impact student learning and classroom practices.  After viewing just 15 minutes of the first presentation I chose to view, I came upon this.  Graham Fletcher of gfletchy.com presented a situation involving 5 oranges cut into quarters.  Here's a screen shot:

In my experience and teaching, I would have expected an answer of 20.  I asked family members to answer as well.  All of us said 20.  One person said they multiplied by 4, another said they flipped the fraction and multiplied.  I was immediately struck by the denominator of 4, not just because of the image, but because Graham said that the answer was twenty, one-fourths.  In later communication with Graham, he would reveal that the solution should say 20/1, which made a whole lot more sense to me, but I am left thinking about two things:

If 5 is a whole number, and you're dividing into 1/4 size pieces, does it make sense that you have 20 whole pieces?

Labels are so important in understanding context and solutions.  

That first question was initially raised because of the solution on the slide, but even with the corrected solution of 20/1, I'm still thinking about how both 5 and 20 are whole numbers, but 20 is used to represent  a quantity of parts.  This could be tricky for students for sure.

In 5th grade, fractions are abundant.  Teaching 7th grade, I had taken for granted that students had already formed the necessary foundation to understand these sorts of answers.  Looking back, most clearly had not.  This image will be embedded in my brain as I take on the new challenge of educating 5th graders.  It will be an important task to ensure that students develop a solid understanding of what unit fractions are (1/2, 1/3, 1/4, ...  fractions with a numerator of 1) and how they relate to our solutions.  In this scenario, each piece is 1/4 and there are 20 of them.

As I look at the image above, I'm also struck by how many questions students could pose if the equation were removed, and how many patterns could be observed.  I'm excited and inspired to work with 5th graders and cannot wait to facilitate their mathematical journey's this year!