Occasionally, I give a task to my students before I have done it myself. Sometimes it is because the solution is fairly straightforward and I can see multiple ways to arriving at it without actually doing it. Other times it is because I want to have no impact on my students’ thought pathways. The practice also makes class time more exciting as students reason through methods that I would not have though of–I am trying to move from a monotonous state of lesson planning to a more exciting one of lesson participation.
This post marks a couple of milestones for Musing Mathematically. First, this is the 50th post overall. For some reason that seems significant. Second, this post marks the blog’s first coined phrase–Atomic Skills.
I love the term atomic skills, but I can’t remember when I started using it. I believe it was the result of my limited vocabulary attempting to explain the current disconnectedness of math education. An atomic skill is a foundational skill. An atomic skill is a skill that holds no real ‘stand-alone’ significance, but can build toward a very significant solution. Atomic skills are usually practiced in isolation of each other in a very repetitive fashion. In school mathematics, atomic skills often make the difference between a good and bad student. Students classify errors with atomic skills as “stupid mistakes”.
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10,000 Hours
My leisure time is often interrupted by educational thoughts. I am often sent scrambling to find a piece of paper after I have accidentally encountered a mathematical situation that I feel would fit great in to the classroom. Last night an episode of Modern Family piqued an interest I have had for months.
In the show, a father is desperately looking for a skill that he can say his son excels at. He creates a list of candidates, but settles on baseball as the most likely avenue for this success. As he and his boy are heading out for their first game, he explains the “10,000 hour rule” to his wife. This concept, pioneered by Malcolm Gladwell in his best seller Outliers: The Story of Success, is based on the idea that mastery is a result of repeated exposure to the feat that you are trying to master. In his estimates, he concludes that at least 10,000 hours are necessary to achieve the stage of “mastery”.
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Staffroom Maths
I don’t mind the staffroom. I share a prep period with my math department head, and we often engage in meaningful conversation about the ongoing struggle of curriculum renewal. It is an unbelievable support to have a leader who is so willing to learn about what the reform approach has to offer. Teachers do not spend near enough time learning–which is an ironic shame.
One morning, I walked into the staffroom and he greeted me with a question:
“What’s new in math education today?”
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A Reflection
In the waning moments of my semester, I made the decision to create a “class expert” system to introduce the idea of rational expressions. Designed as an elongated jigsaw, the students were divided into groups and assigned a topic. The connected nature of the ideas made this, in my opinion, the optimal time to attempt this type of framework. The full rationale for the project can be found in the post entitled, “Math Class Experts“.
Christmas time brings immense stress for math teachers, at least in my division and province. As the days dwindle away, teachers begin to get a more accurate picture of how much they must cover before semester’s end. Once again, I found myself in this position with my Grade 10 Foundations and Pre-calculus class. (Saskatchewan Curriculum) My original plans called for 20 teaching days to adequately cover, in my opinion, the topics of trigonometry and systems of linear equations. Of course, by the time I sat down to calculate this I only had 11 remaining.
In previous years I would have panicked and switched into jam-packed lectures to “cover” all the content. This year I decided to re-think that approach. I wanted to find a project or anchor activity that could facilitate a wide swath of outcomes and motivate a high level of learning so close to holidays. I tried several creations, but settled on this one for its native curiosity and deep flexibility.
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Math Class Experts
Last night I was preparing my list of things to do. This has become a typical Saturday night activity for myself. Almost every week, I am commissioned with the task of preparing a new unit for one of my classes. I am a new teacher working with new curriculum. These two realities, coupled with my desire to keep my classes fresh, force me to steadily plan and reflect on past preparations. As I sat down to prepare a pre-calculus unit on rational expressions, I quickly became bored. The weekly drone of preparing a unit plan got me thinking:
If I thought this was boring, what would my students think?
For years I have wanted to try a project-based math class. My inspiration ebbs and flows as I encounter excellent projects and rationale for executing them. Up to this point, I have left the dream as just that–a dream. There are several reasons for this:
- I felt I was too inexperienced to take it on.
- I felt the curriculum didn’t lend itself nicely to projects.
- I didn’t have the resources and infrastructure to execute it.
- I hadn’t heard of many who believed in it.
- Couldn’t elegantly explain why I felt it was necessary.
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Polling in Math Class
This past Monday I attended a professional development focused around technological infusion into our teaching. I will be the first to admit that this topic is not often tailored toward the math teachers in the building. In the morning, virtual classrooms and movie making dominated the discussions. I didn’t see the implications for my mathematics classroom, until the afternoon. A facilitator introduced me to the SMS text messaging technology of polling.
Many teachers tell me that it is their creativity that limits their ability to be adaptive in the classroom. Somehow the “reform” movement (or should I say re-movement) has pigeon-holed itself into a connotation where high-energy teachers give vague tasks to groups of interested students. Out of all this, curricular outcomes explode in no particular order. This can’t be further from the truth. In my view, the biggest steps toward changing student learning is changing teacher perception.