Summer School - Day Eleven - Bad Teaching

It's official... I have already given up trying to plan new things for summer school. I have reverted to stand and deliver and here's the worksheets. Of course this means that 5 minutes after my spectacular explanations with examples, I have a line of kids asking questions. "How do I do this?"

Who am I kidding? It's not a line of kids. It's about 3. The rest of them still don't know what to do but they don't bother asking. And this lack of caring from the students contributes to my own ennui. Teachers talk a lot about engaging students, getting them excited and interested and motivated. What about the students' responsibility to reciprocate?

My colleague-across-the-hall, Blair Miller, and I talk a lot about the culture of learned helplessness at our school. A big part of the problem is exactly the kind of teaching I am currently doing in summer school. It creates a climate in the classroom where students expect the teacher to spoon feed them everything they need. And we accommodate them.

Teacher lectures. Teacher gives notes. Teacher gives assignment... but wait! Here is a problem that is not exactly like the notes. I'm lost! Teacher walks through the problem so I don't have to think. I now have correct answers on my page and absolutely no understanding. But that's OK because teacher will spoon feed me again tomorrow.

I plan to make one minor change tomorrow. I am going to introduce the concept of surface area by getting students in groups to figure out how to wrap a present. No spoon feeding. They must work it out together.

I admit, I am not optimistic.

Summer School - Day Four - International Shopping Spree

Turned my classroom into a shopping mall today.

I used my Excel worksheet background to create some store posters that randomly generate store names, items for sale, retail prices and discount percents. I modified the old version so every store was labelled with a different country and the items were priced in the currency of that country. I also included a randomly generated sales tax between 1% and 25%.

I gave my students $1000 Canadian to start with (play money of course) and let them loose in the mall to spend as much as they could without going over. They had to convert the retail prices in foreign currency into Canadian funds. Then they calculated discounts, sale prices, and taxes to determine the final price. Finally they determined the total cost for their International Shopping Spree.

The randomly generated amounts made for interesting shopping. Some students found a sports car for around 250 Thai baht at 89% off. That turns out to be about $7.50 CDN. Conversely, pencils were selling for 100's of dollars.

Overall it was an engaging, effective way for me to assess student learning at this point in the unit. It required them to combine the various topics we have discussed into a single combined activity. And it challenged them to verify that the answers they got were reasonable.

"$316.00 CDN for a pencil?!?! That can't be right!"

NOTE:
The link to store posters above seems to open the file in read only mode for some reason. I will try to find some way to correct this so anyone can edit the file if they want.

Summer School - Day Two - Worksheets

The Summer School train is chugging along. Spoon feed them some mathematical procedures, do a few examples and hand out the worksheets. Quality teaching at its finest! Choo choo!

My first year teaching was spent largely in creating more worksheets. I was teaching a two semester math course for grade 8's who struggled with math. The teacher across the hall (since replaced by my stellar colleague, Blair Miller) was an advocate for creating worksheets in Excel using a random number generator. Need a new worksheet? Just hit F9!

I have a colleague who argues convincingly of the need for worksheets and drills to build basic skills. Students can't be expected to solve problems without basic mathematical fluency. Or can they? Which comes first, problem-solving or math skills? Manipulatives or worksheets? Does problem-solving help develop mathematical thinking and ability? Or do worksheets develop the procedural fluency needed to tackle problems?

I plan to give a homework quiz tomorrow. A problem framed in the context of our topic from today... unit price and markup. I guess I will find out if the worksheets prepared them to solve a problem. If not, what is the next step? More worksheets? Or a completely new approach?

One thing is for sure, lots of worksheets gives me more time to blog.