Pendulum

Many people ask me where I want to end up as a teacher and what grade I want to teach. Prior to starting my teaching certificate program, I would have said with confidence that it would be middle school math. However, I'm finding it more and more difficult to say with surety that this is where I will truly end up. Don't get me wrong; I am loving my intern placement at the middle school level. I only teach the subject that I'm most passionate about, I get to work with students who are starting to be able to have real conversations with an adult yet still have child-like wonder and silliness at times, and it seems to have more structure and control than the elementary environment. However, I am coming to discover things about my 5th grade placement that I have surprisingly come to love and want for my furtue career.

I have found that even though I originally picked middle school because I wanted to be able to have "real" conversations with my students, 5th graders are fully capable of having these kinds of conversations. In fact, they bring more to these conversations because they are just learning how to be a part of them and have not become jaded in the slightest by reality. They bring the element of fresh imagination to spice up conversations.

Other things that are starting to change my mind are the teaching of multiple subjects, being able to bring more fun into the classroom, having (slightly) more flexibility with curriculum, having deeper connections with your students because there are fewer of them, and having a connection with the students' parents. All of these things have begun the more drastic swinging of my mental pendulum toward upper elementary teaching, and I'm not sure where my preference will end up. Being only halfway through my program, there is a lot that could change my mind, and I could end up truly anywhere.

Practice Makes Perfect

As I get farther into my practice of student teaching, I am continually surprised by how much more difficult teaching is than it looks. Every Wednesday and Thursday I watch my teacher teach math to 7th and 9th graders, and I think, "I could do that, easy. I just have to do what he does, easy." During the last couple weeks, I've started taking over parts of lessons and have found out that it is not easy to emulate his lessons. I forget to say things I had planned on saying, I forget to show specific ways of solving problems, I forget to wait for the kids to be quiet before I start talking, I forget the students names (well, there are 150 names to learn), and sometimes I forget how to solve the word problems by the method I'm supposed to teach (oops). Although it is starting to get easier as I get more comfortable teaching, I'm realizing that it's going to be a less easy process than I was expecting...I guess that's why I get to have 6 more months of practice!

Mix It Up

This week at my student teaching placement the middle school was having spirit week, and they had a special day called "mix it up" day. This day has many elements meant to "mix it up" including having the kids sit with someone they don't know at lunch and the teachers change up what and how they teach for the day. My cooperating teacher, who is a 7th and 9th grade math teacher, did an intense, moving lesson on being understanding of others and bullying. 

He began by talking about the human tendency to react with emotions to stressful situations and other people who are emotional. He said that it can be very difficult to react rationally and calmly, especially when your brain is still developing, but it's an important skill to learn how to be calm in stressful situations.

He next had an activity where he read a statement about a type of stressful situation like "if you have ever lost a parent, sibling, or immediate family member" and had students stand if the statement pertained to them. It was eye opening to me and the students to see how many students had experienced serious life stresses in their young lives. One of his points in doing that exercise was to have the students realize that everyone has stress in their lives, that we need to be aware of that when interacting with others, and that we should always make a point of being considerate of others. He followed the activity by reading his own experience with being bullied in middle school.

Next came the climax of the lesson in showing two emotional videos. I was surprised by the teacher's choice to show a video talking about kids who had committed suicide due to having been so severely bullied. I don't know if I would have been brave enough to even think about showing something like that to middle school students, but it ended up being an appropriately powerful message for the kids to handle especially because he followed up that video with the music video of Josh Groban's "You Are Loved."

Unfortunately, the class didn't have enough time to have a reflection immediately following the lesson, and they had to do their reflection in class the next day. I feel that the students really needed a reflection immediately following the lesson because it was so intense, and if I ever did a lesson like this I would make use that the would be enough time to decompress before sending them off for the rest of the school day.

What do you think of the lesson? What would you add or take out, or would you even want to do a lesson like this at school?

Read Aloud on Negative Numbers

When I was given the assignment to read a book aloud to my middle school math class, I was lost as to what I should read. After getting the suggestion from my cooperating teach to find a book about negative numbers to read to the 7th graders, I searched around the internet and found this book, Less Than Zero, by Stuart J. Murphy.

Less Than Zero is a book in a series of books by Murphy relating mathematical concepts in story form. This particular book has the following succinct summary on the back cover:

Perry the Penguin needs 9 clams to buy an ice scooter—but he’s not very good at saving. As Perry earns, spends, finds, loses, and borrows clams, a simple line graph demonstrates the concept of negative numbers.

To add to the summary, Perry has ‘less than zero’ clams for a part of the story because he borrows clams to buy things besides his ice scooter. In the end, Perry gets enough clams to buy his ice scooter by getting a loan of 4 clams from a neighbor that he will pay off by working shoveling snow, so he ends the story with a debt of negative 4 clams/hours of work.
 
This book has two possible messages to talk about with students. One message is about negative numbers and what negative numbers mean when applied to amounts of money. The other message is telling students that if they borrow more money than they have, then they will be negative in how much money they have. Furthermore, the second message also puts being negative money as something unfavorable and should be avoided.

Although I read it with middle school students, it could be used with almost any age to introduce negative number concepts, graphing practice, or just as a story about saving money. My students thoroughly enjoyed it, and I hope you find a use for it with your students. 

Wading through it all

This blog was set up as a course assignment, and I have blogged as assigned periodically over the last 6 months. My posts have felt like they came very naturally as a response to something I read or experienced, yet this week seems like I have nothing useful to contribute to the great blogosphere.

I feel like there is so much information out there and being constantly added to (I actually got stuck in all of it for a few hours trying to come up with something to blog about) that I don't feel like I should always contribute to all that noise. Although I do find endless awesome sites and ideas on the internet, it can take a while to get there. Wading through all that information can be time consuming, tiring, and stressful. My technology class has been introducing great tools for finding information and sorting/filing great information, but even using all of those tools can get overwhelming at times.

My teacher says of twitter that there is just too much information out there for you to keep track of; you just need to dip your bucket into the river every once in a while to see what you can get.

Within the last couple months, I have applied this concept to my entire internet usage. I have discovered a great way to make me a happier person and reduce my stress level over finding information by stepping away from my computer much more often. A rule I have for myself is if I find myself browsing things for more than a half hour that don't help me complete an assignment for school or specifically help me do something that I'm learning to do, I need to get off the computer and do a physical activity or hobby. It has actually helped my mood and outlook on my life, and I have started doing things that make me happy rather than just looking at websites that I will probably forget about the next day.

And speaking of which, I have spent far too long on the computer today, so I shall say goodnight to the internet for tonight...well, maybe at least for a couple hours...

Comfortable classrooms

When I had my class on the middle school learner last spring, we talked a great deal about how classroom environments could be made more comfortable for the students and match their physical needs better. Most of what we talked about we're great ideas, but I feel that ideas like tables students could stand at and squishy balls to play with are rarely implemented. It probably doesn't come to fruition due mainly money and partly simple follow through. However, I observed a class today that through the generously of a PTA grant had exercise balls available for students to sit on instead of chairs. Although it wasn't necessarily apparent whether they aided in attention over the 40 minutes I was observing, I was so thrilled to see the students getting their wiggles out during class in a generally non disruptive way. Great use of grant money in my opinion.

Math Manipulatives in Algebra

I just started observing a junior high class and was pleasantly surprised when the teacher pulled out Manipulatives to help the students visualize balancing algebraic expressions. I had never seen or experienced their use in learning algebra, and it gave me wonderful new ideas of how to use them in my future teaching.

The Manipulatives are used to represent the x terms and the integers and differentiate positive and negative terms. In this way students need to follow logical rules of keeping the equation balanced by literally taking away or adding the same thing to both sides. The long bars represent 1x and each small square represents 1. Furthermore, both bars and squares are positive when green/yellow, and negative when red. I think it's a quite brilliant way of physically representing a potentially abstract concept for learners. I definitely plans on utilizing this type of manipulative strategy in my future classrooms.

Below is an example of an equation being represented by the manipulatives. 3x-5 is represented by 3 green bars and 5 red squares while x-3 is represented by 1 green bar and 3 yellow squares. To solve for x, students would first remove a green bar from both sides and rewrite the equation to be 2x-5=3 with the visual matching. They would next add five yellow tiles to each side which would cancel out the red squares on the one side while adding with 3 to be 8 on the other side. The equation would then be written as 2x=8. The final move of the Manipulatives would be to divide the positive eight squares evenly with the two remaining green bars(x's). This would mean there would be 4 squares per bar, meaning x=4. I wish I had pictures for each step, but I don't at the moment. I'll try to update when I get a chance to take pictures of other examples.