I think that one of the things that turns kids off from math is the lack of ability to see its relationship to real life. This quarter I have seen numerous examples (in our class, and in the videos that we have watched) of how teachers are making math "real" for kids. In one recent video episode titled, The Largest Container, one of the students remarked, "It's better to do [the problem] yourself, and think of your own solution." He was trying to articulate the reason that he felt so engaged in trying to create a geometric shape from a sheet of paper which had the largest volume.
I witnessed this same effect in our class last week. We were looking at graphs and interactive data sites. Quite easily, our instructor could have directed us to find out something specific (i.e. how is a country's literacy rate related to their per capita income rate?). Rather, she told us to explore the data and find a story to tell. The only requirement was for us to represent the story on a poster. With this autonomy, we eagerly explored the data in Gapminder.org. Several of our small groups spent nearly an hour looking at various relationships of interest. We discussed ideas and possibilities, we researched our ideas on the internet, and finally we decided on what to represent. The capstone of the entire lesson was going around to each of the groups and listening to the different stories. I truly have not been that engaged in a math class in a long, long time!
The only downside for me is that this is not the type of math teaching I have observed thus far in my student teaching placements. The Lake Washington School District adopted a new math curriculum this year, and much of it is a scripted curriculum. The teacher guides the kids through worksheet after endless worksheet. With multiple choice answers for many of the questions, the kids are developing the skill of "educated guessing" in order to get the right answer. I hope that we have not given up on the idea of making math meaningful for our students. I believe the key to doing that is to give them real life problems... and thus far, that is not in the curriculum box.
Hi Shelran,
ReplyDeleteAnother time when we are in agreement. (We have to stop meeting like this?) There is so little effort in the classes I've worked with to make math applicable. The word problems are NOT real life despite the fact they use real items like apples or cars, etc. For some reason the writers don't have the goal of making the problem a real life issue, like they think making it apples instead of widgets makes it real enough. One of my teachers puts the names of the kids in the class into the problems. This helps a bit, but it only serves to grab their attention for a minute, and then they realize its a contrived imaginary problem.
I'm hopeful that we can find a way to bring GapMinder into our curriculum EVEN if it's not explicitly on the curriculum. For example one of the questions in my middle school class was "Why do we graph information?" Here was the chance for the students to think about how "showing" data in a picture is very different, and more enlightening, than putting numbers into a table. But, the students were lost! They couldn't think of any reasons. If this were my class I would then have broken out GapMinder and given them a chance to explore. Maybe by the end one student would say "It's better to do [the problem] yourself, and think of your own ... graph." I hope we have the freedom to teach understanding, not just meet GLEs and pacing guides.
Hey Shell!
ReplyDeletei'm really glad you said something about the disconnect between the LWSD math curriculum & tactile work with real-world examples...i too have thought about it a little and wondered how i would go about doing a better job in my future classroom.
1 thing that i have noticed my master teacher doing in class to better connect the students to the learning is through open class conversations. these conversations don't address an answer's correctness, but concentrate on instances they might use these learned "math skills" in their lives. For example, Mr.A's 4th grade class was learning how to add and subtract decimals. After they worked through some problems and completed some worksheets, a discussion started regarding how to count out change. "How would you count out someone's change if they gave you a $20 for a $7.38 bill?"; "How do you know you are getting the correct amount of change back?" He talked about the importance (and benefits) of counting out change and why people start with the total, $7.38, and count while giving change (ie. $7.38, $7.39, $7.40, $7.50, $7.75, $8.00, etc...). It was through this open conversation that students made connections to real world applications. Nice to see that there are ways in which real life connections can be made while using the (sometimes limiting) district curriculum we are given as teachers.
In addition, i couldn't agree more with what ElmTree said:
"I hope we have the freedom to teach understanding, not just meet GLEs and pacing guides". I too have hope that this will indeed be the case for the future, and the path to better math instruction.