PERSEVERE THROUGH PROBLEM SOLVING

Sharing Gasoline, Formative Assessment Task

November 9, 2012
“Bring it on!”
Mathematical Practice Standard: Make sense of problems and persevere when solving them.
Target: 6.RP: I can use ratio reasoning to solve a real world problem.
Math has always caused me a little anxiety. I know I am not alone, because Sheila Tobias, in the 1978 publication of Overcoming Math Anxiety, described me perfectly as waiting for my “nonmathematical mind to be exposed.” I recall my experience as a math student. The classroom instruction was structured similarly as long as I can remember. The teacher usually showed the class steps to complete a computation. Students followed the steps to complete the practice problems, raising our hands if we had questions. Then, the teacher assigned the odd or even problems for homework. The next day the whole class checked our answers orally. Usually, checking involved standing at the board in front of the class to show and explain how we completed a problem individually. I am talking one student at a time…at the board…alone while the others remained seated. This routine, along with a Friday morning cyphering match, just about sent me over the edge. But as time wore on, I learned to ask enough questions of my teacher to get out of the hard work. I had come to understand that eventually the teacher would take control of my number 2 pencil and my thinking and complete the problems for me.
Today though, in room 253, the teachers let no one off the hook. The class began differently with a pledge to persevere, to think, and to not give up. Instead of the teacher showing students how to complete a computation, the class began with individual think time about a real-world task in order to tackle the problem in their own way. Next, students worked collaboratively to share their work and thinking. Group members chose a strategy to create the best solution to the task. After observing posters representing how the other groups thought, the teachers debriefed the strategies they observed the students using and how each strategy could help solve the problem of the task. Groups were then given sample student responses to evaluate in order to determine how other students attempted to solve the problem. The discussion that followed focused on how those solving the problems either persevered or took the easy way out. Students were persevering to solve a mathematical task through reasoning, questioning, and clarifying far, far away from the edge.

Resources
http://teresaemmert.weebly.com/index.html
eileen.townsend@hardin.kyschools.us
rebecca.gaddie@grrec.ky.gov
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/24/math-anxiety_n_1371210.html

High Anxiety: How Worrying About Math Hurts Your Brain

I love that book!

October 29, 2012
It seems that rarely a day in my life has passed without my repeating that phrase. When I finished reading The Secret Life of Bees, I told everyone that it was the best book I ever read. Later, I read Me and Emma, and again, it was the best book I had ever read. For me, it is never ending. I fall in love with new authors and new books all the time. It seems I have trouble committing, so to speak. This, I have come to realize, is at the root of my current thinking regarding choosing and committing to a class set of novels.
While enrolled in undergraduate work for teacher certification during my one and only teaching reading as content course, I was engaged in the process of planning a novel unit. The professor arranged for our class members to partner with a local middle school to read the novel with a group of students and to complete the activities that had been designed to go along with the chosen novel. The students were engaged. They completed crossword puzzles, wrote acrostics, drew maps of the setting, filled in story maps, defined literary terms and found examples of each in the text, wrote letters to the characters, and matched characters with their traits. This unit took weeks to design and deliver. I got an A in the class.
Two years later, having a classroom of my own and control of the curriculum, I taught reading the same way that I was taught in college. Come to think of it, I taught reading the same as most of my teachers in middle and high school taught me. After all, a teacher or potential teacher can find hundreds of novel units already created. Truthfully, an Internet search for novel units will reveal quite a number of free units. Why reinvent the wheel, right?
It was in that first year of teaching that the reactions and progress of my students started me to question that planning. While most of the students were perfectly content to listen to me read aloud and to listen to their friends ‘popcorn’ read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, some of the students did not love that book. I know! I couldn’t imagine how that could have happened either, but it did. Stranger still, some students could not pass the multiple choice test over the book or complete the story map even though the first time around I told each of them the answers. Even worse, student progress in reading as determined by standardized tests and other measures showed no significant improvement. But wait, our school had all of these novel sets and our teachers had spent so much time creating the activities!
I knew I had to teach reading differently. Experts I consulted were Nancie Atwell, Laura Robb, Janet Allen, and Smokey Daniels. They taught me about setting reading goals with students using a quantitative measure such as those found using Scholastic Reading Inventory, STAR by Renaissance Learning, or fluency measures. They taught me about helping students find books and topics they wanted to read about using interest inventories, book talks, and author studies. They taught me how to manage students reading a self-selected book, and a literature circle selection so that I could monitor individual reading progress AND I could monitor mastery of reading content standards. Most importantly, they taught me that students assigned to any classroom have a range of reading needs that I could not adequately address using one book with which I had fallen in love. I learned that my job was to help students to fall in love with reading through novels and informational pieces that challenged their thinking beyond the text.

“If you don’t know where you are headed, you’ll probably end up someplace else.”-Douglas J. Eder, Ph.D

I played school a lot.  For Christmas one year when I was about eight, I asked for a chalkboard.  It was black as all chalkboards were back then, with each letter of the alphabet marching left to right across the top.  The chalk tray held white and pastel chalk pieces AND a foam eraser.  When I ran out of bought chalk, I improvised by using jagged pieces of sheet rock by peeling off the cardboard backing.  It worked in a pinch.

One of the few photographs I have of my daddy shows him on this Christmas morning, crouched in front of that chalkboard writing his name in white across the center.  Since that morning, I directed any willing (and sometimes unwilling) soul to stand at the board and I coached him as he copied words or practiced his letters or crafted answers to my questions. I was a teacher in training.  My brother and sister each took turns training me.  Since already each had been in school about a half-dozen years, they were well-qualified.  In fact, my sister taught me to read before I entered school.

My sister remarked on many occasions that I would be the only one of us three kids to go to college.  I am not sure how she could foretell that destiny.  I think I heard that expectation from her so much, I was afraid to let her down.  Over the years, every time one of my parents would remind me that our family could not afford to send me to a university to become properly trained as a teacher, I recalled my sister’s proclamation as a matter of fact.

Since there certainly was no college fund or other source for paying my way to college, I set about the goal the only way I knew how.  I worked hard in school.  I completed my homework and read all the pages of the assignment.  I raised my hand and I asked LOTS of questions.  I asked so many questions, that I know now that I was surely the topic of conversation in the teachers’ lounge and at their lunch table.  At home, my mother begged me to please stop asking so many questions and to give her a break.  Little did she know that one day, I would make my living asking questions.

I always knew that I would become a teacher.  My sister told me so and I believed her.

The mistake I made in that early planning as the teacher was I thought I had to know the answers to everything.  Most of the models for teaching I had were of those as  “knowledge-givers.”  My teachers, for the most part, told me great stories of explorers, writers, and thinkers.  They assigned reading and exercises.  Few of them created a space where my friends and I could explore, write, and think.  Nowthatiknowbetter is a space where I will invite others to contemplate the notions of teaching and learning and what I have come to understand as I have grown as a teacher.  I continue to play school a lot.