A Day in the Life

A typical day in my classroom used to be quite boring. To be honest I've always had a love hate relationship with teaching math. I absolutely love the topic, but the constant "when am I ever going to need this?" question and the monotony of lectures have always frustrated me. Before flipping, we would go over last night's homework (which were normally a few problems exactly like the examples I had done the day before), answer any lingering questions and then fill the remaining minutes with boring notes. I was bored, so I know my 13 year old students were too!

Now, a day in the life of my class goes something like this:

When students arrive they get out the video notes they completed last night. Some days I check these, some days I don't. We take a quiz that usually has 3 to 5 questions on it. Some of the questions are similar to the problems from the video, some questions are about understanding what was learned. Students are allowed to use their notes to help them and then we grade the quizzes together. I want these first few minutes to be a time where it's ok to make mistakes; sometimes mistakes can be more helpful to understanding than doing things the right way.  I purposely don't give my students grades on these quizzes, this is a way to for students to assess their own understanding and application of the material.

After the quiz, students use the rest of the hour practicing and applying our new information. Depending on the topic, I give my students requirements that tend to include options. Today in class students could choose from 4 different worksheets. They were required to complete at least two of them. I love giving students options, I feel that it helps them take charge of their own learning.

Other days, class is more structured and we do an activity or worksheet together. Earlier this week we did an activity where collected data from cylindrical objects. Students recorded the circumferences and radii, plotted the data, found a line of best fit and created a linear equation to model the rate of change (with something close to pi being the slope). Using this information, they had to make predictions of objects given one parameter. The groups with the closest data won candy because nothing encourages learning like sugar : ). Activities that can be added in addition to the required curriculum, makes math real to my students. My students discovered pi, just like past mathematicians!