Math IS Everywhere!

Math has always been a big part of my life, but looking back on it, it was probably only because I excelled in it.  In the working world, most of my jobs involved math, especially as an accountant.  It was during my last job that I really noticed just how much basic math and algebra I was using on a daily basis.

One use of algebra sticks out in my mind the most.  At the time I needed to find the base cost of a contract, before fee was applied, and was given the fee percentage and the net contract amount.  After working on it on paper, I came up with the equation:

(gross contract amount) x (fee) = (final contract amount)

1.065X = 1,523,000

*I divided both sides by 1.065

X = 1,430,047 where X is the cost before fee

Fee = 6.5%

Final contract amount = 1,523,000

I use this knowledge in many ways for things in my post-accountant life.  For example, if there is an item that is $15 after tax, I can find the cost before tax.

It was just last week when my mom and I had a conversation about how some people’s lack of math knowledge makes them less efficient in many everyday tasks.  This conversation stemmed from a trip to a store, where the computers were down and they had to figure out prices without the help of their computer.  I had heard the cashier tell the customer in front of me that the tax rate was 9.9%.  In an effort to help out the somewhat stressed looking cashier, I quickly found out the total of my purchase by taking my total purchase and multiplying it by 1.099, giving me the grand total for the sale (I did use the help of a calculator function on my phone). Here is my equation:

5.98 (I did this math in my head because I had two items, one was $1.98 and the other was $4.00)

5.98 x 1.099 = 6.57202

Though I thought I was helping out, the cashier still decided to find the total on his own.  He pulled out a calculator and did the following:

1 + 4.98 = 5.98

5.98 x 9.9 % (used the percentage button) = 0.59202 (wrote down 0.59)

1 + 4.98 + 0.59 = 6.57

Sure, he got to the same answer as I did, but it pained me to see all of the unnecessary steps that he had to take to get to the final answer.  The most surprising point was that he had to add the two items up to get 5.98.  This is a prime example of why I want to become a math teacher.

There are so many other ways in which math is present in everyday life.  I know that I use math when following a recipe, but changing the serving size.  I also use math to figure out how many miles per gallon I am getting on a tank of gas by taking the total number of miles driven on that tank and dividing it by the number of gallons it took to fill up.  Math is also needed to figure out how to give change to a customer, and also in counting it back (which is an increasingly foreign concept).

Throughout my time in the teaching program, knowing that my end goal is to become a middle school math teacher, I have been thinking up ways to engage students and make them realize that math is relevant and will actually be used in their life.  It seems like so many students lose interest in school because they don’t believe they will need to use it after they have completed school. This is simply not true, so I would like to have students tie in math to their world.  One way I have thought about doing this, is to have students find articles on math, think of ways that they use it in everyday, then have class discussion based upon the students’ findings bi-monthly.

My mind was running on overdrive, as I was driving, thinking about all of the school stuff that I had to compete, but specifically about how I use math in everyday situation.  For a split second, my mind followed a song on the radio and I happed to hear the following lyrics from a new song by Rihanna and Drake, called “What’s My Name”:

The square root of 69 is 8 somethin’, right?

‘Cause I’ve been tryin’ to work it out, oh

As soon as I heard these lyrics I started laughing, just realizing just how much that math IS all around us.

Blog 6 - Pfew!

The other week when we had conferences, my dyad teacher told me about one of our students that told his parents that he wanted to drop out of school because it was too hard for him.  He is a 6^th grader.  I was shocked to find out about his dislike for and struggles in school because he never asks questions, for help, and seems to do fairly well on homework and assessments.  This issue makes me think of ways to reach out to all students, to make them succeed, but how can you realistically do this with 150+ students that you see each day?  When they don’t ask for help or raise their concerns with you?  As I’m noticing, especially in middle school, this is idealistic and there are not enough hours in the day to help 150 students with every question they may have.  How do we get a system into place to help all students succeed?  Time will help me discover potential solutions, but until then I feel like my only option is to wing it and just do what I can.

In a recent week, we had a substitute teacher in our dyad placement that was beyond terrible at his job.  The substitute teacher that didn’t introduce himself, didn’t want to be there, had students pass out the unit tests, and didn’t model anything.  He was essentially a babysitter, but not a good one.  During the last period of the day, the teacher was packed up and walked out the door behind the students, even though there still were two students in the classroom.  A conflict between these students had risen and we did not have the substitute there to handle it.  Instead, I had to step in and help resolve this situation to the best of my abilities, but wasn’t confident in how to handle the specific issue.  Instead of disciplining the students at that moment, because I didn’t know the school’s protocol, I took note of the issue and told the students that I would tell the regular teacher about it in the morning and she would help me handle it.  The next morning the teacher was furious with the sub because of his lack of leadership (and essentially doing his job) and she helped me resolve the conflict in the appropriate manner.  This experience made me realize how possessive I will be with “my” classes and how I will have a hard time trusting the substitute doing a good job in teaching my class as per the plan.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I will be doing once I graduate with my Teaching Certificate.  I know that it’s over six months in the future, but I can’t help to think about what my next step will be.  Will I be able to find a job in Washington?  I’ve been preparing myself for not finding a job in Washington, so I’m trying to figure out some backup plans.  First, I thought about teaching abroad, but after doing some research I discovered that most of the programs in the countries that I would want to live and teach require at least two years of experience.  Since discovering that, I have kind of brushed that idea aside.  My next idea was joining Teach for America after becoming inspired by a TV show that featured TFA teachers.  I’ve been doing some research since then and think the opportunity would be wonderful, but still have plenty of questions about it.  What would I do if I could not live where they wanted to send me?  Would I be able to be away from home for the two year commitment that is required from me?  I took some of my research to YouTube, but most of those videos were created from TFA, so I needed to see some unbiased opinions.  After seeing these “I’m changing the world and love it” type of videos, I ran across some videos from Learning Matters that follows 7 Teach For America teachers in New Orleans:

This video is made by many people that support education, so is this the true view of TFA or is it an extreme example?  Would I have a similar experience or would I have the “I changed the world” feeling like the other videos? For example, this video is a promotional video by TFA:

Then, if figuring this out wasn’t hard enough, my parents offered to let me live in their house in Eastern Washington if I couldn’t get a job in Western Washington and I could work over there.  This just opens up another slew of questions that I have about my future.  Sheesh!  Good thing I have at least 7 months to figure this all out!

This week I went to A Christmas Story preview and during the preview one of the musical producers was talking about Jean Shepherd.  Stories said that he would just go on the radio and make up these fictional stories as he thought of them.  As he talked about it, I thought that this idea may be a good one to use in the classroom, in a creative writing unit.  There are many websites that provide audio clips of Jean Shepperd’s broadcasts, so I could find some examples and play them for the class (like the one below).  Playing these broadcasts of the radio shows would give students an example of made up stories that were narrated in first person.  Afterwards, the students will have the opportunity to create a similar narrative fictional story.  I think this would be beneficial and fun for kids, especially because they enjoyed the two truths and a fib.
Jean Shepherd Toy Bedbugs

Blog 5

This week I read on in Bird by Bird from where I left off a couple of weeks ago.  Though it wasn’t assigned, I was glad that I read those extra 50 pages because there were some ideas that were presented that I would use in an elementary classroom.  The main area of interest for me was the chapter on building characters.  On page 45 Lamott says that the author needs to know everything about the character and lists some questions that the author needs to have answered when considering the character.  This idea can easily transfer to the classroom, having the students fill out a worksheet that asks questions about their character, so we can get to know them.  Taking this idea on step further, I thought I could use the idea of getting to know your character in a setting where the students have to think through the eyes of a Native American.  Though students will be researching people of certain tribes throughout the US, having them give specific traits to the person may engage them in the activity, resulting in them enjoying and learning more during the lesson.

There was one thing that Lammott said in the week’s reading that I thought contradicted what we have learned in Routman’s reading.  On page 108, Lammott says, “Maybe what you care most passionately about are fasting and high colonics – cappuccino enemas, say.  This is fine,, but we do not want to write about them, “ which tells me that she wants writers to write about what she thinks is appropriate.  This idea is completely different than Routman’s encouragement to let students free write, giving them no limits on their writing because it will get them to write more.  I know that this is an extreme example, but are there times when it’s important to influence students’ writing during free write?  I would think not.

Word Identification Strategies made me think, but in a way where I knew I was over thinking things, specifically, on page 94, when Fox mentioned the word find.  I understand that the onset is f and the rime is ind, but I thought that when students later notice the /ind/ when trying to read a different word, like independent, they will be making a different sounds.  Will the students know the different because, by the time the reach the level of learning these more difficult words, they will be more exposed to words like that or recognize the word?  Is this something that we will be learning more about, as we learn the progression of word identification strategies through the later grades?

I also started wondering if the current trend of parents spelling their children’s names in odd ways could have an impact on the way that students learn word identification strategies.  It seems like students will be learning the names of their peers early on, but may have a hard time using strategies when seeing oddly spelled names like Haydyn or Mikaylyah (just made up names – it seems like a lot of people are using ys in names a lot lately).  Could this be a problem for children when they try to figure out names while they are reading?

Blog, Week 4

This week has been an interesting week, between the classes with student interaction (literacy and math) and in our dyad placement where it was conference week.

Tuesday was full of interesting events, from meeting with our Kindergarten buddy to interviewing first and fifth graders about math.  Our kindergarten buddy literacy session had seemed to go much more smoothly than it had in the past, since we used one of our buddy’s favorite things to approach our literacy activity – Spongebob.  After reading him part of a Spongebob book, we asked him to write in a booklet that we created for him, filling in the blanks “Spongebob is…” and “Patrick is…”  When he thought of a word, we had him stretch the word and write down the sounds that he heard.  He was very open to this approach and worked well stretching out his words, and would write down the sounds that he heard.  We didn’t correct him too much, even when he wanted to write “Spongebob is a cleaning utinsle” as long as he stretched his words and wrote the letters he heard.  Our objective of having him stretch out his words and come up with beginning sounds was successful.

Then, we were on to our math interviews with first and fifth graders.  As soon as my partner and I walked into the first grade classroom we were drawn to a student that was saying, “oh my gosh!” and dropping his jaw as the number of adults in his classroom quickly grew.  Seeing him react this way made my partner and I want to work with him.  When we were told to find a student to work with, we rushed to his side before anyone else could choose him to work with.  Choosing him was an interesting choice, especially once we got into our interview.  At first, when we asked him an addition problem, then asked why he knew that, he said “because my brain knows the answer.”  Then, after asking another problem and getting an incorrect response, he said that his brain wasn’t working right.  After the third problem and receiving a correct response, the student proceeded to tell us that he knew the answer because there was a little guy living in his brain and when his brain wasn’t working correctly, the guy would fix it.  That was not the explanation we were expecting, but it sure was amusing!  The rest of the interview continued to be interesting, as the student talked more and more about video games that he like to play, but most of them were violent and he would say things like, “you want to shoot them in the spine with a sniper rifle, so it’ll be more painful.”  This kind of talk, especially for a first grader, was quite disturbing, but gave us insight to the kinds of things that our potential students will likely be exposed to in their early lives.

Our next interview was with a fifth grader that had mastered the concepts that we were asking him about.  Because these multiplication and division problems were so easy for him, he had a hard time articulating the reasons that he knew them.  I was quickly running out of questions to ask him, and he was becoming rather bored with them, so I had to think of new types of questions to ask him.  I used visual clues around the classroom, to see what they were working on, and then proceeded with new questions about inch to foot conversions and areas and perimeters of shapes.  I was finally able to think of some questions that would make the student think harder and had him explain the thought processes he was going through as he was trying to solve the problems.  Though the student said that he liked to come up with math problems to solve on his own, he seemed to give up quite quickly on the problems that challenged him.

During my dyad placement we had short days because it was conference week.  The conferences were an interesting experience, especially because they were all student lead.  Each student had created a portfolio with examples of their work and also set goals for themselves.  The students had practiced the steps of conducting their conference, but most students did not take it seriously.  This lack of preparation was shown during their conference when they would rush through the material and skip over parts.  When the student led part of the conference was over, we would step in and help them develop S.M.A.R.T. goals for themselves – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevent, Timely.  Many students struggled with this on their only, coming up with goals that did not fit these requirements.  After asking questions about their original goal (using their planner, for example), we mainly found that their overall goal was to get good grades.  We were able to take these new goals and turn them into S.M.A.R.T. goals and use their previous goals as stepping stones in order to reach their goals.

Meeting parents, and seeing their interaction with the students, was an interesting experience.  One example was of a parent that had talked about a student setting their goals now, so they could get into Julliard later on.  The way she said it made me questions whether this was a goal of the student or of the parent.  In further discussions, I learned that it was the student’s goal to go to this prestigious school and her mom was simply encouraging her towards her goal.  Later, there was a mom that kept on correcting her son’s spelling and telling him that he can do better than that.  I was appalled when parents would flat out say that their child was simply being lazy.  If I were that student, I would quickly become discouraged by my parents’ description of my and feel that I should live up to their “lazy” expectations and would then stop trying.  Though this was hard to see, it made me realize how important it is for the teacher to be encouraging in everything that the students do because they may not be getting that positive encouragement elsewhere.