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Thursday, October 6, 2016

Am I Wrong?

Today a girl called me over to check her work. She didn't say, "Could you please check my work?" She didn't say, "Did I do this right?" She asked, "Am I wrong?"

This. Kills. Me.

1. Have you ever heard a boy utter these words? I'll bet you that it's never happened.
2. Why do so many students, especially girls, lack confidence in math?
3. Even the wording, "Am I wrong" eats away at me, because it implies that there is something wrong with the person, rather than the work.
4. Even if the work has an error in it, what's the big deal? Errors can be corrected.

For the record, this student was doing her work correctly. So why was there an implicit assumption that her work would not be correct?

How do we as teachers fight this and train our students, especially girls, to have confidence in what they know? I want ALL of my students to be confident and proud. I never want to hear another girl say, "This is probably wrong but...."

How often do you hear girls say things like this in your class? What do you do to combat these attitudes?

A Day With No Foldables, Instead Notice and Wonder

Lately I've been getting a little burned out with how jazzy my Geometry INB is getting. It's a lot of paper. A lot of cutting. A lot of pasting. I'm sure that these are good things to do, but there are other effective ways to teach too.

So for my lesson on exterior angles of a triangles, I tried a take on the Number Strings that I heard about at TMC NYC '16. I used 8 straightforward problems where students could use their prior knowledge on linear pairs and the sum of the interior angles of a triangle to find a particular missing angle (either the exterior angle or one of the remote interior angles). Then I asked them to take a step back and tell me what they noticed and wondered.

Here's what I noticed:

  • Of my 3 geometry classes, only one did an awesome job noticing/wondering and was able to tell me the relationship between the exterior angle and the remote interior angles. 
  • My sophomore group was cooperative in writing down what they noticed and wondered, but they wrote trivial things, probably just to finish the task quickly in hopes of satisfying me. 
  • My other upperclassmen didn't notice or wonder anything. They mostly didn't want to write anything down. Maybe they were just anticipating the final bell. Maybe they didn't feel like thinking. I don't know. 
  • The questions generated by the sophomores made me realize that they didn't notice that there was a purpose to which angle I was asking them to find in each question. They didn't notice that I never once asked them to find the adjacent interior angle (though they knew they had to find it as an intermediate step to finding the answer). 
Overall, the lesson went very well and I'm pleased with it. But I'm still bothered by some students' general lack of perseverance and unwillingness to write their thoughts down on paper. 

Here's what I wonder:
  • How do you get students to persevere, especially when faced with a low-floor task?
  • How do you get students to write in math? 
  • How do you convince students that no idea or question is silly? That all ideas are valued and worth using?