Pi Day (with minimal mention of digits)

Posted on March 15, 2017 by Andrew

Today, we celebrated our belated Pi Day! It was delayed due to inclement weather…

Though my #MTBoS friends were there to comfort me in my time of need!

@bkdidact that’s the rounded up version anyway, none of this truncated 3/14 crap
— Jonathan (@rawrdimus) March 13, 2017

Our spring trimester focus is always financial literacy. So, we spent most of last week researching recipes, planning for a shopping trip, going to the bank, shopping for ingredients, and making pies. Yes, I said it. We made pies for Pi Day, sue me! Now, finally the time had come to eat our pies, but first…we had to do some more math!

First we reviewed of some of the digits of Pi, highlighting that when rounded to the nearest hundredth it matches the numerical date of March 14th, which is subsequently known as “Pi Day” for this reason. I also wore my Pi shirt, which gives the students an opportunity to see that there are A LOT of digits in this number known as Pi and that I’m a nerd. We did, however, skip the traditional digit memorization activity for several reasons including working memory and tedious boredom.

Instead we estimated, explored, and discovered the circumference formula with our pies and some string.

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3-Act Task: Make It Rain!

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Andrew

Standards:

Act 1

What do you notice?

What do you wonder?

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One Moment, One Decision

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Andrew

Teaching is hard.

As Magdalene Lampert notes in her book Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching, “One reason teaching is a complex practice is that many of the problems a teacher must address to get students to learn happen simultaneously, not one after another (2).”

Teaching is hard.

As Max Ray says in his 2014 NCSM ignite talk, “Teaching isn’t Rocket Science. It’s harder.” Max goes on to say that teachers make a litany of educational decisions on the fly based on deep knowledge of content and their students as learners.

Teaching is hard.

As Ball and Forzani write in The Work of Teaching and the Challenge for Teacher Education, “The work of teaching includes broad cultural competence and relational sensitivity, communication skills, and the combination of rigor and imagination fundamental to effective practice. Skillful teaching requires appropriately using and integrating specific moves and activities in particular cases and contexts, based on knowledge and understanding of one’s pupils and on the application of professional judgment (2009).”

Teaching is hard.

As Jose Vilson relates, “We’ve known for decades that building relationships is a central part of our work, but this has even larger implications when we work with disadvantaged students. The teacher-student relationship has so many subtle nuances across race, gender, and class lines that opening our eyes to these nuances would make us better educators.”

So teaching is hard, because reasons.

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A Snapshot

Posted on May 10, 2016 by Andrew

First, a little background.

The theme of our spring unit is always financial literacy. As teachers of students with varying degrees of need, strength, and interest this means different things for different groups of students. One of my groups is working on selling tickets for our school play, Alice in Wonderland.

We sell tickets at two price points. An adult ticket costs $10 and a child/student ticket costs $8. This is partly my doing, because having two different prices sometimes allows my students to investigate more interesting mathematical questions. Today was one of those days.

Show-goers are also able to purchase play tickets in one of three ways: cash, check, or online with a credit card. My students record the type of ticket and the method of purchase for each order in a table. Students then represent this information visually using graphs. We will use these tables and graphs later on to reflect on the trends and patterns in the ticket sales to make suggestions to our play directors for future ticket sales initiatives. But that’s the bigger picture and I promised you a snapshot. So here it is.

I realized I had been giving my students too much information. As they recorded the total amounts of cash, checks, and credit, I was also telling them the type of ticket. Today we began our routine of using math to figure out the type of tickets using our knowledge of the ticket prices and total amount of money. I gave them this problem as a warm-up:

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Financial Literacy: Shopping

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Andrew

One of the major components of our school’s mathematics curriculum is our spring financial literacy unit. The reason we focus on this for so long is that for our students to become successful independent adults they need to be able to use money effectively in the community. The three components of our financial literacy unit are shopping, banking, and budgeting.

Our students have learning and developmental disabilities that impact how they relate to the outside world. It is often hard for our students to transfer what we teach in class for use in the community. Students who seem to have mastered a skill in class may not be able to demonstrate this mastery when needed in the community. The theory and problems with the transfer of learning have been well documented (here and here). This is why we go out into the community as part of our financial literacy unit. We want to see what the students can do when faced with using these mathematical skills in the “real world.”

I have written in the past about how we are integrating MathTwitterBlogosphere (#MTBoS) resources for our financial literacy unit.

@bkdidact absolutely. FWIW- Love seein how you’ve pulled in so many #mtbos ideas & created a bunch for ur money unit. Be a sweet blog post.

— Graham Fletcher (@gfletchy) April 2, 2015