Im a pre-service teacher doing my last placement in term 1 next year (Im from Aus!). I was considering using this resource: https://www.map.mathshell.org/lessons.php?unit=7105&collection=8 as a starting point for context. Now reading your posts for the last few weeks I'm questioning it! My year 7 class is an academic class (top class). But still. I am now considering simpler context questions for first lesson, a lesson on building conceptual understanding slowly as per your comments in "Conceptual Understanding Doesn't Happen All At Once" THEN letting them loose on this classroom challenge .. Thoughts?
I really like the MARS tasks but the principle they tend to violate is "teach one thing at a time." When I look at that task I see it trying to teach a bunch of different things at once. In my opinion, tasks like that are great later in a unit. They function as practice and help students connect concepts and deepen their understanding.
It sounds like your context is different than mine, I teach homogenous classes in a relatively low-achieving school. You know your students. But if I used that task too early in a unit, my guess is that the students who already have strong skills would learn a bunch from it, and the students who don't have as strong of skills wouldn't learn much.
The qualia beneath the quantia! I agree: restoring these flavors to the academic knowledge we want kids to learn is essential to having them love it… and learn it in the first place. Out of curiosity, what associations did you settle upon for negative numbers?
I'm doing a bit of everything. Today we did some problems about the temperatures of different planets which was fun. Also lots of number lines without a context, but problems about opposites, distances, moving around. Some more about contexts with opposites - hours ahead or behind time zones, credits and debts, etc. Which elevation is the highest, which is the lowest. Stuff like that.
One of your fellow Match Corps tutors, an MIT alum named Jon Blum circa 2004, walked his tutee to the stairway landing of the high school's second floor.
"Take 3 steps up." Kid did. "Okay that's positive 3. Come back here to zero. Now take 3 steps down.....that's negative 3."
Im a pre-service teacher doing my last placement in term 1 next year (Im from Aus!). I was considering using this resource: https://www.map.mathshell.org/lessons.php?unit=7105&collection=8 as a starting point for context. Now reading your posts for the last few weeks I'm questioning it! My year 7 class is an academic class (top class). But still. I am now considering simpler context questions for first lesson, a lesson on building conceptual understanding slowly as per your comments in "Conceptual Understanding Doesn't Happen All At Once" THEN letting them loose on this classroom challenge .. Thoughts?
I really like the MARS tasks but the principle they tend to violate is "teach one thing at a time." When I look at that task I see it trying to teach a bunch of different things at once. In my opinion, tasks like that are great later in a unit. They function as practice and help students connect concepts and deepen their understanding.
It sounds like your context is different than mine, I teach homogenous classes in a relatively low-achieving school. You know your students. But if I used that task too early in a unit, my guess is that the students who already have strong skills would learn a bunch from it, and the students who don't have as strong of skills wouldn't learn much.
The qualia beneath the quantia! I agree: restoring these flavors to the academic knowledge we want kids to learn is essential to having them love it… and learn it in the first place. Out of curiosity, what associations did you settle upon for negative numbers?
I'm doing a bit of everything. Today we did some problems about the temperatures of different planets which was fun. Also lots of number lines without a context, but problems about opposites, distances, moving around. Some more about contexts with opposites - hours ahead or behind time zones, credits and debts, etc. Which elevation is the highest, which is the lowest. Stuff like that.
One of your fellow Match Corps tutors, an MIT alum named Jon Blum circa 2004, walked his tutee to the stairway landing of the high school's second floor.
"Take 3 steps up." Kid did. "Okay that's positive 3. Come back here to zero. Now take 3 steps down.....that's negative 3."
For that kid, at least, it stuck.
I met him way back! It's amazing how those little things can make a difference at the right moment.