Week 4: My Student are Good at "School"

This week's assignment was a fun one.  You know when you are planning to be observed by your administrator, you try to pull out all the bells and whistles and show how awesome you are? I thought about going into this week doing the same thing, but decided against it.  Here's day two of a "regular" lesson during first period after a snowy start to the day.  Needless to say, the kids were amped.

The topic of the week is data analysis and scatterplots.  We started the day before doing Yummy Math's Opening Weekend activity and plotted the points for all of the movies.  Great conversations about noticing and plotting points when given this table:

Some highlites included: there are 18 movies, that's a lot of money(!), there is no total gross for Star Wars, and the movies range from 2006 to 2015.  Some fun facts: more than half of the class has not seen the new or any Star Wars movies (gasp!) and one student had the most of seeing 16 of the above movies.  When told to plot the points, the kids had lots of questions about how to plot such large numbers.  They were concerned with being precise which resulted into rounding and estimation.  Here's what our graph looked like:


We talked about how there's a positive and linear association.  This then lead into drawing line of best fit.  I asked the class what it looks like and a student responded that it's a line on the graph.  I replied, "Oh, like this?"

Student: "No! It needs to be in the middle of the dots with some above and some below.  It has to go up!"
Me: "Right. Go ahead, everyone, and do that. Draw your line of best fit"

As I walked around the room checking in with the students, too many of them had what I drew on the board!! This goes back to the idea of last week's post on learned helplessless. No matter what I do with turning and talking, noticing and wondering, etc. it's very difficult to keep all students engaged.  Those that wake up from day dreaming see something on the board and think they need to copy it ad nauseam.  They all didn't know why the drew it on their sheet when I talked with them.  It's very frustrating when you think everything is going well and all kids are engaged and then you see this on their sheet.  We reconvened as a group and made sure no one had what I drew on the board and continued on our way. 

The kids did great as we made numerous conjectures and, I think, by the end all got something out of the activity. 

My favorite part was closing and seeing if our prediction on Star Wars lifetime gross was getting close.  Here's what we found:


This is the excitement that you love to see.  The students went nuts to see how high it is already.  We graphed it to see what it looks like:

"That's an outlier!" they shouted.  It led to more discussion on what to do with outliers and how they should be treated.  Some were mad that they didn't get the "correct" answer.  That made me happy because it kicked in how math should be treated and the answers aren't always what they're supposed to be.  It's all about the process and thinking like a mathematician.  I look forward to doing more activities where we can work on the process and not focus on being correct or copying everything that is written on the board!

Better Questions: Can You Help Me?

There were many prompts to get this week's task going, and this one has hit me hard recently, and not just in math class: "Mr. Hulitt, can you help me?" Simple, right?  Let's resume the convo:

Sure, what do you need?
I don't know what to do
What don't you know what to do?
Number 7
Ok, what don't you know about number 7?
I don't know what to do

Many of our students want the easy way out.  They have been programmed since school age to be robotic answer-finders.  Give them a formula, tell them what numbers to use, plug it into a calculator, and bam(!), there's your answer.

The idea of learned helpless is plaguing our classrooms.  Without the need to rehash posts from this, this and this, I will add that the Math Practice Standards aim to curtail learned helplessness and promote better thinking in class.  Specifically MP1: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.  I've found that low entry high ceiling tasks do this exactly.  That's the beauty of Estimation180, Visual Patterns, and Which One Doesn't Belong.  Also, Jo Boaler and NRich have more examples that expand this concept.

Have you used anything in particular?  How did it go? Please share!

My Favorite

Imagine if Pear Deck, Nearpod, and Socrative had a mobile whiteboard,  ipad mirroring and remote access to your computer.  Sounds too good to be true, except it is!  Meet Annotate.  I have been using it the past year and could not live without it.  Let them explain what it does:



I find the mobile whiteboard, ipad mirroring and remote access to be game changers for the classroom.  With the mobile whiteboard, I am no longer tied to the front of the room writing whatever is projected.  Ipad mirroring is great to display apps or show the students how to do something with their ipads.  And remote access to my computer allows me to control my computer from my ipad.

Let me explain how I use this.  If I'm projecting a pdf, I'll import it to my account via their web-based software, then I need to open a program on my computer.  This will link my ipad to my computer.  From my ipad, I open the imported pdf and tap Project and it will show on my projector

web-based program

computer software

iPad view

  

Projected view

Annotate is great for mirroring my iPad.  Again, I need to open the computer software and make sure my PC and ipad are on the same network.  Then I swipe to the control panel on my ipad and tap Airplay.  Tap my name and it's as easy as that.  Here's the iPad and projected view:

iPad

Projected view

Lastly, I normally use Annotate as remote access to my computer to draw on my Keynote slides.  I prefer to use Keynote as their animations, notes and next slide view are key parts of my presentation.  If I upload the pdf's and project them, it looses what is integral for me.  Here's what I see from my iPad as Annotate is in Remote:

Their customer service is top notch as I had a recommendation to add a Secondary display to preview.  They quickly added it in and now I can easily tap between display views so I can see my notes for the slide and what is coming up next.

Here's an example of drawing on my slide from my ipad as I walked around the room and what the students see projected.

Annotate does much more than I have described.  I'm still trying to work in how I can use the other features as it's difficult since we're not a 1:1 school.  

Without a doubt, Annotate is easily My Favorite!  Let me know how it goes when you give it a try.

Week 1: One Good Thing: "What? Do you think I'm a math person?!"

During our warm up the other day, the students were presented with this:


While I was observing the students working, I asked one about 4x=32.  He told me the correct answer and I then asked how he got that.

Well, I know that four times eight is 48.
Makes sense.  What if you had something that looks like 4x=44?
11
Why?
Four times 11 is 44
Ok, how about 4x=72?
<Working on the calculator> 18!
How do you know?
Four times 18 is 72
Ok, how about 4x=244?
What?!  Do you think I'm some sort of math person!?

Yes! He had the headache and wanted aspirin!  We then talked about how he solved the addition and subtraction problems above.  He said that he did the opposite of whatever the problem was asking.  I asked him what's the opposite of multiplication and he told it was dividing.   He used his calculator and did four divided by 244.  He thankfully realized that .016 is incorrect, so he did it the other way around and got 61.  We did another problem to see if it worked again and it did.  He felt very satisfied and proud of his work.  The lightbulb turned on and he finally understands one-step equations.

Welcome to the Math Person Club!