All of my amigos are gone on spring break.
Here I am, in Fort Wayne, Indiana during my University Spring Break. Some buddies went to Miami, others up to Michigan, and my roommate gone to Texas. What have I been doing with all my free time? Becoming a better teacher.
I have spent most of my free time working on lesson plans, looking up ideas for various concepts in the classroom, as well as searching for something that will capture the students and really engage them. Last night, I was looking through the entire internet for a cool Pythagorean Theorem project for my advanced math students to do during ISTEP testing days. Turns out I did not really find much that I enjoyed or that I thought they could accomplish without lots and lots of help.
Instead, I have decided to create my own project, and today was the first day they had to work on it. Actually, it was not much of a project, more like a problem I just made up, which they obviously knew because the question asked, "What is the longest straight path that my frog can swim in his tank?" I had a video that went along with the question, which was of my albino frog, Lionel, swimming up and down ferociously in my fish tank.
We had just covered a few worksheet problems, you know those ultra boring and non-related to anything questions that you can find in the teachers resource in your books website. They handled those pretty easily, since they are basically hand-feeding the students, and it only takes a sliver of intelligence to plug one number here and one number there. Instead with this project, I had them come up with their own ideas, form their own questions and make calculations themselves.
After the video was over, I asked what information they would like to know. Some asked pointless questions, like why I had my fish tank look like Bikini Bottom, or what the names of the other fish were. Suddenly, one student asked what the dimensions of the tank were, so I happily changed to the next slide where I had the dimensions of the fish tank. I asked them to get to work and to show their work.
Most were quick to multiply Length times Width, even though they were not asked to find Area or anything like that, which was confusing. I reminded them that we had just finished practicing Pythagorean Theorem and that they should be able to use that to find some unknown length. After I said this, they asked if they should find the Hypotenuse of one of the glass sides, and I asked them if they thought that was the longest part of tank? They sat there and thought for a little bit and I was happy to see that they had a puzzled look on their face.
Only thing about having this project today is that the periods were so short, so before I knew it the class was over and they had forgotten all about Lionel and his training regiment. So hopefully tomorrow they will be able to solve this and we can keep moving forward.
CM
