I have only one section of students right now, a group that went through most of the semester with no math teacher and therefore were not going to be promoted with their fellow tenth graders at the end of July. But the VPI (vice principal of instruction) sat down with me when I arrived and asked me to work with them this month and bring them up to speed so they could move on. I agreed, so I now have two hours of geometry five days a week with forty students. This is vastly different from the two hours of algebra per week with four hundred students that I had last year.
Since I have so much to cover, my lessons (all two days so far) have been very notes-heavy and I was struggling to find ways to incorporate critical thinking into an introduction of basic geometric figures and symbols. Students here are very skilled at copying and memorizing notes, but one thing they don't practice much is applying the material they're presented with. One of my goals for my second year of teaching is to build more excited critical thinking into my lessons and assessments. A late-night lesson planning/Skype conversation with my best friend yielded an idea that I put into practice today.
I greeted my students ("Good afternoon, 10E" "Good afternoon, Ms. L"), put the warm-up in the board, and floated around the room listening to discussion and debate about the difference between complementary and supplementary angles. We examined the definitions of convex vs concave polygons, named polygons by number of sides, and explored special types of triangles. And then I introduced their assignment: explore campus and find examples of three different geometric figures or ideas from their notes, classify them, and illustrate their findings. I walked them through two examples (a convex hexagon shape formed by classroom windo bricks, the parallel wood slats on the back of a chair) then turned them loose for 15 minutes.
When I called them back in they were excited about how much fun it had been to have class outside and amazed that things like equilateral triangles and right angles were so plentiful outside their copy books. I was excited about how engaged they all were in the lesson after two hours of notes and amazed that they were so insightful and observant.
I usually leave class feeling accomplished enough just having presented material and kept order, but today was something special. I felt like I really taught, connected, shared small the reason I love math so much.
