Day 170 Working World Wednesday

6th Grade Math Standards: 6.RP.3c Find a percent of a quantity as a rate per 100 (e.g., 30% of a quantity means 30/100 times the quantity); solve problems involving finding the whole, given a part and the percent.

The Learning Objective: Use proportions in a real-world contextIdentify parts of a paycheck; budget money in a real-world scenario

The Assessment: Much of the information given in this class is new to students. My main concern is that they use proportions to find how much of a check is devoted to items such as social security, gross pay, etc. The secondary concern is that the students come away with a sense of how difficult it is to save money. This is much harder to measure in terms of exit tickets or projecting it onto a worksheet, but I heard students make comments such as "I don't want to be an adult," and this was good enough given the amount of new information stuffed into one lesson.

Agenda:

1. Pick a profession
2. Fill in the blanks as to the definition of social security, net pay, gross pay, federal withholding, state withholding, and medicare (part 1 of this worksheet)
3. Calculate the percentage of your check that gets taken away as a result of social security, medicare, and taxes (part 2 of this worksheet)
4. With the remaining money, get a car and pay off bills such as utilities, mortgage/rent ($1000 for all just for simplicity), cable, etc. (this worksheet)
5. Calculate the percentage of money left to "play" with

Glass Half-Full Take: I like seeing the reactions from students as they realize that their "hard earned" money is simply thrown away before they get to buy their video games, fancy sneakers, and expensive trips to theme parks. I like that many of them choose an expensive car and that we can have a discussion about material possessions.

One Regret: When filling in the blanks, it was unclear to students that the terms were a word bank. I suppose this needs to be communicated better. It was quite frustrating in one class as the students refused to even try and guess, and only said in an exasperated tone "how are we supposed to know this stuff?"

I also think a conversation of what percent of your check do you think you get to spend after paying for bills prior to starting the lesson could be helpful in motivating and adding to the learning throughout the lesson.

Link of the Day: Up to 40% of America's food gets thrown away. The article discusses that we should buy in less bulk and actually go shopping more. Great for unit rate discussions.

Day 169 Tessellation Tuesday

Grade 6 Math Standards: 6.NS.6b Understand signs of numbers in ordered pairs as indicating locations in quadrants of the coordinate plane; recognize that when two ordered pairs differ only by signs, the locations of the points are related by reflections across one or both axes.

Standards for Mathematical Practice 5 & 7

The Learning Objective: Tessellate a shape using translations and reflections

The Assessment: The students traced their tessellations on an 8 and 1/2 by 11 inch index card.

Agenda: This PDF pretty much takes us through the agenda. We ended up doing just parts one and two.

Glass Half-Full Take: It's the end of the year and the students are able to have a little autonomy while still meeting mathematical obligations to make me happy.

One Regret: The directions said to cut the index card in half. I never did this, but it worked out fine. The other regret was that I was not as specific as I needed to be in telling the students to start cutting in one corner and finish in the adjacent corner. Many students finished cutting on the edge of the index card instead of the corner, so they had to start over and an index card is wasted in the process.

Link of the Day: This article from The Atlantic discusses how teachers have summers off. There are those that believe teachers are not underpaid because they get summers off and those that do because much of the time teachers spend on the job is done while they're technically not on the clock. I think summer is the perfect time to recharge the batteries for both teachers and students.