Second Day of School Time Management Survey

I have always given students a little get to know you short answer sheet and I genuinely read every response that I get. This is my Welcome to Math warm up that I have used in the past and this is Welcome to Math 2.0.

As a result of reading so much literature (Mindset by Carol Dweck, How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, Drive by Daniel Pink to name a few) in the past two years about non-cognitive skills and the psychological research behind it, I wanted to change the focus a little. I eliminated questions where the students generally gave me poor responses and replaced them with how they manage their time in six categories: video games, television/YouTube, cell phone time, exercise, reading, and writing. My basic thought being that I can help them reallocate their time away from pleasure seeking and instant gratification to more constructive use of their time in experiences that create flow and provide opportunities to do work for its own sake. Who knows it might totally flop and I might have no time to even start to give feedback to students regarding this, but if nothing else it will give me data.

Fifteen Problems I Stole from Fawn Nguyen

On Friday mornings, I run what is called Math Academy at our school. I give students one to three problems (usually I try to make it just one). They have from 7:15 until 7:45 to work it out. I had trouble getting problems that were engaging and challenging as the year pushed on. More often than not I turned to the blog or Twitter page of Fawn Nguyen and my needs were met. I either stole problems directly from her or stole problems that she stole from someone else. Good thing stealing is allowed. Here are fifteen I really like:

1. Visual Pattern #3 by Fawn Ngyuen
2. Visual Pattern #5 by Fawn Ngyuen
3. This problem about the band fundraiser. I wouldn't link this to any particular sixth grade standard. 
4. Ten dimes weigh an ounce. How much does $1000 in dimes weigh? 
5. Splitting the cost of a house (not evenly) and then reselling that same house. How much should each person get? 
6. Three two-sided chips
7. Love the way that this Reversing the Question prompt was set up with the four multiple choices not even shown initially. 
8. The missing area problem. 
9. The Dad's Cookie Problem. 
10. Put the digits in the right place for a 3 digit times a 2 digit number.
11. There are a million unit rate lessons out there, but I like everything about the way that Fawn constructs this one in which she compares a new hot spot for smoothies to Starbucks. Fawn talks about the numerous reasons she likes the lesson in the link, but to me the one thing that sticks out is that the math and the real world connections are in the Goldilocks land of not too hard, but not too easy. 
12. Hotel Snap was also given to NCTM Illuminations by Fawn. I actually used this one this past year, but it was way too much for my sixth graders. Fawn actually suggests starting with a smaller hotel that only uses ten cubes. I didn't see this article at the time or I just thought eh my kids will be fine. 
13. The Test Drive. I think this would go really well with teaching double number lines or anything ratio. 
14. This one was really really hard. Not for the kids. They haven't tried it yet. I have. I got it wrong. A little bit of fractions, proportions, percentages all wrapped into one. 
15. Generate the smallest and largest answers. This is a great tool for teaching students how to make sense of answers with fractions. They usually try to memorize and it's a way for them to think logically particularly regarding the division operation. 

At-Risk Program Moving from Cognitive to Non-Cognitive

A guidance counselor and a special education teacher performed miracles and started an intervention program for at-risk students called Next Steps for Success last year at our school. There was no budget, but they were determined. We already had a program from the previous year that paired students with a teacher in the building that volunteered to keep a special eye out for them as a mentor. We had 32 students and 25 teachers in this program. Not a perfect 1:1 ratio, but close enough where kids and faculty had the opportunity to build a relationship. The students in the Next Steps for Success program were still struggling after being paired up with a mentor, and thus the next tier of help was needed. Like the mentor program, this program was entirely voluntary. Here were the basic steps we took to help the kids:

• Students volunteered to sign up for the program and were given the expectations in the form of a contract when they signed up. 
• Students were provided a breakfast that the teachers would purchase, which included healthy snacks and tasty snacks.
• Students were to arrive 25 minutes before the start of school to get help on their academics and also were given supplies to get through the day.
• Students had to come after school twice per week for a half hour as part of the program and stay for a core academic teacher two other days. 

We ended up getting positive results to some degree with all five students in the program. Two students completely turned around their attendance records, and all students saw some improvements in different classes. Despite the big picture gains, everyday seemed to be a battle. Instant gratification, executive function, and motivation were perpetual issues with the students. After the year was over, every teacher evaluated the program. Before giving my own feedback, I bumped into the book How Children Succeed by Paul Tough. And that completely re-shaped the way that I looked at how the Next Steps for Success program was run. 

We needed to shift our focus in the morning from keeping the students academically afloat to building their non-cognitive skills, which Tough lists as character, work ethic, and grit. As part of that, the morning curriculum should be built around stress management, neuroscience, the relationship between IQ and character, tangible examples of overcoming adversity, and goal setting strategies. It was encouraging to read yesterday that eight states agree and have taken steps to build social/emotional standards. 

It's no secret that students were better off if they could perform the academic skills on their own. The whole teach a man to fish and you'll feed him for a lifetime line applies, but we were spoon feeding these students because they did not know why it was important to fish. There comes a point where the good teaching practices of accessing prior knowledge, building curiosity, or having well-established routines are not going to work in moving students. Eventually any successful academic reaches a point of feeling overwhelmed or disinterested. They persevere because they see the value in education. These students eventually have to want it. And although motivation is a very hard concept to master, I came away from reading Tough's book feeling like motivation can be taught to some degree to at-risk students. 

We will begin year two of the Next Steps for Success program this September. And I'm sure many of the same battles we faced last year will persist. After all, the students are still coming from high stress environments, and will still be immature. That being said, I'm excited that we are going to confront these issues now instead of simply saying this is how to find the area of a square when you take out the area of a circle. 

Bagel Bites or DiGiorno?

A friend had to buy gum at Walgreen's last Saturday. The line was huge and I had nothing to do so I was the crazy dude taking pictures of Bagel Bites and DiGiorno. Looking back I probably should have stood the DiGiorno up like the Bagel Bites. Oh well.

Standards: 6.RP.3, 6.NS.3, 6.G.1: MA.1.a, MA.1.b
Act 1: What questions come to mind?

To me the question that comes to mind is what is the better buy? Of course that implies the Bagel Bites and DiGiorno taste the same, which I honestly don't believe, but anyway. I'm also ignoring the thickness of both, but I already said anyway so moving on!

Act 2:

• Diameter of a Bagel Bite = 2 inches
• Diameter of a DiGiorno Rising Crust = 12 inches

Act 3: The math. 

Sequel: How many Bagel Bites would need to be added to the box for Bagel Bites to be the better buy? How many Bagel Bites would need to be added for the area of the two products to be equivalent? 

Why Can't the Weekly Quiz Help All Students?

Since I set foot in the classroom in 2009, the sixth grade math department has developed a weekly quiz. The process has been altered here and there, but generally students are given seven days (Friday to Friday) to complete twenty problems or an open response that is a review of something we have already done in class. And when you continue to do something for eight years in the classroom, it should produce a good return on investment. The math teachers are confident that that is the case, but I wonder to what extent. The best explanation I got was from a teacher who went to work in a separate school district.

That teacher went on to implement the weekly quiz in her seventh grade classroom, but the two other math teachers on the team were not ready to take the plunge. As a result, it became a pretty good accidental experiment to measure the impact of the weekly quiz. What she concluded when the year was over was that there were virtually no changes in the MCAS scores of the students that were in the warning and needs improvement categories in comparison to the two other teachers (the control group), but she had a much greater percentage of students score advanced than the other two teachers. As I said, it was a pretty good accidental experiment. Perhaps this teacher had other practices that were unique that enabled her advanced students to reach a higher level or perhaps the sample of students was disproportionate in how they were distributed to the three teachers. For the sake of what I'm writing, I'm going to accept that the findings between weekly quiz implementation and MCAS results of this accident experiment. The question for me then became, why are the lower achieving students not making bigger gains with a quiz that is designed to reenforce the skills that they may have missed the first time around? 

1. Executive Functioning. Giving the students seven days (or five after the students do nothing over the weekend) to complete twenty problems actually creates more of a problem for many students. It gives them seven days to lose the physical paper and procrastinate with the assignment. In eight years, you pick up on this pretty quickly, so I take a million precautions which include putting it online, sending emails to parents, making the "rough draft" due on Tuesday or Wednesday, a spot in the back of the room with extra blank weekly quizzes, forcing students to come at lunch, and ordering a team of fairies to move the students hands in a certain sequence to put correct answers on a paper. Despite all of these measures, I routinely had students fail to turn in the assignment when it was due on Friday. At one point or another 41% of my students did not turn in a weekly quiz. And among that group 73% had a weekly quiz in the needs improvement or warning category for fifth grade MCAS. Taking this further, for students that do the work then lose the work, and do the work again, they are missing out on feedback that other students are getting. 
2. Time and feedback. Students can pass in the weekly quiz at the start of class any day of the week and get feedback before it is ultimately due on Friday. Many students take advantage, so my method for giving feedback is the red pen and the highlighter. If it's wrong, I highlight the problem, and if it's correct I give a red check. The trouble comes for lower students when they see the highlight. It's wrong, but where do you go from here? Time is a precious resource for me. I do not have the time to write on every paper "to carry out the distributive property multiply every term in the parenthesis by what is outside the parentheses. A term is anything separated by a plus or minus sign. Once the terms are multiplied do not combine terms that do not have the same variable because that would be like saying you bought two bags of popcorn and a new car and the price for all of them is the same." Whereas with the higher achieving students, I can highlight and they can often self-correct or at least know where in their notes, family, or online they can go to get the feedback they need.
3. Copying. Once I put the red pen indicating a correct answer on one paper, that answer can become viral. As long as I see the work, I'm not going to interrogate everyone I see. Each of the past eight years, I have caught people cheating. There's a fine line between students helping each other (which I discourage with weekly quizzes unless it's in my presence) and students copying. Typically the ones that copy will admit it because when I ask them to explain they can't. For students that struggle, this of course represents an easy way out. 
4. Basic Skills. Some of the weekly quizzes involve problems with multiple steps and big numbers. For the students that still cannot multiply with two digit numbers this represents a mountain-sized obstacle. I do not want students to spending more than thirty minutes with the weekly quiz. Without basic skills though, it's impossible not to. 
5. Reviewing Tests and Quizzes. Many of the weekly quiz questions are taken directly from quizzes and tests we take in class. We usually go after the questions that were hardest. Consequently, if students would absorb my explanations after tests and quizzes perfectly they would never have an issue. The opposite seems to be true though, which causes me to wonder if reviewing tests and quizzes serves as any purpose for these students. 
6. Grit and effort. Handing in a weekly quiz is not difficult when all the accommodations are taken into account. Yet it still isn't done one hundred percent of the time. 

There are surely other factors such as home life, IQ, or sleep but these are outside of my control. Looking at these six problems, part of the solution seems to scream for differentiation and motivation. Easier said than done, but that's what I will look to follow up on.