I just created my first podcast as a reflection on:
Where's the Critical Literacy in y = mx + b?.
The audio clip is available here and the script of the audio is available here.
Enjoy.
-MF EDOOMCATOR
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
In the heat of DCCAS testing...
We are now in the heat of DCCAS testing and I'm looking for ways to get students to do well on the testing. One of the main problems I believe students have is with interpreting and reading into the word problems. There are effective strategies in attacking word problems and I'm always looking for ways to help students get over the phobia of doing word problems.
So, as a follow up to my last post... here is a reading guide that I plan to use in my class later this week to help students attack some word problems on the DCCAS.
Click here for the document. Many thanks to the head of our math department for providing this great reading/study guide.
I believe this will get students to critically think about word problems that they encounter on standardized testing and I'll see how the lesson goes later this week...
-MF EDOOMCATOR
So, as a follow up to my last post... here is a reading guide that I plan to use in my class later this week to help students attack some word problems on the DCCAS.
Click here for the document. Many thanks to the head of our math department for providing this great reading/study guide.
I believe this will get students to critically think about word problems that they encounter on standardized testing and I'll see how the lesson goes later this week...
-MF EDOOMCATOR
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Where's the Critical Literacy in y = mx + b?
As I read through our assigned book Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children, I keep wondering how can I use critical literacy in my classroom? How can I use critical literacy in the context of a math problem? I took a class that touched on critical literacy early on in my graduate work at AU, but it feels like an eternity ago...
So, it's nice to realize that there are many opportunities in my own classroom investigating into "texts". For instance, my students are always asking me why we don't use the textbooks very often in my class? Hmmmm... why is that? Earlier this year, one of the teachers at our school created a set of word problems for the students to practice with. I was astonished that most of our students couldn't even begin to understand the problem relating to golf because they have either never seen it before or have NO IDEA how it is played or scored. I had to step back and spend some time explaining the game to them. Once they realized, it was just like mini-golf... some of them started to get it! Just like many instances in our provided textbooks, the golf word problem was lacking context for the students understanding.
To create context in my own classroom, I recently assigned a mini-project where students had to create their own word problems related to their interests and there is a sampling of pictures below. Our focus was to critically view linear functions (y = mx + b) in 4 different views: as a story, an equation, an input-output table, and a graph.
(I typed up a few samples of the created word problems below the pictures since they are hard to read.)
"There are 20,000 soldiers in Iraq. 5,000 were killed. An average of 8 soldiers are killed each day. Write a model representing the number of soldiers left in Iraq depending on the number of days."
"The owners of Club Mandingo are trying to bring "TCB" to a concert at the cost of $500 and the tickets are $5 each. How can you model the owner's profit depending on the number or tickets sold?"
-MF EDOOMCATOR
So, it's nice to realize that there are many opportunities in my own classroom investigating into "texts". For instance, my students are always asking me why we don't use the textbooks very often in my class? Hmmmm... why is that? Earlier this year, one of the teachers at our school created a set of word problems for the students to practice with. I was astonished that most of our students couldn't even begin to understand the problem relating to golf because they have either never seen it before or have NO IDEA how it is played or scored. I had to step back and spend some time explaining the game to them. Once they realized, it was just like mini-golf... some of them started to get it! Just like many instances in our provided textbooks, the golf word problem was lacking context for the students understanding.
To create context in my own classroom, I recently assigned a mini-project where students had to create their own word problems related to their interests and there is a sampling of pictures below. Our focus was to critically view linear functions (y = mx + b) in 4 different views: as a story, an equation, an input-output table, and a graph.
(I typed up a few samples of the created word problems below the pictures since they are hard to read.)
"There are 20,000 soldiers in Iraq. 5,000 were killed. An average of 8 soldiers are killed each day. Write a model representing the number of soldiers left in Iraq depending on the number of days."
"The owners of Club Mandingo are trying to bring "TCB" to a concert at the cost of $500 and the tickets are $5 each. How can you model the owner's profit depending on the number or tickets sold?"
-MF EDOOMCATOR
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