Story 1: learning through presenting

The first presentation of the day was a student presenting a math project about Misleading Graphs. This student clearly had no fear about this process. Earlier in the year he got on stage for the mental health panel and had also signed up to have 4 panels in one day. His confidence was as high as his substance as he was able to describe multiple types of misleading graphs and the news sources that keep making them. Even on the best presentations we have to keep asking questions that push the student. It is pretty rare when a student demonstrates total mastery over the math, the context, and the strategies the used. In this case, he didn’t really understand all the features he used on google sheets, and one graph that he made stepped over the line of being ‘misleading’ to just being incorrect. Presentations are great places to talk about wrong answers because you can really walk through the student about why it would be wrong, and correct any misconceptions on the spot.  Sometimes even the teachers have misconceptions. That’s a great thing about presentations is that there is space to really root out any misconceptions.

Story 2: a kid comes in and says “my teacher is in the hospital, so they sent me to you to approve my independent project.” Independent projects have become a thing of the past thanks to me and the rest of the team. We’ve asked that projects that to be presented to only come class projects to avoid getting things that aren’t on a high school level. However, someone gave him a green light but couldn’t finally approve the work that the student did, so I had to step in and help him finish. The paper was titled “Old Testatement.” I was worried.

His paper was actually super interesting! He asked two questions. Could Adam and Eve have populated the Earth in the 6000 years since being cast out of the garden of Eden, and could the the earth have been covered by flood of Noah’s ark (which we learned was originally told in the Epic of Gilgamesh) have actually covered the Earth? It was brilliant! He made an exponential model to describe the growth of human population from Adam and Eve’s 44 kids, and used the volume formula to find out that the earth would have required 3 times the amount currently in the oceans to be as high as it was described in the book.

The ingenuity and the curiosity on display wasn’t the best part. He actually became a different math learner during his presentation. He was vocal about how much he hated math class, and this disdain was what led his teacher to go along with this independent project idea.  He presented with three other kids, and offered to go first because  he felt his project was the “least worthy.” But when he finished the kids sitting next to him said he did such a good job that they didn’t know how to follow it. We also commented on how well he answered questions and explored his original problem. He left the room with his back straight and his head held high.

It was a great example of independent thinking and what is possible when kids are pursuing their own questions. Now the policy around independent projects seems like it should be reconsidered. Or, we should have more opportunities for kids to do modelling tasks where they pursue questions as opposed to doing it just because. Having a ‘mythbusters’ class where the kids try to model some historical story or other event could be really interesting. Kids could also try and compete with each other and come up with the best model possible.

Today was the first day I got to teach a class this year! I’ve been coming in to school daily since mid-August 15th, so there was quite a bit of anticipation for actual teaching. The class that I’m teaching is called Problem Solving. This class was largely developed out of the Crossing the River with Dogs book by another teacher but has been, and continues to be, heavily adapted. The first section that I plan to teach in this 8 week course is Draw a diagram. Specifically, the Farmer Ben problem. It’s where you have to count up the number of cows and ducks that Farmer Ben could have if he had 22 animals which have 56 pairs of legs.

Before we got into a problem, we started in a circle. My plan is to do a circle kind of sporadically through the class, in order to build community and support my school’s restorative justice initiative. Once we sat in the circle I asked kids to think of a problem they solved and then choose one of three questions out of a hat:

• What helped you understand the problem?
• What was the process you took to solve it?
• What were other ways it could have been solved?
• How did other people help you solve it?

In retrospect, I probably should have started with something fun like “what are you watching on Netflix.” Instead we heard everyone listing all of the problems in their life on the first day of class. A few people harped on their personal flaws, or biggest mistakes, or some other horrible things that happened to them, and how they worked their way out of it. It wasn’t a mood lifter, probably going to have to tweak that for next time.

Next we counted off into groups of 3 and started doing VNPS using the Farmer Ben Problem. I wanted kids to think and to be a little uncomfortable, and that definitely happened. There were a few things that left me wondering whether I was setting kids up for failure.

One of Peter Liljedahl’s shifts for creating a thinking classroom was about reading the problem out loud instead of putting it up in words. Hopefully it will underscore the importance of paying attention and listening. Immediately after I finished reading it people asked me to read it again. After reading it the second time one student asked me to read it again and he had a look on his face like I just asked him to walk across fire. “I read it once, that’s why you need to pay attention,” I said, ushering him towards his white board, “you have to ask your group mates.” A few minutes later it was clear that he was standing on the side of his group mates while the other two members of groups were barrelling towards a solution. I checked in with the group and those two students knew just what they were doing, but that first student was silent and making a face that said “I have no idea what’s going on.”

Meanwhile, another student was making a face that said “I suffer from anxiety. Working independently on math problems was my sanctuary. Now my heart can’t stop beating, and I just want to go do the problem on my own.” This left me a little stumped. The student and I spoke after class, but I struggled to help this student connect the group work we are doing, to any real world that she has imagined. If anyone has any ideas of how to tweak the VNPS for these two students, let me know in the comments.

My first ever implementation of VNPS went very well for the majority of my class. Kids were talking and thinking together with a familiarity and comfort usually reserved for weeks into the cycle.  Some groups didn’t want to stop working after the time ran out. It is definitely something I am going to have to keep doing and keep tweaking. Next time I do it, I might use a 3-act of some kind that could have us do Act 1 in the circle, and Act 2 on the whiteboards.