Baiting the Hook

This post has been sitting in my draft folder for over a month.  I originally stalled in finishing it because I wasn’t happy with my writing.  I’m working to stop letting “perfect get in the way of good,” and so I’m posting this to get back into blogging. -Kate

One of the reasons I asked to teach a class this year (in addition to my duties at the district office) was to be able to try out a bunch of different strategies with students.  I don’t want to be the leader that tells teachers they need to be using a strategy that I’ve only read about.  Today I took a cue from Dave Burgess, the author of Teach Like a Pirate, by using what Dave refers to as a Taboo Hook.  Dave writes that he has found making content seem taboo, secret, or otherwise off-limits makes students eager to hear it.  I adapted this for my class to be the Too Advanced For You Hook.

Today (9/4) was our first day of textbook-based lessons.  They’re not my favorites, but for some topics they’re efficient.  We covered powers and exponents, squares, and order of operations today.  (100-minute periods….tons of time for that much review content.)  Generally, my students don’t need review lessons.  But they do need a chance to develop note-taking skills with less demanding content.  To keep them engaged and challenged, I like to extend lessons to more advanced content, especially when a true conceptual understanding of the 6th grade content naturally leads to understanding of higher level concepts.  Enter exponents and the Too Advanced For You Hook.

After quickly covering the vocabulary and meaning of exponents, then working through a few exercises with students, I paused for a few seconds and looked at the clock.  I looked back and forth across the classroom and then said, “I don’t know.  I don’t want to overwhelm you guys.”  And that’s all it took.  I had 10 kids instantly insist that I couldn’t overwhelm them.  They didn’t know what I was going to give them, but they were already convinced that they wanted to get it.  So, with just a little bit of planning and some good theatrical timing, I had 33 students practically begging to be taught about negative integers.  During the last 20 minutes of the last period of the day.  And they loved it.

 

Day Two

We have a lot of work to do in my class this year.  After Wednesday’s reasonably successful problem-solving activity, I thought I’d give the students a few problems to solve from the Marcy Mathworks PUNCHLINE series while I dealt with first week paperwork.  I intentionally chose a set of problems from the set that calls for students to “Draw a Picture” as a solution strategy.  My goal was to reinforce the idea that even as they enter middle school, drawing a picture can be a great method of making sense of a problem.

After watching the groups attack the medicine problem on Wednesday, I thought for sure that this would be a simple exercise…a warm-up…but I was dead wrong.  Although several students jumped right in and worked efficiently to solve the problems, the rest had that dear-in-the-headlights look.  I reminded them to skip any problems they were stuck on and come back to them later, and I think there were a few that just kept skipping problems in a big loop.  Sensing that, I asked students with good drawings to put them on the board for others who might not know how to draw a situation.  That seemed to get the others moving, but some were still lost.

Some sample problems:

So, knowing now that this group will struggle with interpreting “story” problems, I think we’ll be doing a lot like this.  Probably not 7 at a time like today; the students don’t have the endurance yet.  Maybe just 1 or 2 for bell work, but then followed up with justification and critique.  One thing is clear, these students don’t seem to have had much practice making sense of problems and so that is where we’ll start.

Day One

Wednesday marked my first day back in the classroom since June 2012.  I was nervous.  Did I still know how to do this?  Well, I might…but I couldn’t stand the thought of just doing what I had always done.  Not so long ago, the topic of discussion for Global Math Department was the First Day of School.  Reading about all the different ideas, I resolved not to spend my first 100-minute class period just going over rules and dress code.  So after some reading about whiteboarding in class and researching some different problems, I chose the “When Should She Take Her Medicine?” problem from Robert Kaplinksy.

Over 10+ years of working with gifted and high-achieving 6th graders, I’ve noticed that they really struggle with patience when they get to me.  They can’t wait to have the right answer…and they’re used to getting that answer FAST because they’ve almost never been asked to look past the immediate and obvious computation-based “problem.”  That’s why the medicine problem seemed perfect for the first day.

To introduce this activity, I created a slide to display the problem.  When I displayed the “situation,” their hands shot up immediately because they were sure the answer was 35.  I apologized for misleading them to think that I’d be asking them to give answers to any obvious questions this year.  Then I showed the “problem.”  Of course, they thought they had an immediate answer for that, too.  Then I walked them through the estimation process (high, low, best) and asked about assumptions being made (I had to define that term since they kept trying to tell me that they were assuming the answer was 4.5 hours).  As soon as we covered the waking and sleeping times, the hands shot up again and giant 3s were being written on the boards.  I asked them to convince me that their answer worked…show me with a timeline, schedule, list, something to prove they had a good answer.  That’s when they started to unravel.  They tried to show me that doses at 7a, 10a, 1p, 4p, and 7p worked, but then I’d ask them about the assumptions we made about the dose schedule.  I asked if everyone in the group was 100% behind their answer and every time there was the one kid that said they weren’t sure it was a good solution for the person to be awake for 3 hours without getting any medicine.  Then I encouraged the group to come up with a better solution that would address their teammate’s concern.  (My favorite student work-around for this was shifting the doses up 1.5 hours to break up the three hour gap.)

Here are some photos from the group that fascinated me.

1) This was the group that was the first to arrive at the answer of 3 hours (and most insistent their answer was correct.)  I told them I wasn’t convinced and suggested that they find a way to convince me.

  2)  This is when I asked them to explain their dose schedule and how they arrived at this solution (every 3 hours).  It didn’t take them too long to figure out that they actually had 6 doses, not 5.  (If they had only seen that they had 5 intervals!)

3) Making progress.  Notice the repeated addition…they knew they needed to extend the interval, but unfortunately they were trying to add 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, etc.  I found it interesting that no group tried converting the times to minutes to use a division algorithm.

The hardest part of the day was not helping too much.  These kids worked on this problem in earnest for almost an hour and still didn’t get to a “best” answer.  At times I felt like a member of the “Who’s Line is it Anyways” cast playing the questions game; the students asked questions and instead of giving them answers I just asked more questions.  There were some huffs and sighs, some frustrated grunts, but they kept working.  They kept going back to the problem.  The different solution strategies were encouraging.  It was good to see that they had some solid understanding of how to approach the problem, at least once they resigned themselves to the idea of not having an instantaneous answer.

One thing is certain; this problem threw these kids for a loop.  I don’t think they knew whether to love it or hate it.  I heard from one parent who works at the school that her daughter was talking about the problem all afternoon, telling them all about the problem, how I presented it, and how her group tried to solve it.  I think I’m going to like this class.  And it’s good to be back.