Recently I saw a link on Facebook to a YouTube video by Taylor Mali titled “What Teachers Make” (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5yg0u1MkDI). In this pointed video, Taylor makes us all proud of our contribution as teachers. In my early and challenging years as a new teacher many decades ago, it seemed that no matter how tough the school year had been, there was always one student who said something that made it all worthwhile.
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Mistletoe School, where I teach, is transitioning to a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) academy for the upcoming school year. In STEM curriculum these four domains are integrated during instruction. Language arts, history, and electives can also be interwoven if desired. Students work on project-based instruction that incorporates a loop of research, design, building, testing, evaluation, and improvement. Aside from the excitement our staff and students have in anticipation of this, here are our main reasons for making such a bold move. I’ve been teaching middle grades for over three decades, so you’d think this would be second nature to me. In some ways it is, but trying to understand adolescent behavior is like pushing spaghetti upstairs – assuming you’ve tried to do that. I always learn
A dozen years ago I had an eighth grader who didn’t know his multiplication facts. That’s not unusual. What was surprising is that he was my top math student. Four years later he received a six-figure scholarship to a major university where he
That biting joke begs an important question: how do you think career options will look for your current students when they leave high school? I just returned from the California League of Schools Technology Conference in Monterey and attended a session by John Merris-Coots ([email protected]) of the California Career Resources Network (CalCRN). Mr. Merris-Coots outlined the resources How would you respond if your administrator suggested that mathematics instruction be dropped from the curriculum in the elementary grades? How would the parents of your students respond? Recently I ran across an article in Psychology
A new member has been added to the Endangered Species list; it is the math teacher of yesterday. At a recent conference I asked the attendees to consider how their teaching would change if their students had an app on their smart phones that would solve a math problem and show the steps simply by taking a picture of it. How much of what we do would be suddenly obsolete?
For some reason, math teachers tend to hear, “When are we ever gonna use this?” more than teachers in other content areas. I have often thought about this fact and wondered about the reason for its prevalence in the math classroom. Is math truly something that we don’t use outside of the classroom walls? Is proficiency in math not necessary for success in college? Of course these are questions that we can answer with a resounding, “No.” I suspect that the answer runs deeper than that.
We have been exploring Michael Stallard’s “Six Needs to Thrive at Work” and analyzing how they relate to a student’s success in the classroom. So far we have studied the first four needs: respect, recognition, belonging, and autonomy. This month we will look at the fourth need: personal growth. It was the first week of school and I held up a chessboard in my honors class. “How many squares are on this board?” I asked. One student raised his hand and said there were 64. I asked him how he got the answer. “I multiplied eight times eight.” I asked him to stand up along one wall of the classroom and instructed anyone who agreed to stand with him. About ten students remained in their seats. I asked one of them what he thought. My eighth grade students expect that the first day of school will be spent learning all their new teacher’s rules, so they are surprised to hear me say that I don’t have any rules in my class. “You can do whatever you want, as long as you are willing to accept the consequences.” One time I began the year with that statement when one of my bolder students blurted, “So can I hit her?” |
AuthorBrad Fulton is an award winning teacher and nationally recognized provider of professional development with over three decades of experience in education. Categories
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