PEMDAS

I was asked to teach a lesson in a 4th grade class at the last minute.  I had my Ipad in hand and thought what if the students made a song about the order of operations.  I downloaded two songs to use as examples and then gave them 20 minutes to create a song. Here is one of the ideas I recorded.

I am finding some great things about the world of math.  I am learning that we need to spend more time dedicated to helping the students understand what they are trying to find and how to share the answer.  Many students just want to get a number answer from the problem, I think this is because they are hardly given real problems they are only given problems with numbers.  When was the last time I had to solve a problem in my life where it was just numbers and then what did I do with this answer.  Should I have math teachers create one or more real problems per concept or is just understanding how to solve the problem good enough?

Great things

I have posted 4 times and all of them are complaints so I decided to post the good things I see.  I was in a teachers classroom the other day and saw the teacher working in centers and working with small groups.  This is the best way for some students to learn.  The teacher had grouped according to needs of the students and as he instructed tailored each lesson to the needs of the small group.  What a great example of how to use your time for the best needs of the students.

Classroom extentions

I went out to the Resource Room the other day to see what type of math was being taught there.  I was shocked by a few things.  First, I always thought that resource was used as an extension of the classroom with more tailored instruction to fit the needs of the students.  Then I thought resource teachers and aides would have an understanding of how to teach.  I know that there are some great ones out there and there are some that just need a direction and I think we have the aides that just need direction.  I was shocked that the 5th grade students were being taught how to multiply 1's and 0's when they were way above that.  i stepped in to see what they could do and found that they knew most of the multiplication facts.  There were being thought this because that is what the 4th grade book told them to do. 
I want the Special Education students to get the help they need but not be slowly walking along.  I think the thing that shocked me the most was the lack of supervision out there.  The Literacy coach had never been out there and I don't know if the new principle had been out there.  I just worry that there are other resource classrooms out there that have no direction or supervision to ensure the students are receiving the instruction they need.

Forcing Math not teaching it.

Teaches have such busy lives outside of the classroom how are they suppose to spent time implementing new things into their classroom.
Over the past several years the big push in my district has been to improve literacy.  New literacy aides were hired and also a literacy coach to help improve reading scores.  The push included 180 minutes of language instruction to insure students were getting taught language skills.  With 6 hours of school you now have 3 hours to fit in History, Science, Arts, PE, Computers, and maybe even Math.  When a student looks at the schedule and sees less time dedicated to math than Language they think math is less important.
Also with Language there are so many ways to teach it; reading from a book, in small groups, sitting around the room on soft pillows reading, with the cool teacher who dressed up like a character from the book.  With math the only way to teach it seems to be with a teacher in front of the class talking then do an assignment out of the book and you have to write down all the problems and you have to show all your work an all 50 problems that are exactly the same.  There needs to be a better way. 
Please please please if anyone reads this blog tell me better ways to teach math so I can tell my other teachers.

Timing of Math

For the last few years teachers have been told to increase literacy scores.  In doing so the majority of the class time as been dedicated to reading and writing.  Today I was in a classroom and in the 6 hour day 35 minutes were used on Math.  I understand that Math may need less time than reading but not just a half hour.  If we want our students to understand the importance of math maybe we would show them by spending time on it.

First Week

I started observing teachers teaching math and found a few interesting things. The first thing I found was that there are teacher trying to teach math who have no idea where the students are heading with math. I always taught math knowing where the student we going and tried to apply what i taught to what they were going to learn. Some teachers have little understanding about math so they can't help them understand what they will need to know they only teacher them what they have to know now. I know this doesn't make sense so let me explain. Let's say i was a beef farmer. When a calf was born on my farm and I don't understand what that calf will be doing I might just let it run wild building up it's muscles and getting really strong because I don't want a fat bull. Really I should be looking to the future of my investment and not let the bull, soon to be steer, get too tough. A bull with all it's parts and active turns into bad meat. I need to know that the future of my investment holds to get the most out of it. Many teachers do a great job of teaching out of a book but books don't do a great job of teaching for the future. What we need more of is teachers that understand math teaching math. I hate when teachers say "but our math book is no good" If you really understand your content you have a world wide web you can pull resources from.