A SnapShot per Day in my classroom
Engineering Physics – A few groups had their cart launchers in class today, tweaking them and testing their ability to move from gravitational potential energy. The difficult part will be timing the launch of a projectile while the cart rolls.
Math 8 – The above picture shows the 2nd vote (peer instruction). On the first vote the choices were evenly split between A, B, and C. Obviously we spent more time on this question. Pretty good evidence that this topic needs to be explicitly dealt with, we shouldn’t assume that kids know what the equals sign means. This vote was after I asked the class to consider the difference between 4×8 (an expression) and 4×8=32 (an equation).
Above shows the class collaborating and discussing a voting question.
In general, we had good Flow today…
Physics 11 – Today was the physics’ students first shot at the mistake game. The above picture shows a group’s work on a ranking question.
As well, I handed back last day’s quiz on graphing, best fit lines, slopes and models. I asked students to look at three other quizzes to compare mistakes. They then had to write down the three most common mistakes and hand this sheet in to me. This is my attempt to stop them from repeating the same old mistakes time and time again…
Math 8 – This is the third time we’ve used patterns and tables to explain or reason around a rule that we use with integer arithmetic. Today’s class the students did most of the work though (gradual release of responsibility). They were given the following prompt, “In groups, come up with a table that you could use to convince someone how to multiply a negative number by a negative number.” Most groups managed to succeed. The most common problem was when the group started by using the rule that we’re supposed to find. In other words, the “correct” table would start with a positive x negative because we had previously determined that this resulted in a negative number. However, some students started with a negative x negative, saying that the product is positive. This only works if you already know the rule.
The day also included a few more practice questions on adding integers, and their first practice with multiplying integers. I’m trying hard to utilize spaced practice.
Finally, the students signed up for Moodle and enrolled in my Math 8 course. The Moodle course will hold mini-lessons/notes on the topics along with auto graded quizzes for practice.
Math 8 – Students had their first short quiz today and I introduced them to SBG. Some kids got what I was putting down but I think many are still unsure of what I’m talking about. However, this will sort it out over the coming weeks as we do more assessments.
For a breakdown of my grading scheme, take a look at my physicsoflearning blog post on it.
Physics 11 – It was a short day, so today the class worked on some practice and we did our first peer instruction. The first vote had about a 18/5 split, and the second vote went 23/0. Success!
Math 8 – Today the kids practiced adding and subtracting integers by working on suduko type puzzles together. Next we took at look at multiplying integers. We reasoned that a negative multiplied by a positive must be a negative, by modeling expressions like 4 x (-2), which corresponds to 4 groups of negative two. Things get tricky when you consider (-3) x 4, because exactly what does it mean to have negative three groups?
There are ways to model negative groups but I find them completely unsatisfactory. I believe that models in science and math are meant to represent a feature of the world such that it is easier to understand. Some of the modeling in mathematics clearly does not do this. Adding a bunch of matched pairs of positive and negatives such that we can subtract a negative where one didn’t used to exist is the opposite of easy. And certainly very few people would come up with this model or use.
Instead we used the communitive property of multiplication to show that (-3) x 4 = 4 x (-3) and then easily modeled the latter. At this point I asked the classes to come up with a rule for when a negative is multiplied by a positive. With examples on the boards and having discussed it for a bit, I was surprised that many kids couldn’t pick up the pattern – that the product is always negative. I think we were dealing with mental fatigue at this point.
We also took at the pattern generated from a table:
