At the third grade level, it’s different, because kids are at such a different maturity level. There’s a fair amount of handholding necessary for some of the kids who haven’t quite made the leap to independent work. In my math class, I’d say I’ve got two kids who need nearly constant attention from me to be kept on-track, two or three more who will quietly rely on their partner to do the lion’s share of the work unless I come by and remind them and their partner how to do partner work, and another two who are really good at math but are equally likely to go off into loud conversations about Fortnite. Everyone else is pretty great at working with their partners, but they still have misconceptions, and the best way for me to address those is in the moment–to interrogate the way they partitioned the whole into fractions, and what the numerator means, and when they realize their work is wrong to teach them to ask them the questions they need to learn to ask themselves in order to fix it. And this is one of the most on-task classes I’ve ever had.
I stay busy :).
With thirty kids, it’d be really, really hard for me to meet the needs of these nine-year-olds.
Heh–interesting. Not counting after-school time, I’ve only got 45 minutes a day of planning. I could definitely use more, but am not sure I need 90 minutes. This may be another difference between working with a small group of younguns and many dozens of teenagers.
Too much of the observational cycle in our district comprises central office creating a “Fidelity Checklist,” which administrators are supposed to bring around and “grade” teachers on. Those–how do I say this politely?–are not always the best way to improve either teacher competence or teacher morale.
I can totally see that. For you, there isn’t a difference between class size and student load, but it’s all the difference in the world for me.
I think in an ideal world, what you would be doing is working with other teachers! We used to have 45, and it was awful. My before and after school are always packed with students–there’s just no way around individual conferences, plus tutoring time, plus clubs and teams.
This sounds terrible, but it’s true: my Best Administrator ever often had no time to observe me, so after-after school (after school–kid time. After-after school–teacher time!) I’d go in and narrate what I had done that day as she filled out her form. I shit you not, those were by far the most useful and reflective “observations” I ever had. We had really wonderful conversations about my strengths and weaknesses, about the WHY of what I did and when it did and didn’t work. It helped that she’d seen me teach many times and we’d had a lot of conversations about pedagogy. But it’s still funny to me that the best observations were when there was no observation. It’s so easy to get defensive when someone watched you do the thing you love–but so productive to debrief with someone you trust.
If an elementary teacher really hates, fears, or doesn’t understand math, maybe they could do what a couple of my teachers did and trade off: Mrs. J’s kids go to Mr. G for math while Mr. G’s students go to Mrs. J’s for social studies, for example.
(Of course that doesn’t work if you have too many anti-math teachers.)
I just saw this thread for the first time. I don’t have time to go through it in detail yet, but as a Certified Doper, I wanted to provide some opinion without reading it, of course.
Like some of the other parents in this thread, I’ve got an engineering degree: electrical engineering, with a math minor.
I’m an older father so I went to elementary school back in the 60s and early 70s. Learned math by rote memorization, the good o’ fashioned way.
My daughter is in fourth grade in a Waldorf school (an alternative education), which teaches math starting later than in typical Taiwanese school.
When she started coming home with math homework, she had all of these boxes and dots and they used methods which I never learned. It was different. The funny thing is that after a while, they were through using boxes and dots and were doing it not much differently after all. It seems me that they were trying to build a foundation for understanding math.
There were times when I know a much easier way (for me) to solve problems. No doubt. I was an engineer. However, I don’t know if my method would be confusing to someone else, or would really help my daughter gain a better understanding of mathematics.
As a teacher now (English as a foreign language) to students, including those who are the same age as my daughter, I’m more aware of the teaching process. Some of the methods which will help her solve problems can be taught later, as to not overwhelm her.
It’s easy to lose focus of the goals which are not limited to finding the right answer, but also learning processes which will help the student learn in the future when Engineering Dad isn’t looking over her shoulder.
I think a great deal of the problem is the way we’ve set grades up as statements on a person’s character and worth. Even–maybe especially–in younger grades, there is this attitude that every grade matters, that the score you get on a homework assignment or a daily quiz is an evaluation of who you are. When you approach it this way–and parents reinforce it–it becomes a matter of life or death whether or not you “deserved credit” for an answer. Heck, I’m still salty about individual questions from elementary school. I feel like I was Done Wrong–and when I took my papers home to my parents, that was the way they analyzed them to: should I have “gotten the point”. Everything about that seems horrible to me. With my own students and now with my own son, I just refuse to have those conversations: let’s talk about what you learned, what I was concerned you didn’t understand, and if you did understand it, why it wasn’t being conveyed.
Hah! I actually remember a kindergarten exercise (this would in the 1960s because I’m old) - we were supposed to circle/color the object that was or wasn’t a toy (details are fading . . .). There was a pistol and a balloon. I identified the balloon as the ‘not toy’, because the pistol was obviously a cap gun like I had at home, and I must have seen a story about hot air balloons because I was arguing that they weren’t toys (it was a picture of a standard toy balloon with a string on it). Mrs. Weeks was having none of it, however. Who knows how far I might have gone if my 4.0 hadn’t been blown in my very first year of schooling?