Blog 2

I just got back from an all-day field trip with my students. Unfortunately, after a snow-day and then a full day of romping in the woods, there is little to report mathematically. Fortunately, I did have a conversation with one student last week that I will reflect on. I will make an effort to snap two photos for next week's blog!

One student is a fifth grader who hangs out with sixth graders. These three girls are all very motivated and excel at their school work. This fifth grader, whom I will call Darcy, is very timid and often follows the other girls example. When these girls get done with all their work, which always happens days before its due, they are encouraged to go online and seek out a new learning experience of their choosing. They usually choose art or language related subjects. So you can imagine my surprise when Darcy brought me a worksheet of algebra problems and asked me "to explain it real quick."

I did not know her background with algebra, but the problems were of the 2x-4=10  variety. When we began to go over it, I realized that she did not know a lot, but was very intrinsically motivated to begin. I wound up drafting problems that first dealt with subtracting from the right and left, and then made the reverse side a "challenge" side with problems that division and multiplication was necessary. Making up a worksheet gave me a lot of insight into how careful you have to be when sequencing math problems. After I showed her how to do some, I left her with it for the night. The next day, she came back with the entire sheet completed and begged for more. We did this for a few days, and I did not realize why she was so anxious until I saw her teaching her two friends how to do algebra!

She was incredibly proud of her newfound skill, and her intense dedication to learning how to do things  made me remember how proud I used to get when I knew things before my peers. It filled me with a sense of intelligence, capability, and leadership because I knew I could help my classmates. When students are able to learn things so well that they can turn around and teach others, it can result in a powerful ownership and pride of knowledge as well as an awesome network of highly specialized students.

This Montessori model of rewarding kids doing their work with freedom to choose more work seems like it would not be much of a motivation to learn, but many children have found interests and niches that they had never had before.