For years I would always give my students an end of course survey and ask them to strongly agree – agree – no opinion – disagree – or strongly disagree on a various list of questions about the class. Sample items were:
- Mrs. Strole did a good job of making me feel comfortable with asking for help.
- The notes in this class were useful.
- The activities in this class helped me to better understand the material.
- The review sessions before tests and quizzes were helpful.
- If I am absent it was easy to find missing assignments.
- After taking this class, Mrs. Strole has helped me to see the relevance of math in my own life.
I would always get agree or strongly agree for every question except for one. The students were not seeing the relevance of math in their own life. I was so disappointed because algebra and algebraic thinking are hidden all around. I had thought that I was doing a good job of highlighting that. So a couple of years ago I made it my mission to help my students to see math. I made a conscious effort to pick activities that matched up with their interests as well as had algebraic concepts that we were studying hidden in them. I always end up with lots of basketball players in my classes so I started our march madness bracket challenge and found a desmos activity that correlated a basketball shot to a quadratic function. During all of this I read Instant Relevance by Denis Sheeran and I was even more determined to make this happen. My results got a little better, but I was still under 50% of students who saw the relevance of math in their own life. Now if you know me I’m a very competitive person so this was not acceptable. I was just going to have to be more determined.
#seeingmath is born
Last year, I started the #seeingmath hastag and tried to tweet out weekly activities that we were doing. The students started following. They would comment if I didn’t post any pics with them in it for a couple of weeks in a row. Students would say, “hey Mrs. Strole you should tweet this. This shows that exponential functions and tennis ball bounces relate.” Somehow, I had found a gold mind. I was running with it. Before Spring Break I challenged students to take selfies with any type of function that we had studied, when they saw it out in “real life.” I told them that we would highlight the quadratic functions that they found after break, since that was the unit that we were in. Over spring break, I tweeted every time we saw quadratics on our drive down to Florida. For their Seeing Algebra Showcase last year I opened up what the students could do for their showcase. I also explained that this year elementary students would be coming over to see what we were doing. A group of students said that they wanted to write children’s books using their selfie’s from spring break and then add to it. They said that way the elementary students would start to see that math is all over the place. My teacher heart exploded!!!!! The students did just that, they shared their books with the first, second, and fourth graders. One little first grader said during the Q&A with my student after they heard the book, “I’m never going to look at the McDonald’s sign the same. Now I know those are parabolas!” Their teacher emailed me later that day, to let me know that one of the boys in her first grade class said that if he had “infinite thumbs that’s how many he would use for today.”
So at the end of the year, I gave the kids that same survey. I crossed my fingers that they had started to see the relevance of the math in their own lives. I waited for all the survey monkey results to come in and then I did a happy dance. 85% of the students said they agreed or strongly agreed.
Now I’m determined to get 100% but I was ex tactic with those results. However, if you know me you know my competitive juices kicked back in and wanted to figure out how I could get to 100%. So over the summer I made it my mission to read and read and read and read. One of the books that had to be on that list was Denis Sheeran’s new release Hacking Mathematics. The first chapter had me hooked.
I also knew how much the #seeingmath tweets got the kids invested. Then I reflected on that fact that if the students hadn’t done the selfie challenge over spring break then that group would not have wanted to write the children’s books. So I came up with my take on Chapter One. I am going to do Monday Mathpic Moment. This week I am posting a graphic that was posted in a window. We are going to look and see what we notice and why we think it happened? Then I plan to collect data from all of my classes to see if our class data supports the graphic. Little do they know that on Wednesday we are going to look at the history timeline of technological innovations throughout history in communication with the telephone making many appearances as we review integer operations. My challenge will then be for the students to start taking a pic anytime they see something “mathematically interesting” out and about in their lives, email it to me, and hopefully it won’t just be me contributing to the Monday Mathpic Moment. I will update you later in the year to let you know if this was a two thumbs up or two thumbs down idea. I am hopeful it with be an “infinite” thumbs up idea and get the kids #seeingmath everywhere!
#seeingmath with Mrs Strole 