Teaching Is Making Connections

Teaching is Making Connections

Teaching is making connections with students, whether it be inside the classroom, around campus, at school events or on the soccer field.  I try to make these connections both academically and personally with every student I come into contact with around campus. Students, at the middle school level, are going through so many changes in their lives that they must believe their teacher sees them as more than just a student, but also as an individual who has feelings with a life outside of school.  On the personal level, I treat each of my students with respect daily to create a safe environment in my classroom where students feel they can be themselves. This respect is given unconditionally to students, but it takes time during the school year for students to trust that there are no strings attached to this respect. From this point, I can challenge each student to believe that they can do more than they ever thought possible.  While many students find math difficult, I am proud that students do not give up when our class becomes challenging. Making a personal connection with students allows me to challenge them to do even better without them giving up.

In addition to making a personal connection, it is important that students make a connection with the curriculum and the world around them.  To that end, every unit of study is embedded in a project with a challenging problem for the students to answer. The purpose of the project is twofold - one, the project’s challenging problem gives a focus for the students throughout the entire unit of study.  Two, the project provides real world context in ways math can be used in the world. The reward I have had in implementing this in my classroom is for students to realize that there are uses for what we are learning. Last week and this week by 8th grade students worked on a statistics

project - "Barbie Bungee" - where students collected data, created a scatter plot, made a line of best fit and then made a prediction of how many rubber bands it would take for Barbie to jump off a basketball hoop safely while touching only her hair to the ground. Below are clips from students gathering data in class last week and a clip from today's Barbie Bungee Jump on the basketball courts.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1c5LWiiGrDaZ-Nca5PBy_5zjODamBXIam

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bCUOTvNaJINMiFLhG-a82NAdrjlTXruv

(Thanks to my 8th grade student Manuel for taking the video for me.)

 

My teaching style allows for students to question, research, make mistakes, reflect, and revise while learning the necessary mathematics.  I challenge students with a problem to solve that requires them to struggle with, collaborate with peers, and communicate their solution.  I do not want my students to wait for me to give them the answer, but instead, I want to teach my students to persevere in finding a solution and communicate how the solution was arrived at. Getting my students to see connections within the real world, combined with persevering, I believe gives them the best opportunity to be successful in life - middle school and beyond.

Still teaching  and loving it,

Kevin Stott