Math Archives - THOM GIBSON

03 Apr 2020

A Better Way To Teach Math

This episode was recorded and edited before the coronavirus & distance learning was front of mind for educators. Valuable takeaways though regardless if you're virtual or in person One of challenges of teaching math is being able to satisfying answer the question 'why'? Before we can even answer the question for students, we have to answer the question for ourselves. Why does the math work this way? It's much easier to teach a student how to do a problem. It's a bit harder to explain to them why it works the way it does. It's even more challenging to help…

27 Sep 2019

4 Things Every Math Teacher Should Stop Saying

In today's video, we look at 4 things that every math teacher should stop saying, as well as what to say instead. 1. Does anyone have any questions? Instead - "What questions do you have?" or "I want to hear 3 different questiosn about this topic before moving on." 2. What's the answer to this problem? Instead - "How did you approach this problem?" or "What's something you tried on this problem?" 3. That's correct. ** Instead - "Tell me what you did here and why." or "Convince me that this is the correct answer." 4. That's wrong. ** Instead…

31 Oct 2016

Entry 11 – My Most Unique Lessons

The week's reflection is a few days late but better to reflect later than not at all :) Our prompt was the following: What do you do as a teacher that feels unique to you and your class? Share one of your unique lesson plans or activities. Share one of your unique forms of assessment. I think the most unique thing to my class is the classroom economy. I've spoken about at it length in my blog but what I'm most excited about is that this year, not only am I introducing budgeting and giving to charity, I'm also documenting…

25 Sep 2016

Entry 06 – Projects In Class

We have wrapped up week 6 of school. Here is the prompt that several teachers and I reflected on this week: How do you incorporate project-based learning into your class? This depends on which class I'm teaching. Robotics is basically all project-based while in math I've really only done one or two projects in the last couple of years. ROBOTICS PROJECTS I don't really know how robotics can be anything but a project-based class...unless we just took a bunch of notes on how the robot works without actually building the robots. I'm in my fourth semester of teaching robotics (it's…

07 Aug 2015

A Review of the NCTM’s ‘Principles to Actions’

Currently making my way through the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) publication Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success For All. It's pretty much a how-to for teaching math. They discuss eight aspect of effective teaching and learning. For each, I’ll share thoughts, questions, and aha moments. Establish math goals to focus learning Implement tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving Use and connect mathematical representations Facilitate meaningful mathematical discourse Pose purposeful questions Build procedural fluency from conceptual understanding Support productive struggling in learning mathematics Elicit and use evidence of student thinking. 1. Establish math goals to focus learning…

19 Jul 2015

A Belated End-of-Year Reflection : Lowlights

This is part 3 of my 2015 school year reflections. If you'd like, check out my previous entries: A Belated End-of-Year Reflection: Changes A Belated End-of-Year Reflection: Highlights In today's episode: LOWLIGHTS Lack of clarity in what to teach Coming from public school, you don’t really have to figure out what you have to teach. You’re given a scope and sequence; you know what units are to be taught and in what order. Sometimes a bit stifling and rushed, but you know what’s expected of you. I came in with a little bit more autonomy than I expected. The math…

23 May 2015

Using Evernote To Help Students Study For Final Exams

To help my students review for their final exam, I gave them a copy of the mid-term that covered our first semester's concepts, as well as a review packet for concepts we discussed 2nd semester. Originally I was going to have the answer key in class available to any students who wanted to check their work. The packets weren't for a grade, just a resource for them. A couple students suggested I put the answer key online, which is something I've done in the past. I pulled up Evernote and I'd used the document camera before, but I'd usually have…

07 May 2015

“The Best Discussion I’ve Ever Had”

I just got out of my 6th grade Math Skills class. We finished up the Proportions project (something akin to THIS) and spent half the class getting their final papers printed and putting the project papers up in the hall. I thought it would be hard to really have an engaging lesson afterwards as they were a bit hyped up but we refocused and got started on our lesson on converting percents. Being that it was our first lesson on percents, I had a few opening questions just to get their minds geared into thinking about what percents actually were:…

02 May 2015

So Failing Exams Can Be A Good Thing?

I recently read the New York Times article 'Why Flunking Exams Is Actually A Good Thing' by Benedict Carey. A pretty insightful read. Found things I was doing, things I had done, and things I plan to do. Carey proposed having a pre-course exam could be helpful. He stated: A test can be an intro to what students should learn instead of a final judgement on what they did not. I thought maybe a pre-course exam for my math classes but definitely multiple choice (probably use a Google Form). If not for the whole course, at least for each unit.…

29 Apr 2015

5 Ways To See If Your Students Are Learning

I recently wrote a reflection on a prompt given by our middle school director on how I know students are learning. He's followed up and given us a couple articles to read. I reflected on what I felt I was already doing, what I've done before but stopped, and what I should start doing. The first article was an excerpt from Checking For Understanding by Fisher & Frey. The second article was the New York Times article Why Flunking Exams Is Actually A Good Thing by Benedict Carey. This entry is on the first article. Checking For Understanding by Fisher…