Musings from Mrs. Galvan

After 8 years teaching Geometry from this textbook , I finally made the lesson on Space Diagonals more interesting than saying: Do Pythag twice. Sure  I always do the Space Diagonal Dance, to much laughter, but the PrBL model wins. No, I don't have a video of the dance (that I know of). I happened to have brought donuts for a meeting so I had this box. I made up a story told them the legend of the Prince who made his butler leave the castle on a quest to find a delicious bread stick, the crunchy kind. The Prince told his butler that he was not to return until he found the longest bread stick that would fit in the box. I gave them the box dimensions, put them into groups and handed out the white boards. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. They discussed and argued for about 7 minutes before coming up with the solution. I walked around and monitored, giving feedback and hints. A group presented their approach before starting independent practice, er a worksheet, ...

Since I started looking beyond the textbook for problem solving opportunities for my students, I am continually reminded how much I used to over teach and over model. My traditional daily class plan had been: Review homework, new lesson, guided practice, homework. Repeat. Quiz. I know that I had been leading them too much because now that I am giving them richer tasks, I am surprised by how difficult they find some of them. Fourteen years in the classroom and my judgement of the degree of challenge in a problem still needs calibrating. For example, recently we did the task Viewmongus from Mathalicious to explore applications of Pythagorean theorem in Geometry. Given the diagonal length and the aspect ratio, calculate the dimensions of the TV. I looked at the materials before class and judged it a 10 minute problem. I budgeted 15 and reasoned that they could blog it for homework. I was surprised (and happy) to see my students struggling to use the 16:9 ratio to find the dimensions ...

I really like this task . I like spending the class period working on a worthy, layered task together. My students, however, were not impressed: "Why would I do this to when I'm on the beach?" "I'd just find some place else to eat." "You seriously want me to square that?!" The issue is NOT with the task. The issue is that I am new to this way of teaching and despite my mantras on growth mindset and posters on grit, I am still having trouble getting them to work through failure. In every class I have a handful of fixed mindset, afraid to fail kids whose first response is that the task is too hard. I might be seeing the cup only as half empty. There were lots of students who dug in, overcame obstacles, collaborated with classmates and got the answer in triumph. Is there a magic spell I can say to increase grit? I love this blog post on grit and this video on grit, BTW.