StoryCorps houses audio interviews on various themes (Family, Identity, Friendship, September 11, and Work, among others) that are terrific for listening practice and theme-based content. The interviews are rich for the content that they provide on topics, and they provide a wonderful opportunity for listening to two people speaking openly in a natural setting (real-life listening). Continue reading Listening is an Act of Love
Which One Doesn’t Belong? (WODB) is a website with a very simple concept. It is “dedicated to providing thought-provoking puzzles for math teachers and students alike”. Basically, it presents four of something and you have to come up with a reason why each one of the four things doesn’t belong. But it is far more than a collection of brain teasers.
One way we can help students develop different ways of thinking in math is to have them work on activities where they have to classify mathematical objects. Continue reading Learning through classification: What makes this number (or shape or graph) different from the others?
At this point most of our students have access to some sort of mobile phone. Are you using these in your instruction? I have met teachers who send text messages to their students and have found tools that allow teachers to contact many students at once, but the idea of individualized instruction via cell phone has always seemed like it could be very time consuming. And that’s where Cell-Ed comes in. Continue reading Hold the Phone! ESOL Instruction via Mobile Phone
When I was a student, in every mathematics class I had, the teacher presented problems and explained how to solve them. The teacher would do a sample problem with us, then give us a worksheet full of similar problems to try on our own. Our success depended on how well we remembered the procedure we had been shown. It never occurred to me that there was any other way to learn math. Continue reading A Window into International Education
Years ago, when beginning some work on percentage with some HSE students (they were called GED students at the time), I posed the following problem:
Veronica’s math class has 25 students. If 7 of them identify as men, what percent of the class does not identify as men?
I used it as a quick assessment to see what kind of understanding I could build off and what kind of misconceptions I could draw out. Continue reading Mistakes in Math: Expected, Respected and Inspected