West Cocoa Chat

There are times as a teacher when I am on my game. You mean being able to convey the wonderful world of Algebra in an engaging and relevant manner so as to improve (how’s that for educational jargon) student performance? No!

I’m talking about keeping the middle school kids off balance when given the opportunity as we say in the South, “To mess with them.” As always, the names have been changed to protect the ignorant, I mean innocent.

John is one of my better students and he actually gets my humor, most of the time. John was paying attention during an inspiring lesson on “Slope Intercept Form of an Equation.” When it came time to post the assignment on my screen John’s attention began to wavier. After a few minutes he “came back to us” and he began to copy the assignment down and start it.

I was inputting some grades into my computer when John came up to my desk, book and paper in hand, and a puzzled look. He said, “Mr. Walker, I don’t get number one?” My standard answer is usually like Steve’s (http://intentionalwalk.blogspot.com/) in that I tell students to take the first 10 minutes on their own, struggle, and use the notes we just took in class, etc, etc.

That started to come out of my mouth when I noticed his problem. The assignment was on page 289 but John had written down “page 389!” Yes, he was a full “century” ahead of us and he had no clue and better yet, he was worried. To make it better, I had him!

Looking at John with one of those “disgusted teacher looks” I said, “John, give me a break. Number one is easy. Just look at your notes.” Then I asked the class who didn’t realize the 100 page problem, “Is number one hard?” Of course to John’s distress they gave a collective “its so easy a caveman could do it” response.

You could see John’s brain processing the situation with thoughts such as, “I don’t have a clue how to start number one and so-and-so is already on number 10! What is going on?” So John turned around and started heading back to his desk. I stopped him after a few feet and said, “John, look at the screen and then look at your paper. Do you see anything different?”

It only took a few seconds for John to realize he had been had to which he said, “Mr. Walker, you’re good!” Thus I fulfilled one of my philosophies of teaching that has gotten me through 28 years of teaching Middle School which is, “Get them before they get you.”

Trust me, as I get older this mantra gets harder to live out. Feel free to try this at work or home.

// posted by cwinwc @ 5:52 PM