I haven’t been one for writing about small things that happen in my class, but I want a reminder for myself of a nice moment that I observed today.
My class is heavily group-oriented this year (a big part of our new CPM curriculum). I have a student, D, who seems the type so far who wants to either get my goat or play helpless.
Her hand goes up. Me: What do you need? D: I don’t get it. Me: Which part? D: All of it. (I’m sure you know the type.)
Well, today my teams were exploring hinged mirrors at the edge of colored paper, seeing what kind of polygons they could make appear and trying to find numerical patterns relating the figures to the mirror angles that made them. (If you can’t picture this, I apologize. I don’t have those materials with me here at home as I write.)
Long story medium, D was more engaged with her team than usual, and at one point a pattern really clicked for them and she exclaimed, “Dude, we’re awesome at this!” I think that moment is my biggest success of the school year so far. I would enjoy “this is so awesome” quite a bit, but for D to feel like the awesomeness is in her and her teammates is, well…awesome.
Erratum: I had originally recalled the quote as “we are so awesome”, but changed it in the story after checking my class notes. I think it works nicely as the post title, so I kept that.
It's all math. 
I love those days!!!
May you have one soon. Thanks for stopping by!
I love this post – gives me hope!
Also found your foldable useful, thanks.
Elizabeth, thanks for reading this from around the globe (South Africa)! I know that you teach Grade 6, and if I had to guess, you will hear more positive exclamations from your students over time than I will. It can be tough for teenagers to stop “being cool” long enough to express pleasure in their Math(s). Another guess, though I’m no psychologist, is that your students will be more likely to say “Maths is (are?) awesome” rather than “we are awesome”, but I’d certainly be interested to find out if I’m wrong, or if you see a male/female difference there.
Not that you need to keep track or anything. I’m just thinking out loud here. 🙂
I’m still figuring out foldables. That first one took a lot of work to create, and had the students doing less of the writing than what I see most people doing, which is starting from a blank page. I was going to put my next couple of foldables up as well soon, and you’ll see that I left a little more for the students to do, but still didn’t nearly start from “blank”. My Foldable Filosophy [sic] is evolving…