I teach a class called Geometry Concepts, geared primarily toward high school sophomores who struggle with math. Much of the time, there is the ever present pressure of meeting the standards, teaching them formulas, and practicing properties that truly don’t mean much to these kids.
I have been thinking a lot about what I can do to best serve these struggling learners, and it led me to the name of the class: “Geometry Concepts“. I feel like my job with these kids is to help the build on the concepts, the bigger ideas that are much more transferable to their lives. I don’t just teach quadrilaterals, I use quadrilaterals to teach “classification,” the same ideas they use in science and English. I don’t just teach parallel lines, I teach them about driving and all of the lines used (they are getting there licenses this year).
Anyway, we spent the last two days finding areas of polygons and we did some really nice problems where they had to find the area of a lame triangle with a base of 12 and a height of 7. Very applicable, I know. Even though we have been practicing these formulas, I feel like they needed a different approach to area. So for a Friday, I scrapped the quiz and instead gave them one task: find the area of the carpet in the room.
This immediately took my class from bored note-taking to genuine curiosity. I had a prime opportunity to build some real problem solving skills with kids who don’t like to be challenged. We discussed how we could approach the problem, how to make a diagram of the room, and how to account for the cabinets, furnace, and other non-carpeted areas. Then they spent class measuring, recording, and calculating.
My initial concern was that we weren’t practicing the formulas; they were just finding a bunch of rectangles. But this was the most engaged I have ever seen these kids. These were the hardest rectangles these kids had ever seen in their lives and they went with it. They did some genuine problem solving. Today, my struggling math students got a real feel for what area is and how to find it without looking at a piece of paper.
The other perk? All it took was a bucket of tape measures and 30 seconds of prep time.
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