Using Curiosity To Your Advantage

Hello everyone!

This week was the last week of class, and what an eventful year it has been. I can truly say that I have learned a lot in this math course, as it has put me in various situations I know I will be in as a future educator. More importantly, this course has introduced me to new techniques and insights in the educational world, such as courses with no marks and the spiral method to deliver courses, which I am confident will pick up momentum with educators across the world in the next few years. I am truly honoured to be in such a wonderful classroom environment and look forward to using many of the shared resources we as future educators have shared with each other throughout the year and in our lessons to the class. 

This week our colleagues had the pleasure pf delivering a lesson for the grade 9 and 10 locally developed class and the grade 11 and 12 workplace courses. Today I would like to go into detail about one of the lessons, in particular the grade 9 locally developed class on proportional reasoning. This was a great lesson because the teacher conducted an inquiry on a Guinness world record based on clapping. Students were shown the following video:

After seeing this video, students were asked probing questions such as whether or not they believed the person would break the world record of 721 claps, and so on. This was a great way to get the students to think about their answer, and estimate how many claps the person did in four seconds. In our classroom, there were a vast variety of techniques people used to count the claps. I personally kept time with my feet and used a music-orientated 16 beat rhythm to count the claps in the four seconds. Regardless, after everyone in the class tries to map out how many claps the person does in the video, the teacher shows the following video which gives the actual number in the class. 

Once the students have the right number, they can use proportional reasoning to figure out the actual number of claps he completed in a minute, and if it broke the world record. Students would have to figure out how many times 4.5 seconds fits in a minute, and then use proportional reasoning to come to the final answer. Once everyone has their number for the claps in a minute, the teacher uses the last video to conclude the activity and consolidate with the class.