Today I learned how hard it is to be a dynamic, effective teacher. Creating lesson plans requires a lot of creativity, and managing time really takes experience. No matter how much you plan and think about the lesson beforehand, however, I learned that what happens in class is more flexible. Sebastian and I could plan out beforehand who would say what and so forth, but in the end we sort of improvised a discussion based on our students.

When we went around to help the kids do the math, students were at very different levels. Some got the averages and plugged in the equation extremely quickly while others needed some guidance. I realized after a bit that some students had calculators that weren’t the best for plugging in a bunch of numbers to get an average – but that that was ok. We applied the order of operations and did some math.

The most important part, I learned, was the application of what we did. Students do math throughout grade school, but the things that students remember often are concepts that they can apply to different problems. After we calculated the number of friends of friends, some jaws dropped. We could see students put two and two together – literally using math – to realize that more people could see their posts than they thought. The teacher we worked with is friends with some students at the school on Facebook, which means that most of the students who are friends with each other have a teacher as a “Friend of Friend”.

My favorite reaction during the discussion: WOW!

This is what I love about math – numbers make sense and help to explain our world.