Building A+ Better Teacher(Elizabeth Green)

Building A+ Better Teacher(Elizabeth Green)

     

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Open the door and walk in. Remain standing. Or maybe you should sit down?This crowded rectangular room is yours. Right now it has twenty-six chairs with attached desks, a chalkboard, and early-afternoon sunlight pouring through windows onto the tabletops. In a  moment, the room will also have twenty-six fifth-graders whose names are printed on the attendance ledger: Richard,Catherine, Anthony, Eddie, Varouna, Giyoo, Awad, Donna Ruth, Tyrone, Ellie,Enoyat, Leticia, Charlotte, Karim, Shanota, Messima, Saundra, Dorota, Ivan, Connie, Illeana, Yasu, Reba, Jumanah, Candice, and Shahroukh.
Your job, according to the state where you happen to live and the school district that pays your salary, is to make sure that, sixty minutes from now, the students have grasped the concept of “rate.” Specifically, if a car is going 55 miles per hour, how far will it have traveled  after 15 minutes? How about after 2 hours? By the end of the year, your students should also have mastered fractions,negative numbers, linear functions, long division, ratio and proportion, and exponents. You’re also supposed to teach them to become good citizens,  subtly knitting into your lesson (yes, this math lesson) the principles of democracy. In whatever time is left, remember to help the children vault over any hurdles life has thrown them—racial, economic, parental, intellectual. You must bend reality closer to the dream of the  American meritocracy.
Ready?
The door bursts open. With the residual energy of recess, they surge through the coat room, rearranging their clothes and jostling for sips from the water fountain. Here comes Varouna. She is from Kenya, lithe and dark skinned. Giyoo is from Japan. He is 4 feet tall and  barely speaks. Catherine is studious and has her hair in braids. Eddie, freckle faced and hyperactive, takes his seat in the back. Tyrone just moved from South Carolina and prefers not to pay attention.He sits closer to you, in the front.Don’t just stand there. Teach  something! Richard sits near the front, next to Tyrone. They’re both new to the school this year. On the first day, Richard introduced himself and volunteered that math was his “worse subject.”
Half an hour later, the students are all askew, murmuring and chatting with each other. They’ve been working on a math problem you wrote on the chalkboard while they were out at recess.
Condition: A car is going 55 mph. Make a diagram to show where it will be
A. after an hour
B. after 2 hours
C. after half an hour
D. after 15 minutes
Consider how to get everyone to quiet down. Next to you, on a table, is a small bell. Do you ring it? Perhaps you should raise one hand and put the other hand over your mouth. Or what about that old line? When my hand goes up, your mouths go shut. You go for the bell.  Thankfully, it works, and you launch a discussion.
Soon, fifteen minutes have passed, and class is almost over. So far, the students have worked on the problem in small groups of four to six. You have circulated around, peering over shoulders at their varying degrees of success,deciding when to talk and when to nod and  when to hold in a laugh, letting it shake inside your chest when a student does something hilarious and adorable.And all of you, together, have reasoned your way through A, B, and C.
On the chalkboard, you’ve drawn a straight horizontal line, with distance represented on top and time underneath. On the far right is a crosshatch for 110 miles and 2 hours (B); halfway in the middle there is another for 55 miles and 1 hour (A); then there’s one more,  smaller, crosshatch halfway between 0 and 55:27.5 miles and 1⁄2 hour (C).

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