My Ninth Day

On March 29th, I was in Ms. Johns's class, and the day took a different turn. I felt proud of myself for helping a student, but it wasn't help with writing. It was math, the Pythagorean Theory to be exact. Ms. John's is a fairly new teacher at Classic City. She told us she wanted to incorporate other subjects into her class, so she went to other teachers and asked what areas students needed help on. Apparently for math, it's explanatory writing. In one of the standardized tests, students had to explain in writing how they solved a math problem.

At the beginning of class, students had a journal writing. They had to write a paragraph about what they do when they come across a math problem they do not understand. For this assignment, I was paired with a girl whose first language was not English. Ms. Johns was struggling to get anything words or writing from her, so I worked with her while Ms. Johns helped others. Even though Ms. Johns started each sentence for them, I still couldn't get her to finish with her answer. She would just say "I don't know." So, I had her pretend she was in a math class, or any class. I would say, "Okay, you're in class and you don't understand the problem. What would you do next?" And she finally started responding. "I guess I would raise my hand." I continued to ask her what she would do next until she "solved" the math problem and finished the journal. Every time she answered, I made sure to be encouraging. A lot of these kids, and probably most students, really struggle with writing because they think they're terrible at it. So, whenever I work with a student and their writing, I give lots of compliments and encouragement.

The next part of class was the explanatory writing. They first did a worksheet individually to refresh how to solve the problems. Most of the students already knew. After, Ms. Johns took one of the problems and the class started to solve it step-by-step. I was looking around, and I noticed the girl I worked with on the journal was not writing and was looking around with that confused "What do I do?" look. So, I sat by her, and we quietly worked through the problem together. The majority of the class already knew how to do the math, so I think that's why Ms. Johns went a little too quickly. After she finished the problem, she just copied down what Ms. Johns wrote for the class's explanation.

Even though my main focus of the day was not writing, I still felt like I accomplished something. Mainly because this was math I could actually remember how to do, so I felt a little smarter than usual.