Practicum Stories

On my last day of my practicum I taught a Math9 class where we did a review of exponents and unit quiz. I spent approximately half the class going over questions they had from a quiz which they got back. Then the students were given 20 minutes to review and independently study for the quiz. I was not sure how this would go because they are a younger grade and I wasn't sure if they would stay on task studying for the quiz. However, I wondered around the room and answered questions, and the students took advantage of this time for the most part. My sponsor teacher had said that the students needed to do the quiz that day because they were already behind from the other Math9 classes, but they also may not have been completely ready for it. He had suggested that we do a group quiz or something along those lines where they could collaborate with other students.
I came up with a type of group quiz, but one that everyone handed in their own papers and not one from the group. Students were given 20 minutes to work on the quiz by themselves, but I told them that they would have a chance to get help from other students after. They were quite excited about this, but I held off telling them the details. After 20 minutes they were each given 3 slips of paper with their own names on each. These were their "lifelines" where they could get help from 3 different students. When students asked another for help, they would give the helper their slip of paper. So as each students handed in their quiz they would also hand in the slips of paper of the students they helped. However, each student could only help up to 5 people, which prevented the top students getting bombarded with everyones questions.
This group quiz went really well. My sponsor teacher was nervous and excited about doing something like this with the class because he had never done anything like this before. He is a more traditional lecture style teacher and he wants to start employing more creative activities in his classes in the future. He said that he would most certainly do this type of group quiz with his future classes.

I had another great experience with a Math11 class in which I introduced polynomial functions and properties of their graphs. I took the class to the computer lab and had them use the graphing program graphmatica to explore different graphs of polynomial functions. I chose to use the computers rather than graphing calculators because I felt they were more user friendly. I personally had a hard time figuring out the calculator in high school and I didn't want the lesson to be focused around how to use the calculator. I made a worksheet with linear, quadratic and higher order polynomial functions and a chart had to be filled in by the students. The different headings were: shape of graph, degree, leading coefficient, domain, range, minimums, maximums, x and y intercepts.
I was thrilled with how well the lesson went and how involved the students were graphing the functions. My sponsor teacher was very happy with the outcome and will be using the computer lab for graphing in the future. He had never used anything other than the graphing calculators for lessons like this.