Chapter 5: Composing With Media Across the Curriculum

After listening to this excerpt:

Three things I learned about storytelling are that storytelling is joke telling, stories affirm who we are, and storytelling can cross the barriers of time; but, the most important thing I learned, is that storytelling allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others.

Chapter 5: Composing With Media Across the Curriculum

Whitehead warned educators about the danger of inert ideas, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations. (p. 89)

I could not agree more with this!! I teach math, so I see this happening A LOT. My students are students who haven't done well in math in the past, and so sometimes, unfortunately, they come into my class with negative preconceived notions. (This isn't always the case, but I do have a handful of students who actually do this)

I have found that students don't have a romance for math. The only emotional connection they have to it is negative; its hard for them or they find it useless and therefore boring. No matter what I do, some students just aren't engaged in my class. They do the minimal amount of work to pass and that is it. They just see it as a barrier between them and their diploma. They are here because they HAVE to be, not because they want to be. (One day, I would love to teach a math elective so the students actually want to be there)

A perfect example of this just happened to me today. We are studying personal finance, a topic that is extremely relevant in everyone's lives. I thought that because of this, I would get more participation and they would do better than other topics. Today in class, we had a pop quiz. It was one problem that we had done together in class Monday! I thought to myself "they will do really well on this. It's relevant and we have spent over a week doing this". I was wrong; only a few people got it correct. Unfortunately, several students turned in a blank paper! I'm very upset to say the least. I feel like I am doing a bad job because I can't seem to get through to them and help them to understand HOW important math is and will forever be in their lives.

I saw this video posted on Facebook last week it is worth the watch! I made me laugh out loud for real!

This is a great video, I think, to help illustrate in a humorous way what happens when students aren't mentally engaged. When they lack the want to learn a topic, it isn't hard to space out, fall asleep, or just in general not pay attention. And, again, with math, I feel like a lot of students just hear my voice as "blah, blah, blah, blah", like the teacher in Charlie Brown.

I am constantly looking for new ideas to get my students engaged during class and to help them see math is more than just memorizing a bunch of  'boring, old, useless in real life' formulas.

Hobbs, R. (2011). Research as Authentic Inquiry. In Digital and media literacy: Connecting culture and classroom. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press.