Making Connections

I am wondering how many times you are in the lab and students are working so diligently on the Cognitive Tutor (because that’s what all of them do, right) when suddenly, one of your students raises their hand with a question about a problem they are working on. HA!! If your students are anything like mine lab days are even busier than classroom days!! When we are in the lab I always find myself running around like a mad woman trying to answer the 4000 different questions from the 28 different students who are trying to master 28 different sections in 28 different units with their hands constantly in the air. “Mrs. Bratcher”….“Mrs. B”….”Hey”….”I need help over here”….”Mrs. Bratcher”…..”My hand is up”….and on and on. Some days I have to stop and say “wait a minute, I am not your pet, stop calling me, just raise your hand and be patient – there is only ONE of me”!!!! (They think I’m funny.) But the most distressing part is that 90% of the time what they ask for help on is something we’ve ALREADY done in class!!!

Does anyone else know what I’m talking about out there??!!!?!?!!

Making connections from the classroom to the lab (and vice versa) is one of the HARDEST things to do. A young teenage mind (especially a male one) is still so compartmentalized. For them, what we do in the classroom is completely separate from what they work on in the lab!! And it is SO easy to forget that I need to consciously and purposefully make those connections for them. The beginning of this week we were working on Problem 5.5 Saving Money (point-slope form) and when we went to the lab the end of the week I had several students in the unit on Writing Equations of a Line (21 I think). So many of them were stuck because the scenario wasn’t just given them the rate and starting value. But once I sat down with them and we talked about what the scenario WAS giving them and how that related to the problem we had just done in class, things CLICKED!!

It works the same way in the classroom as well. When we were talking about slope-intercept form a few weeks ago I pulled up the cognitive tutor on a question where they have to graph in slope-intercept form and shot it up on the interactive whiteboard. Immediately they connected it to what we were doing in class (plus they got to work it ON the interactive whiteboard which is always “cool”).

Don’t forget as you are going through the busy-ness of each school day that THEY are not making those connections on their own, but oh what happens in their brains when you make the connections for them. Algebra suddenly starts making a whole lot more sense when it moves from being a whole bunch of dots to a connected picture of real life!!