My Great Moment

Today I had a great moment.

We've been working away on Data Management and the focus has really been on selecting the most appropriate graph to display data.  We've spent a great deal of our focused "instructional" time looking at the differences between bar graphs and line graphs - that you can't really effectively graph what the class's favourite type of pizza is on a line graph, but you can graph how many slices of pizza are eaten over the course of a month by the class.  It's all about time comparisons versus quantity comparisons.  For some reason, as educators, we often forget to go that extra step of looking into something other than a bar graph for favourites.  It's my pet peeve.  For goodness sake, there's more to data management than surveying whether people like rain or don't like rain!

The other day, I gave the kids a graph with only the data on it.  No labels, no numbers, no title.  Their job was to list out possibilities for what the data was representing, and then to select the best option and complete the graph so that it suited their idea.  I thought this wasn't asking too much.  But, apparently it was.  Although we'd worked forward - building the graph - working backward was apparently very difficult.  It really begs the question - are we over marking our students in data management by expecting the bare minimum?  It would explain why at multiple schools, the data management strands are often low on the EQAO results.  This experience prompted me to explicitly teach that line graphs were about timelines, since the graph I showed them was a line graph, and yet many students were suggesting that the graph might be about people's favourite fill-in-the-blank.  UGH!

So, today we kicked things off with a review/consolidation on graphs of all sorts.  I made it EXPLICITLY CLEAR, and re-asked the same question I'd asked last week:

Ask a question about your environment (it could be fact based or opinion based). Get creative! Find the data, and select the most appropriate graph to display your results.  Be sure to make thick and thin observations.

(Thin = right there; for example, on Monday, the temperature is 2 degrees celsius.
Thick = think about it/do some work; for example, the temperature will drop by 5 degrees between Monday and Thursday.)

The kids are really getting into it: they're surveying the school to see who is wasting electricity by leaving lights on when they don't need them, who is throwing paper into the garbage can instead of the recycling bin, or who is leaving projectors on when they aren't using their Smart Boards.

But what really excited me - what really was a "great moment in teaching" - was when two boys who are quite intuitive with their math work and often speed through - approached me with the idea that they'd like to compare the use of lights over the course of the week - so they wouldn't be able to finish today, but would need the rest of the week.

BINGO!  This is what it's all about.  They're buying into it, and making their learning meaningful on their own.  They don't need me to do it for them anymore.  The fireworks went off!  I did my happy dance!  Two down, 19 to go!