"But its different with the numbers!"

One of my students who I would consider one of my top students, is defending her opinion that she can subtract 24 from 18 and get a positive number.   She's telling the class you just have to carry!

I write the problem vertically on the board and ask her to come explain what she means.   I want her to figure it out or have another student pinpoint her mistake, but it's not happening.  

I draw base ten blocks and start illustrating what she says.  She is convinced and getting more convinced each time that she is correct.  None of the other students are speaking up. 

Finally I take out 18 cubes and ask her to take away 24 of them.  She confidently removes the blocks one by one and counts.  When she gets to 18 and there are no more she looks at me and declares "But its different with the numbers!!" 

Wow!  

NJCSA Conference

Today my school attended the New Jersey Charter School Association conference in Atlantic City.    Overall, the conference needs some beefing up, with better sessions for teachers and more vendors.  However, I can't complain today because I attended an amazing session called Getting Messi:  How Mistakes make Mathematicians and Scientists.  The presenter was the winner of the Fishman Prize for Superlative Teaching (which I didn't even know existed today, but it is really cool!) Check it out here: http://tntp.org/fishman-prize/winners/fishman-prize-2013/keith-robinson  Anyway, the session was all about Mindset!  My passion of late especially since taking Jo Boaler's class over the summer and now participating in the Perts study.  Most of the ideas presented I was familiar with but did come away with some ideas for really creating the growth mindset culture, such as presenting my "fake" mistakes for students to analyze and awards for class culture such as for the hardest worker, or the best question asker, etc.
The best part was I was a winner of Carol Dweck's Mindset, which I've never actually read.  So excited to get reading!

Then after lunch I got to be a speaker at a session!   I was kind of thrown into it as another teacher was going to do it and backed out at the last minute.  I am so glad I did!  We talked about some of the things our school did to increase math fluency, deeper conceptual understanding and incorporating the 8 mathematical practices.  It was really easy, I talked about our "Mad Math" program, how we set it up, how if runs, some of the changes and improvements we made since last year.  Then I talked about using KWI (What do I know, What is the questions, What are my ideas for solving) for multi-step or word problems along with TAPPS, Talk-aloud-partner-pair-share also for problem solving.  Finally I talked about using kid friendly translations of the 8 mathematical practices and how I introduce three to four main practice to focus on when I introduce the objective of the lesson and also how I have them hanging above my number line and refer to them often throughout the day.  I got to present this with our math coach and the Director of my school.   It was fun, I could talk about teaching math all day long!

Start Hard

It may be because I am a new teacher that I think I have this great idea, but I am super excited about an idea for more student engagement.
I have been taught to teach math using the I Do, We Do, You Do method. Starting out with easy computational problems and moving to word and multi-step problems once they "get it".
My brilliant new to me idea is to pose that difficult word problem first. My thinking is that when I model the math to them there will be an interest in why we are doing it in the first place. Duh when I write this out I feel so stupid for not doing this already.
The other part to this is how do I get them thinking about the question beforehand. What I've come up with is that will be the last thing we do each day, and they will have 10 minutes to write about the problem in their notes, it could be anything from writing down what they know to solving it if they know how. Then their next video will be on that topic and at the end of the video I will give the solution to the previous day's problem.