Before my first lesson I was to teach during my first placement, I spent days and nights putting together a week of well planned, well thought out lessons. My class was an ESL math class with students in grades 3 and 4, and they were starting a short unit about probability. My associate teacher informed me that I would do well to stick to the curriculum for grades 1 and 2 to start. I did one better, or so I thought. I found a great idea for a kindergarten level lesson online, a reworked it to make it more visual to help the student with lower language skills. As almost all of the students could not read English, I also added photos to the flashcards of every day or impossible events. They were to place the flashcards on a timeline that went from “certain” to “impossible”. This seemed like a great simple way to start the unit. I also had a week’s worth of lessons that gradually built on this beginning knowledge of these new probability words. What I didn’t account for was that those english-speaking kindergartners on Pinterest already had some idea of what at least some of these words meant, although in a non-math context. This group of students, who had never heard these words before (and many who would not understand the sentence “My teacher will turn into a horse.”) struggled to say the least. I first felt defeated, threw out the evidence of my failure, deleted the worksheets I had made for the rest of the week. But then, after coming to terms with the fact that I had to go back the next day, I pulled the poster out of the garbage, and focused on what had worked. I paired down – a lot – and came back the next day focused only on two words “impossible” and “possible” and only on one scenario: what animals can come out of eggs and which ones cannot? Throughout the following lessons, we started building on this base and expanding the scenarios in which they were able to use their new vocabulary. Throughout the following lessons, we started building on this base and expanding the scenarios in which they were able to use their new vocabulary. This experience (while giving me a great lesson on perseverance) also reminded me of the importance of taking into account the specific skills of my specific students and meeting them where they are at, instead of making assumptions. It was also a chance to build my flexibility and to focus on what is working on not working before taking a new path forward.
