Oct
10
4 minute read

Math Club for this year is finally up and running.  As I’ve alluded to before, there are 28 kids which is by far the largest group I’ve ever led.  So I’ve been making some initial adjustments.

  • I setup a google calendar and asked parents to volunteers as helpers. At least initially until I figure out how the club flows, I plan to have them stand on the edges and jump in to refocus any kids that are off-tangent and potentially to answer questions when we’re working on an activity.  We’ll go from there and see how much more I can think to do with an extra hand available.   

  • Instead of maintaining a list of contacts. I formally used a google groups for email notifications. That should let me more easily manage the process of self service adding and removing people from the mass emails. 

I was actually pleasantly surprised to arrive in the classroom and see everyone already calmly seated around the room.   My first goal for the day was to start the process of learning new names. So I took a quick inventory of who was there versus my roster before formally starting. This is going to take me a few weeks I think to fully memorize and associate all the faces with names. Ever chance I could through the hour I focused on this task.

Then I began a fairly standard set of talking point discussion that I usually use:

Talking Points

  • Introductions (Say your name, math class i.e. Geometry or Math8, and why you joined or what you liked best last year if you’re coming back)
  • My Goals:  Joy, Discovery
  • Logistics: each day  [arrival, snack, activities, cleanup]
  • Baseline Behavior 

         Respect me.

         Respect each other  / Listening

         Multiple Grades

         Respect the room and Ms. Heu. Leave no trace behind that we were there.

         Extra considerations because we’re large

  • Club Officer Elections
  • Contests - AMC 8 in November (more info coming)  MOEMS
  • Problem of the Week - How it works
  • Volunteering / Mistakes.

Discussion Topics:

  • How can you help make the club successful with so many kids?
  • What is Math?
  • What to do when you’re stuck on a problem

I’m always amazed how candid kids can be asked direct questions. As usual I had a small number of them essentially answer: “I joined because my parent made me.” The most amusing variant on this was the one student who had an unfortunate incident with microwave popcorn after which her parent sought a more supervised activity for after school.  I used to despair that I  could win these draftees over. But I’ve found over time that I’m starting to have more success on this front and I do find it useful to know who is reluctant from the start.  (I’ll focus on them a bit more in the first weeks)  I also like for the draftees to hear the other kids talk about how they like Math and/or enjoyed something from last year to start the process of adjustment.  

An interesting situation also arose during this introductory phase.  I have a noticeably larger group of Asian students than in prior years and a few of the (probably) self-conscious new 6th graders said something along the lines of “I’m Asian so I’m good at Math” for why they joined.   This was the first time this has come up and I was caught a little by surprise. I responded back that this is a stereotype and your mathematical identity is a function of you not your ethnic/racial background.  But based on some advice I received afterwards I think I’m going to return to this topic for a brief discussion next week.  I want the kids to all talk about how this made them feel and hash things out a little more. The hope is that its good to openly discuss and clear the air on this score. 

After all the group discussions finished I had a little less than a half an hour to do some math with the kids. So I chose two introductory puzzles that I thought were engaging, accessible and did not need a full hour to work on:

  • 12 Envelope Puzzle.  I found this one courtesy of  Sarah Carter.    

“I have 12 envelopes numbered 110 - 121 and 12 letters number 1 - 12. Can you place one letter inside each envelope so that each number on the envelope is divisible by the number of the letter within it?” This one is easy to just  put up on the whiteboard and it takes very little to get the kids up and attempting to solve it.

This is a bit harder to explain so I went over it briefly but planned and did circulate to explain the rules more individually.

Finally:  AMC8 is coming up fairly soon so I gave out problem 25 from 2016 for the first P.O.T.W:

I like this one because its meaty but not impossible over a week to come up with some good ideas.

Updated:

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