Math Fair

This is a project that I've heard about and tried out during my B. Ed. year.  I was instantly sold on the idea when our Math Methods professor took us to a small Math Fair as a field trip.  Since then, every opportunity I had, I tried it out.  I ran it on my practicum.  I gave the problems to the kids at the tutoring center where I was working as a TA.  Then I brought it to this school as a new teacher last year and pretty much forced all other Math 10/11 teachers since then to take part in it.  Luckily, they were pretty interested in the idea too.

Originally I thought (and my classmate in B. Ed. at UBC, fellow student teacher at Churchill, now my Calculus teaching partner at Maple Leaf, Joseph Liu agreed with me) that it's a good excuse to get away from the tedious curriculum and to show a bit of interesting math problems to some students who are already infected with the disease of math-phobia, hoping it'd be a cure by sparking an interest.  That's how we saw it when we ran it on our practicum.  However, we had a different set of problems with the students at Maple Leaf.  Most of our students have already learned everything covered in our Math 10 and 11 courses back in their public junior high school years.  They're not all getting 100% because they don't tend to remember everything taught in junior high school, and language tends to be a more serious barrier to success than the content of the course itself, but that doesn't stop them from feeling that they already "know it all".  Rarely do we actually come across a student who's afraid of math or honestly thinks that he/she cannot do math.

We have the opposite problem though:  Students think math is too easy and therefore boring.  Not only that, we have the opposite problem as other departments in the school too.  While English and Science teachers in the same building struggle to cover what they need to in the 70 mins a day, we struggle to fill all the extra time we have.  The average Math 10 lesson lasts less than 10 minutes before it starts feeling like a pointless and mindless review activity and starts calling for enrichment or English language training.  Even then we run the risk of having two weeks at the end of the semester with nothing but review to do.  On top of that, because of the large turn-over rate at an oversea school and a shortage of math teachers these couple years, almost all our Math 10 and 11 classes were taught by teachers completely new to the profession (like me when I taught it) or teachers whose specialties are in other areas.  On top of that, the current curriculum has been implemented just a couple years ago.  As a result, we are still lacking in quality enrichment material.

So here's our school's version of Math Fair.  The structure and guidelines are exactly from the original Math Fair website (http://www.mathfair.com/), and the problems we use are from the galileo website (http://galileo.org/classroom-examples/math/math-fairs-math-problems-grades-k-12/), but we also encourage them to bring in their own problems from other sources.  We let them form their own groups of two or three (some of us let them be in groups of four), and we make it into an eight- to ten-period project spread out over the course of the semester from picking the problem, understanding it (the hardest part for our kids due to the language barrier), solving the problem (to the best of their abilities), making a poster of the question (not the solution), making manipulative props for their problems, coming up with hints for when guests have difficulties solving the problem, practicing introducing the problem to guests and guiding them in the solution, and finally an in-class practice round, and a real Math Fair with 3 to 5 classes in the same two large dance/drama classrooms each block.

These are some of the posters.  The one above is from a pair of girls in Grade 10, and the one below is from a group of Grade 12 students in my Math 11 class (because they failed it when they were in Grade 11, and they were struggling the second time around as well).  I liked this part of the project because it showed me another side of these students that I meet everyday.  Suddenly, the ones who showed no interests in the math itself became the most eager participants in this design-related activity.

These are some pictures of the actual Math Fair on the final day when we invited teachers who are having their prep blocks and other classes to come and be our guests.

We have now done it four times in our school, and experience has told us that the more visitors we have, the more students are into it.  We have had trouble with spacing when we have invited more classes than what can fit into the rooms, but we managed to work it out by sending them back and forth between the two rooms where we were having the fair.

Hello World

I am (almost) at the end of my first ever full-time teaching year.  Like most other teachers at this point of their careers, I just recently learned what it means to be in "coping mode".  However, that didn't manage to eat up all my passion and excitement for the upcoming school year, and my attempt to start this blog is proof of that.

The purpose of this post is to paint a little background for all future posts.  The school I teach at, Wuhan Maple Leaf International, is a private senior high school that is open to (mostly) Chinese students and follows the BC Grade 10 to 12 curriculum.  The Wuhan Campus is 5 years old, and the Maple Leaf company and its main campus in Dalian started in 1995.  We now have about 1500 students on this campus, and most of them live in the student dormitory during the week and go home on the weekends.  This year we have about 60 Canadian staff including BC subject teachers, language elective teachers, a librarian, an academic adviser, and admins.  We also have about 60 Chinese staff including homeroom teachers (aka counselors), Chinese subject teachers (Mandarin, Chinese Social Studies, Music, Art), main office staff, admins, student recruitment, etc.  Most of our students came to Maple Leaf after completing the official Chinese junior high school curriculum (Gr 9), and some even had up to one year of Chinese senior high school. Like most boarding schools in China, besides the normal 5 classes per day, they have morning and evening "self-study" blocks where they stay in assigned classrooms and work on their homework or studying.  They are literally in school from 7:30 in the morning to 9pm at night.  The vast majority of these students are ESL, and they usually go through one year of full-time language training before being allowed into BC courses.

Our school is a semester school. This year I taught 4 blocks of Pre-Calculus 11 last term, and this term I am teaching 2 blocks each of Pre-Calc 10 and 11.  Most of the material in these courses were taught in the Chinese public schools in Grade 7 or 8 except for anything related to functions and graphing.  The biggest challenge the students face in my classes are word problems.  They are extremely well-trained in symbol manipulation and calculations, but that doesn't make them math geniuses.  They still struggle with concepts that are new to them, and sometimes work habit or motivational problems.

So that's about all the relevant information of our school.  Starting next post, I'll talk more about specific events.