When I grow up...

I want to be older.

It's been a few days since MAM ended, so now we're back to regular tutoring entries with a few extra MAM bonus days thrown in.

For Math Rules! volunteers who are reading my blog, the following are my takeaway points:

• Check in with them and ask how things have been going before you start tutoring. It's a good gauge of how the session will go.
  
• Encourage your students in the following couple of weeks before MCAS, let them know they can do well no matter what happened in previous years.
  
• Remind them to take their time to read the questions carefully, check their answers, and answer in complete questions for word problems.
  
• If you can, take an extra five minutes at the end of your session to chat with them about college and careers. Talk about your college and/or career. For the most part, students are very interested in college but may or may not have someone to ask. Even if they're 3rd graders, if you get them thinking about the future it will help them in the years to come.
  
• Help them realize that you're there for them and want them to succeed in everything, not just math!

Yesterday I worked with my fourth graders. They're preparing for the MCAS in two weeks so I helped two students who needed a bit more practice. It's sad because it seemed like my other two students wanted to work with me too. In the end, I think it was better that I was only working with two because I could focus and give them more attention. Also, my teacher has changed her schedule - to prep for MCAS the students are doing 1.5 - 2 hours of math until the MCAS.

MCAS prep means working off of last year's test and trying to figure out best approaches to problems. We went over the standard algorithm for multiplication and division (long division) computations. We also talked about alternative approaches to multiplication problems such as using the array to help with multipication problems. Finally we focused on word problems, which was a good exercise for them to take their time and carefully read all the instructions.


I tried my best to give them test taking strategies like checking answers, rereading the word problems, not falling for the time-wasting tricks, showing all work on the test, and making sure they knew their multiplication and division algorithms.

I found out that both of my students didn't get very good MCAS scores last year and I think it's because they rushed through and didn't check their answers. When we went through the packet, they seemed dejected when I told them their final answers were wrong. It's interesting because most of the work is right, but the final answer is wrong and then they assume they failed.

One of my students kept repeating that she hadn't gotten anything higher than 2s on practice tests throughout the school year. I tried to encourage her by telling her "that was last year, this year you can do better!" I'll see how her self-confidence levels are next week.


We also got a good chance to chat in between problems. I found out that one of my students wants to be a teacher or singer when she grows up. My other student didn't know, and when they asked me, I said I don't know either. :) She retaliated and said "What do you mean you don't know?" That's one of life's secrets, adults sometimes don't actually know what they want to be when they grow up, it's a self-discovery process. We also discussed college briefly which was a good thing, they brought it up and asked me if I was still in college and if it's hard. I told them that it is tough, but if you work hard, you'll end up learning so so much.


We also got off topic and one of my students asked to interview me for a job, which is ironic because I'm in the process of interviewing right now. I also got a chance to interview her and found out some things I didn't know before. She took on a different persona and told me she was a 21 year old singer living in Florida who was interviewing for a teaching position. It was a great chance to bond and talk about jobs and our personal lives. I told her about my new pet hedgehog (shameless plug) and I found out that we both have four siblings.

In a program meeting, we started talking about how to improve Math Rules! for next year and I'll definitely take into consideration how many students are working in a group and the length of math time. These longer math sessions mean more time with the students, more personal attention, and it gives me some space to chat between math problems.


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MAM Day 8: Time Part II

Today is Boston Partners in Education's big Gala, so this is the downtime I've got to blog before the storm.

I was planning on discussing time zones, the passing of time beyond 24 hours, and how it still relates to math today. This was before I found this website that has lots of information and pretty pictures and animations. I'll include links from various websites because they explain things much better than I do.

I just found another website that documents the history of calendars. It's the first slideshow with information on calendar systems, just click on the pictures to continue through the rest of the history. Documenting time and the rotation of Earth around the sun has been around in many different civilizations. Mathematicians, early scientists and astronomers were able to figure out the best approximation of the Earth's rotation around the sun which is why our current calendars are based around the solar cycle. There are also calendars that are based around the lunar cycle. The Earth's rotation around the sun also causes seasonal differences.

Time zones are necessary because the entire world can't have the same time. If it is 10:30 AM here in Boston, it shouldn't be 10:30 AM in Europe also. The sun's position in relation to a geographic location is how time zones were formed. This website explains time zones pretty well, and this website has large cities and their respective time. You can use this link to convert time. From my blog's statistics, there has been one visitor from Mozambique. With a few clicks I found out that Mozambique is 6 hours ahead of Boston's time, which means that as of right now, it's almost 4:45 pm in Mozambique. I hope they check in again!


One of the things I wanted to discover through today's post was how fast we are traveling around the sun. This website helped answer my question - our rotation on Earth alone is approximately 1000 miles per hour at the equator, and our rotation on Earth around the Sun is approximately 67,000 miles per hour.

The website says we can calculate a more precise estimation of how fast we are moving around earth's axis by multiplying the cosine of Boston's latitude by the speed of rotation at the equator (1000 mph) to get our speed. Why do we have to do this? A person standing on the equator is traveling a different path around the Sun because of the tilt of the Earth.


Don't worry! I did all the math and came up with ~738.95 miles per hour. So in 24 hours, everyone in Boston has traveled ~17734.8 miles around space at over 700 miles per hour! And you didn't even have to go anywhere!

I'm not an astrophysicist so I'm sure my calculations are off. I didn't take into account that because we're rotating around Earth's axis and also around the Sun, the distance we're actually traveling is probably more, but that doesn't matter because I did some math today and I'm fairly satisfied with what I came up with :D Finally, as if my math nerdiness has no bounds, I really appreciated this online calculator.

Some cool space links. I'm always amazed at how cool space is.
Space missions diagram
Rotation of the planets in audio form
NASA's archive of awesome pictures

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Also one of my Fellows at Science Club for Girls sent me this link on the positive effects of mentoring on the mentors! Mentoring leads to "measurable benefits for the volunteers, who showed improved physical activity and health compared with adults of similar age and demographics."

I've found that mentoring makes me happier, I look forward to certain days and the knowledge I will get to see my students. I laugh a lot during tutoring sessions, I get to play games and act like a student again. To top it off, after I started volunteering in the Boston area, I found a job - this job! Volunteering may not pay much (haha), but the benefits are the best!


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Compounded mentoring moments

I guess the school year has gotten into that slump where there isn't anything drastically new to report from my volunteer/tutor sessions, so today I'll be talking about how I've developed mentor relationships that start from "mentoring moments" as our Executive Director calls them.

This came up for a number of reasons. Yesterday I went to an info session about my AmeriCorps program, the Massachusetts Promise Fellowship, a service program that partners with Northeastern University and focuses on serving youth across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Fellow projects range from developing after-school programs, providing educational support, developing youth leadership and work-related skills, training youth workers, to free college financial aid guidance, and other youth related projects.

One of my fellow Fellows asked the question, "After our year of service, how do we let go of our youth?" I almost started crying right then and there because I thought about the youth I had grown to love and care for; having to say goodbye would kill me. It's interesting because there are certain students that I would not (and could not) say goodbye to, while there have been other individuals in my life who did not evoke the same upswell of emotions and tears as these students. Some of these kids I've known for a little over a year, and others I've only met this year. But as a collective, I've really come to enjoy working with and seeing these different groups of kids weekly.

For the new students I've only met this year, it was tough to start off a year not knowing what to expect and knowing very little about their situations that led them to our tutoring partnerships. But as time goes on, we've built relationships slowly from week to week. At first the students were wary of me being in the classroom at all, but I notice a little excitement when I come for tutoring. The students jump out of their seats and say hi to me. The other students I don't work with look towards our group questioningly, and in some cases, they come right over and ask to work with us.

I'm pretty sure it's the consistency that really helps tutoring and mentoring relationships. Sometimes it's a matter of personality matching as well, but for me, I've had good relationships with the students I'm working with. The kids (myself included) really look foward to working together every week on our scheduled day. There was a point where I had to switch my schedule around, and the kids questioned me "Don't you come on X day?" I've also gotten to a place where the students work so well that we have extra time to chat and get to know each other beyond the math, or their schoolwork.

The "mentoring moments" were originally used in the context of the Big Cheese Reads (BCR) program at Boston Partners in Education. The BCR program asks for community, government, corporate, and public figures to come into a middle school classroom and read an inspirational and student relevant short story or excerpt. Afterwards, the Big Cheese Readers talk about their experiences growing up, getting work experience, and how they got to where they are now. The BCReaders also field questions from students taht range from "How do you get an internship?" to "What's your favorite TV show?" The Big Cheese Reads program is a mentoring moment where students are exposed to a life they may not get to glimpse into, and hopefully learn and grow from it.

I've taken the phrase to apply to my weekly meetings with my different students. There are weeks where we don't have a chance to talk about subjects other than math. And there are weeks where the students don't really feel like talking at all. On some level, I don't really feel like a true mentor who guides young people through difficult lifestages and turning points. Sometimes I feel more like just an academic tutor, however, there are those moments when I feel like I've really made a difference, or that I've expanded their world a little bit just by talking frankly about something. I notice these passing moments when it's significant to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if my students have many more of these significant moments when they learn something about me, the world, or themselves.

And to be honest, I don't have enough time to get to know these young people enough. I always want more! Last year, I was fortunate to go to MathSTARS twice a week, but this year I only have time for once a week. If things were up to me, I would go all four days a week. Every week, I only manage to speak one-on-one with a handful of the kids, but it's the little things and the short conversations that add up to make me so darn emotional!

Sometimes I think, "Did I really help these kids today with their work?" but sometimes it doesn't matter so much. It matters that I was there when they were expecting me. At the meeting yesterday, one of my fellow Fellows said that she got an email from a youth she had worked with years before and she didn't realize how much of an impact she had made until she got the email. In the now, it's hard to gauge how much your presence is making a difference, but in the long run, I hope these kids will remember me and our time together. I know I'll look back fondly on this year of service, and the students I worked with.


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Student juggling

I managed to work with three different students on Tuesday at MathSTARS and all three students got a significant amount of work done, which is amazing! I don't really know how it happened, but I started on a physics lab with C and we got halfway through before she got bored with it and moved on to other homework.



In the meantime, I switched and worked with V on his math packet. He's a very sharp boy and knows his math fairly well, but he has serious focus issues. We worked through it, I think he's warming up to me pretty well because it took a lot less effort to get him to focus. We also had a very nice and lengthy conversation about tattoos, family, his friends, and his future career (he wants to fix cars and planes and eventually buy a $15 million plane someday).

C came back over and gave me a hard time saying that I had "abandoned-ed" her to work with V. We have an interesting relationship where she teases me endlessly. C and I then worked on her Romeo and Juliet homework which basically meant I sat and watched her do her homework. These kids are so smart that sometimes they just want and need extra attention from the MathSTARS tutors.

The last student I worked with was J. He has consistently had attention difficulties and gives us all a run for our money. It's really hard to get him to focus, and he ended reading National Geographic magazines for the Tuesday session. The afterschool director Ms. D gave him a two question assignment to summarize and explain an article in the NatGeo. He hadn't started writing at all, so Ms. D suggested I write while he dictates. It was somewhat frustrating to get him to sit still and talk to me about the article, but once he got started, it was tough to keep up with him.


Then we played Apples to Apples. It was a good day at MathSTARS.

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Barf, tears, and crushes

I will apologize in advance for this post and the title, but if you read on, it sums up my tutoring today very nicely.

I had the opportunity to help in another classroom today, a 3rd grade Sheltered English Instruction (SEI) class with roughly 20 squirmy third graders doing multiplication word problems. I got a warm welcome chorus of "Hi Ms. Minh!" from 20 eager and excitable children and a speed round of names to memorize in thirty minutes.


The teacher Ms. Ph had the students on the carpet and was asking word problems like "There are 8 dogs, each dog has 6 puppies. How many puppies are there?" and the students would have to repeat the equation and the answer.

No more than five minutes after I got the classroom, a student with some stomach virus threw up on the carpet and made a trail to the trashcan. I'm not even going to sugarcoat this one, it was naaaasty. Nasty.

I was surprised at how well the kids handled the situation though, most of them kept their focus and we continued on with the math. The students finished up with group work, and went back to their desks to do all class multiplication fact families. Ms. Ph would ask and write on the board:

11 x 12 =

To which the students were to compile the fact family:

11 x 12 = 132
12 x 11 = 132
132 / 12 = 11
132 / 11 = 12

I walked around and helped the students. I was about to say "This isn't how Math Rules! works" but I felt I would be more helpful by circulating the entire class and helping to check fact families, I let it go. The students were enthusiastic about math which was nice to see and experience. By circulating I got a good sense of which students needed help, which students wanted attention, and which students wanted someone to check over their answers.

At one point, another student came to inform my class they would have computer class instead of science (or something like that). This student unfortunately disrespected one of the students in my class, which upset her and she started crying. Which is not very nice at all. Ms. Ph handled the situation well, but the upset student wasn't ok. I stepped in and used a mentoring moment to tell the student that it was just probably because the offending student doesn't like herself very much that she has to put others down. I hope it made her feel better, but you can never really tell. I think I'll follow up next week with her. It's a shame because she seems like a very bright student and enjoyed doing math.

Math homework was given out, the students had to copy equations on a sheet of paper and bring back fact families. Two students who were sitting next to each other were bickering, and I asked them what was up as I was circulating. Each time I came by there were new developments. They were teasing each other:
"She punched me"
"He kicked my shin"
"She threw this piece of paper at my face, look what it did!"

I did not point out the fact that this probably means they liked each other, but it was incredibly adorable and amusing to say the least.

I'm extremely excited to be working in the class now, there's a lot of good math potential, positive energy, and interesting characters in this class. I'm looking forward to it.

Have a great weekend everyone!


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National Mentoring Day + Month!

Happy National Mentoring Day and Month! Today celebrates mentors who have made a difference in the lives of others, so go out and thank the people who have mentored you!


As part of the celebration, I attended Youth Mentoring day as presented by the Highland Street Corps Ambassadors of Mentoring at the Massachusetts State House. It was a very nice program with lots of appreciation for legislators and big name individuals who have made mentoring a priority in their lives. I thought the keynote speaker's take away point (though morbid) was that on our gravestones, we get three things: our name, the date we were born, and the day we passed. The hyphen in between the dates encompasses everything we've done and accomplished. The important thing is to make our lives mean something by making a difference in the life of as many young people as possible. As the saying goes, "To the world you may be one person, but to one person, you may be the world."

Mass Mentors
National Mentoring Month

Candy canes and fractions

Yesterday was even more miserable than in my previous post. I woke up to snow on the ground, which quickly progressed to blustery wind and freezing rain. I went and bought candy canes for my tutees because this is the last week I'll be working with them until the beginning of next semester. Walking to my schools, I think the candy canes comforted me more than my soaking socks and wet pants.


Working with my horseshoe group, we had a handout that reviewed lots of fraction work, converting to decimals and the like. I thought the session went incredibly well because my kids are warming up to me and we talk about other things in between problems. When I told them I wouldn't see them for a few weeks, one of my students got worried. I reassured them I would be coming back in January and she seemed ok with it.

Working through the worksheet, I showed them a shortcut for making fractions into decimals when the denominator is 5. They can just multiply the original fraction, both the top and bottom by two to get a fraction over 10, which is a lot easier to change into decimal form. After showing them the shortcut, I came up with problems not on the worksheet.
"But that's not on the worksheet!"
"Yeah, I know. I'm trying to challenge you."
And they really stepped it up and applied what they had just learned to the new problems. It was nice to know that they could adapt to new math rules and tricks.

When working with fractions, I find it really helpful to draw a fraction circle and ask them to color in sections. We also had a set of decimals they needed to change into percents which involves moving the decimal point. Once they understood the rule, they raced each other to finish and I 'quizzed' them on their answers afterwards.


I was so impressed and told them they were superstars (I even drew stars on their papers) because we finished early. I let them choose candy cane flavors and said bye for now. I'll miss them while I'm on vacation, but I'll have something to look forward to when I get back.

Connections

After a few weeks of volunteering, it seems like I'm slowly but surely building relationships with my students.

One of my groups has been touch and go because the math format changes from week to week. Sometimes we're working on reviewing for a test and playing a Jeopardy game, and other weeks we're doing group work on a new topic. This week we worked on arrays and played a game with different size arrays. Only two of my students were at school yesterday which was nice. I had more attention to give to both of them, and I felt like I got to know them a lot better because of the small size.

One of my students shared stories with me while we were playing the game, and it's really helpful to connect with them. I talked with her about the Nutcracker and how their class is going to the Urban Nutcracker performance in a few weeks. She also told me she practiced her multiplication tables in the morning before coming to school and the roles her parents play in getting ready. I'm glad she feels comfortable enough to share with me and to talk freely. My other student I hadn't had much of a chance to talk to, but he's an energetic and eager young man who knows his arrays and multiplication tables well. He also enforced taking turns "I got the game cards, you gotta spread them out now." Overall, it was a very productive session. I also let the kids pick arrays for me to do with them and they tried to stump me, but it didn't quite work. :)

With my Horseshoe group, we moved out of the classroom and working at a table in the hall. I got to chat with them as we were walking from the class and found out their ages and got to connect with one of my students who wrote a story about his favorite animal.

This session was a little more tough because we were working on fractions, changing to decimals and adding different denominator fractions. It's tough even for adults, so explaining to the kids was difficult. We started with decimals first and the kids seemed to know what they were doing when we went over it as a group, but when I asked them to do it by themselves they struggled quite a bit. I was a crutch for them in guiding them through the long division, but I couldn't get them to understand the long division steps on their own papers.


We managed to get through maybe half of the problems, then we switched to adding fractions. This worksheet seemed easier for the kids and we walked through those steps to get their answers. I skipped problems that would've taken more time to explain so that we could understand the process clearly.

One of my students took it upon himself to try the hard problem and got frustrated. He didn't quite finish the problem and seemed down, so as we were walking back to class, I helped him go through the rest of the problem and he did just fine. I wish there was more time to work with each student one on one because he wouldn't have gotten to that frustration point if I had been sitting right next to him. He's independent and didn't want to ask for help, but if he had had the help, he wouldn't have been so disappointed in himself. I tried to cheer him up and told him he tried a really hard problem and managed to get pretty far, which I think he appreciated, but I'll try to give him more attention next time.

Math Rules! Blog

First week of volunteering! I met with one of our first new volunteers JD today at one of the schools. Our volunteers will be starting all of this week and next week, I'm trying to meet with most of the new volunteers so they know where to go and who to contact.

I'm going to start volunteering on Wednesdays, I'm both excited and nervous. Being the new kid in class is tough. What if the kids don't like me? What if the teacher doesn't like me? What should I wear? I hope I don't forget all my math! I'm also going to three different schools and four different teachers, a whole day of math tutoring. I'm looking forward to being out of the office for a while. It's a shame I'm going to miss the Math Rules! training at Boston Partners though.

As Math Rules! Coordinator at Boston Partners in Education, this is part of my AmeriCorps and Massachusetts Promise Fellowship year of service. The blog is meant to be a resource for the Math Rules! volunteers, as a forum to document the Math Rules! volunteer experience. I hope other volunteers will find it useful, but we'll see.







More updates to come!
-MN