Experiences

Numbers and letters

Anna Luise

Italy

Vocational School

Maths

Teaching in class, Online Learning

Direct

This experience is the result of the awareness that especially in vocational schools young students do not commit very much with homework and the personal reflection that should consolidate the concepts and calculation procedures learned in class.
Even when the level of a first class is good (sometimes it happens!) there is a reluctance to study the theory with a consequent drop in performance when you move from the particular to the general.
A crucial step in the early grades is the one from numerical calculation to the literal one, with all the generalizations that follow.
Since this year I have a first year class of mid-high level I wanted to try this experience by asking the boys a little more effort with the aim to stimulate the understanding of the study, avoiding the mere execution of mechanical procedures learned by rote.
I divided the class into five groups, quite heterogeneous within them, and, leveraging on their availability for using new technologies, I asked them to download from the Internet materials that dealt with the calculation but, more precisely, with the properties of powers.
Given the amount of downloaded files, I had to reformulate the request: I created three groups and I provided them with the names of three websites (one for each of the groups) for downloading the requested material, also doing some printing for using it in the classroom as a tool for discussion and comparison.
During the discussion a couple of students per group presented the results obtained and compared them with those of their classmates, treating in parallel both numeric expressions that the literal ones, understanding, finally, what it means to think in abstract, how much it can be a versatile formula and especially how much it is important to check that the conditions for applying it are checked.
Of course performance has improved in some cases and not in others but definitely math homework done with a tool for them more appreciated than a book, and the discussion of their work in the classroom, has also involved the guys who usually feel a sense of frustration in front of a blackboard full of incomprehensible formulas to memorize.