Turning point?

The year started off pretty well but the last 3 or 4 class periods the students’ attitudes have gone from positive and enthusiastic to negative and apathetic. The students don’t want to participate in any type of work – they complain that they aren’t learning any math (because the Algebra Project focuses on language initially) but they refuse to complete the simple math worksheets (3rd grade mad minutes) Mrs. Mills uses as a warm-up. Mrs. Mills had a heart-to-heart with them half way through the class and she is starting to keep a daily log of the students’ participation and behavior. She has threatened them with referrals before but has not given one yet, but I think the heart to heart may have a more significant impact in the long run because many of the students realize that she cares and they want to keep her as their teacher and they know they need to start being respectful.

During the past few classes each of the students chose a different landmark from the Detroit trip to place on the trip line. They each created an icon of that landmark and ordered them according to when they saw the landmark during the trip. This led to a class-long argument about the location of the café relative to the park. For some reason a couple of the students became extremely personally invested in the location and we had three groups of students – one group remembered the café before the park, one remembered the café after the park, and the third group remembered passing the café twice. After an hour of trying to determine where the café was located, Mrs. Mills stepped in and placed it before the park just so the class could move on to the next task. This completed the trip line, after working on it for two weeks, and the students could move on to the doing math with locations on the trip line. Maybe this progression will help the students settle in and see where the math is in the trip line.