[...Continued from previous post - I figure I should break it up into chapters for reading convenience]
As I was finishing up my student teaching I got the opportunity to go to a Teacher Fair to try and get hired. I stopped by all the school district tables that interested me. I did like 3 different screening interviews there. I had a break while the fair was winding down and so I meandered to see tables. I came across one that had a guy talking about using a dart gun and Rube Gholburg projects in his math classes. I got instantly interested. We started talking, and it turned into a really good conversation about how math should be taught: with hands-on, real-world tasks. We clicked and the interview went smoothly. I was hired on for the next year within a couple weeks. The man turned out to be Noah Williams. He is a truly brilliant man. I honestly think he will be a man to look out for in the future. He became my coach as to what to use to teach math in the middle school. I was converted to an applicator of math. Everything we do in math has purpose in the "real" world. Math is the Master Tool that we can use in any discipline to analyze and make decisions.
I started the school year with almost no resources. There were some books, but they were typical math textbooks and had almost no application to the stuff they taught. So I had to come up with my own activities and documents for what turned out to be 4 different grades of students: 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th graders. It was perhaps the most difficult thing I could have possibly done for my first year of teaching, but I wanted to start fresh with nobody telling me what to do to teach except the Common Core State Standards. I used them as a guideline for what to teach and I gathered ideas wherever I could find them.
I searched and searched and searched for hands-on activities to teach students math. I bought over $100 worth of books that claimed to have projects and hands-on activities. Some did and some didn't. It was a gamble really. I wouldn't say any one of them was particularly bad, they just weren't what I was looking for. I'll do a quick review of the ones I liked in another post. (This one is dedicated to story time:))
I spent time searching the internet for resources. Holy freaking cow! There are soooooooooooooooooo many websites, and soooooooo (notice the fewer o's) many of them are complete piles of ****. (I guess that statement depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking for non-traditional material, then it is). Truth is, I wasn't looking in the right places. I didn't know what to look for. I wasn't part of online communities. And honestly, there aren't that many AMAZING sites out there that appeal to me. I feel like everyone has their own ideology on what makes a kick-butt curriculum or lesson, and none of them match up to what I think is awesome. It's because I get bored with things that are "Mathy" like graphs and numbers. Other people think those are interesting and that is cool. We're different people. I haven't been really connected to others with twitter and blogs, but I'm working on getting out there. I'm hoping to find more people like me.
Anyways, I'll post favorites and my thoughts.
Have you struggled finding resources that fit what you want? How do you find them?
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