FIN Commons

Plan: Co-teach a lesson that combines math and English concepts.

Myra Snell and I cooked up a project that would preview our math/English collaboration for next semester. We wanted to test our theories that math can be relevant /FUN and that math can inform themes of racial and class identity covered in my Puente cohort over two semesters or 1 year. I know! Seems very challenging and me not being a math-y person at all, felt nervous. Truth is I avoid teaching essays that involve any kind of percentages because I find that I am challenged to 1) understand the information myself (which means I am possibly teaching it incorrectly a.k.a. winging it) or 2) help students synthesize textual ideas with data (cold, hard data). This was an opportunity to select a more challenging essay written from an economist’s POV and sprinkled with all sorts of data. I won’t spend much time revisiting details, so I will just add, SEE LMC/PUENTE LESSON STUDY. Long story short, we tried it.

Day 1: Post class observations and follow up questions.

Realization number 1: Math is fun (I still remember what cross multiply means) and students found Myra’s “visualizations” (which I love) of Mantsios’s claims to have had an important impact of their understanding of class in terms of income and wealth. I got the pleasure of observing Myra lay out a clear way for students to create “pictures” to understand concepts like total national wealth versus total U.S. household wealth. In Mantsios’s essay, “Class in America–2003,” he writes that class is not well understood, never discussed, and surrounded by “myths.” He poses several interlocking questions two of which I supply here: Are class differences getting bigger or smaller, and how do these differences impact the way we live? Does everyone in America have an equal opportunity to succeed? Side note: At the beginning of this unit, Money and Success, students self identified as middle-class. They did not view themselves as under privileged and did not see their families as struggling to make ends meet. It would be interesting to insert conjecture regarding cognitive development, but oh well. Myra used columns, pennies, and even a football field to represent the complexities of the author’s argument. The numbers proved to students that wealth is not equally distributed in the United States and possibly that opportunity to advance along the class ladder in the U.S. is limited to a select few (an important moment of growth when discussing concepts like the American Dream). Day 1 of our lesson study presented our team with many more possibilities for math and English to intersect.

Question? These questions may seem to go outside of what we planned in our study, but at least two students talked about how the ideas of the current unit, specifically themes in The Grapes of Wrath, kept popping up in other classes. They seemed excited and empowered to be able to inform and even teach others about what they are learning in English. Does it make more sense to create packaged first-year experience that could include a cluster of classes working with similar themes? What would this mean for student efficacy?