Spaztastic

On Friday, to begin our day, I had my class write about the following prompt:

"What would make math more enjoyable for you? What do you like most about math? What do you dislike about math?"

After they wrote we talked a bit about their answers (because I want them to enjoy math and I want to see if anything I do is helpful to them). I received pretty standard answers that my students thought would make math more enjoyable like: "pass out candy or pretzels." "Make assignments shorter." "Don't make us take the math book home."

Some things they hate are: "Having to stay quiet" (side note: they never stay quiet and I never ask them to be during math). "How heavy the math book is." "Having to do a ton of problems."

Some things they like are: "When you (Miss J.) make worksheets for our homework instead of copying a page from the book." "Playing math games." and my favorite "When you act, well, you know...like a spaz." Awesome. So under the caption "How to make math more enjoyable," I wrote, "Miss J. needs to be more spazzy." They all cheered. So I guess all the yelling and doing push-ups when they get correct answers and talking like a crazy person and making faces and singing and skipping around the classroom are good teaching strategies. I'm sure my students go home every day and tell their parents about things I do and their parents think they're being taught by a nut case but it works and they are engaged...when I'm spaztastic.