Since the first few days of class are all about getting to know the students and establishing classroom atmosphere, I decided to make concept maps to find out about student attitudes about Math. I intended to only do this activity in my support classes, but I have support period 1 and when I saw the results I decided to have all students do this. In support class I asked students to pair with a “like minded student”. But when I looked at the results, they are all like minded, so that was a surprise for me. I expected the negative feelings, but was unprepared for how negative they were.
This student ran the gamut from HATE, to DON’T LIKE, so I guess there is some room for improvement.
What I like about the purple one on the upper left is that it did include Learning
I made this one large because I had this student last year in my core class and this now explains some of the behavior I saw. He is actually a very bright kid, extremely bright in fact but he leaves the tests/quizzes blank and doesn’t even attempt classwork. I felt like a failure with him, but now he tells me that he considers my subject EVIL. Ok, I’m not going to take that personally, but this tells me a lot about what I need to do to reach this student.
This student seems to see Math as just a few basic operations–and finds them stressful and hates it.
I love this “it takes forever to answer a question”.
This student is also one I had last year, and the level of insight and thinking really impressed me. This one was difficult to photo because there was so much detail, so I took several close photos.
Guilt, I say “This is easy” and I guess I need to stop saying that. I also try to make it fun, but I didn’t realize I was making the process worse….I think it probably is fun from my very old, adult view, but I forgot to look at things through my teenage eyes…..
Leave a Reply