Formulas n’ Foods

[Adam Ross]

Working in the Student Support Center, I get the opportunity to see lots of tutors engage with students of different academic levels, different motivations, and different issues. This past week, I watched Challa give a lesson on the Quadratic Formula.

Challa was called to teach this lesson when a student, having not gotten the full value of an algebra lesson, was unable to solve a quadratic polynomial on her own. His objectives were clear, to ensure that this student can: recall the quadratic formula, associate the correct parts of any quadratic equation with their corresponding parts of the formula for its roots, and arithmetically simplify the resulting expression to report its roots.

Challa did not need to use a warmup the way a teacher might have needed to for a class, the student who came to him had been working on a specific problem and was already primed to learn how to answer it. Plus, this was a student that tended to gravitate towards Challa, so she was already engaged to be working with him. Challa could just project good vibes onto the student, and she would be ready to work.

Challa’s lesson promoted this student’s motivation by setting realistic measurable objectives, like the student being able to recall the Quadratic Formula. He manipulated his tone of voice in order to produce reinforcement when the student needed it to continue to focus, and then gave verbal reinforcement when the student accomplished things.

Challa’s lesson took the better part of a class period, around forty minutes. His first activity was to help the student memorize the formula by writing it down for her, having her copy it down and read it out loud, this took three minutes. His next activity was to teach the student how to plug in values. This took a little bit longer, because quadratic equations can come in all sizes and arrangements, see the example from Khan Academy:

There is some arithmetic that results in a cleaner expression that can be fed right through the formula, but this takes conditioning in order to build up the behavior. This part of the lesson took about fifteen minutes. The final part of the lesson, once the student could get to an answer that looked like the ones in B, C and D, was to simplify the answer to a two-value simplified fraction where possible. The student, having been unfamiliar with the +/- operator, took a little getting used to with this step. This part of the lesson took twenty minutes.

To close, Challa made sure that the student could solve any of the problems on her worksheet on her own. Since the student came in with a specific need, the follow-up work of where to go from there was already done for him. I think math lends itself nicely to this part of the lesson process because there are always new problems that people can solve when they learn new mathematical methods, and solving these problems usually leads to the discovery of new problems that also need to be solved.

The structure of Challa’s lesson was well planned out and intentional, owing to the fact that he was working with only one student with specific needs. I could see how making an intentional lesson which reaches every student in the way it was intended to work in a perfect sense would be super difficult. Because he was working with one student, Challa could tailor every part of his lesson to account for this student’s needs at the exact moment. I think Challa did a nice job, and the student walked away understanding the Quadratic Formula.

This week, I had the pleasure of working with one of the students who usually slacks off and goes on his phone. This student is very nice, but usually stands his ground more than other students if he feels like I am going to suggest that he put his phone down and open up his homework. This week, I did a grade check with him. I came over to him and he was scrolling through his phone, he said hi but he didn’t look up at me. I asked him how he was doing, and he said I’m only okay. I told him I wished he would feel better and I would like to help him achieve this by improving his standing in class. It was grade check day, so he showed me how classes were going. I could see from some of his grades that he was putting noticeable effort into his classes, and his limits were impressive given his grades in some of his classes. But I could also see the subjects where he was not reaching his full potential, and I asked him why that was. He knew exactly which assignments he was missing and which teachers he needed to email, so the two of us set a goal for him to achieve which he told me he would not need help with. We set a timer for fifteen minutes, and I went to another table. When I came back after fifteen minutes, he had sent an email to his biology teacher and was in the middle of an assignment for English.

Food is so interesting. The student support center often has food that the students can eat while taking breaks, and it is very healthy. There are these nutrition bars that look like brownies, crumble like fudge, and taste like dry hamburger. So I’ve been told, I wouldn’t share food with or take food from a student. The students love to talk about the food, and as much as they complain about it, they keep eating it and never bring food from home. I can understand liking a food that initially seems unappealing, these nutrition bars don’t even sound that bad to me. But the students, in their high school hopes to be cool, act like they hate the food that they keep eating. I bet Erikson would say they are in the identity vs role confusion stage, knowing that they like the food but wanting to play the role of a “cool kid” who doesn’t like anything that is too healthy.

[Chisom Oguh]

Hey Adam,

I think Challa was a great example of an MKO using their position to assist a student through the process and make sure that they understand. I also liked how you “handled” the student who was on his phone. There were clearly some things he was expecting you to do but you respected his boundaries and worked with him the way he wanted. By leaving him for 15 minutes, you were trusting him to go by his word and do what he said he would. Also, the situation with food. I never understood why food was seen as taboo in the classroom (at least, it was for me). You can only eat food during lunch, but in the classroom, it was seen as a distraction. But what if I’m hungry during the middle of my class because I had an early lunch?

[Author]

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