Field Experience; Teaching an Application of the Distributive Property Remotely

Teaching through zoom has been challenging. I’ve been teaching 7th grade math through zoom since March of 2020. My biggest challenge is keeping my kids engaged for 90 min. They are young and are easily distracted by things in their homes. At COA Middle School we have a M/W, T/Th schedule. Kids have periods 1-3 on Mondays and Wednesdays and periods 4-6 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Each period runs for 90 minutes. Typically we teach six 1-hour periods in a day but have made significant changes since going remote. Our main thinking for the block schedule is to alleviate students of the strain of being at their computers from 8am-3:15pm (which is what it typically is) so our instructional days in the remote setting run from 9am-2:30pm.

I’ve faced a number of other challenges teaching remote. Internet bandwidth has been a common theme as an issue with many of my students. A handful of students consistently have internet connectivity issues and often zoom throws students out of my meetings. I don’t think there has been a lesson since the beginning of the school year without some sort of hick-up happening along the way. On Friday I taught an application of the distributive property, and I was sure I was being zoom bombed because I was getting unusual activity in my waiting room. It flustered me, to say the least. Ultimately I locked my meeting and continued my instruction. That’s another issue with teaching through zoom, zoom bombing is a real concern. This was the second week I was going over the distributive property.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my kids picked up the distributive property pretty quickly. After showing them a video of the distributive property and doing a bunch of practice problems with them, I wanted to share applications of the distributive property in the real world. I was going to show them that the area of a larger rectangle made up of two smaller rectangles could be calculated two different ways. Two expressions represent the same area. This was the distributive property in geometry, and could be applied to situations where you are, for example, calculating the area of a backyard, given the backward is made up of a patio and a pool adjacent to each other. My goal was to have them derive the expressions themselves.

First, we needed to review area versus perimeter, since lots of my kids confuse the two. One of my strengths as a teacher is making the direct instruction portion of the lesson interesting by incorporating stories, or things that interest my students, like minecraft. If you take a look at my google slides presentation, I talk to them about building a sheep pen. I went ahead and asked them if they built a sheep pen in minecraft (lots of my kids play the game). So I talked to them about the difference between calculating area and perimeter, given for example your building a sheep pen. When you are calculating the area of a rectangle you are answering the question, “how much sheep can I fit inside?”, but when you are calculating the perimeter, you are answering the question, “how much fence do I need to surround the sheep in my pen?” From there I asked them a series of questions, ultimately leading them to derive the expressions on their own. As I was asking the questions they were responding in the chat. I love utilizing zoom chat because zoom saves a copy of the chat for me after the meeting. I like to print it out, and check students' participation. Then I give them participation points. I call parents if there is a lack of participation. This has been one of the most helpful tools for me to keep my kids engaged in the lesson. They seem to really enjoy chatting with their teacher too, so I make use of it. And I praise them like crazy when they do respond with correct answers.

One of the things that I really need to work on is pacing. It is an ongoing challenge for me to keep the appropriate pace in my lessons. I’m either going too fast or going too slow. And it’s especially hard to tell in zoom if I am going too fast or too slow, because I cannot read their faces like I could if I could see them face to face. If you take a look at the google slides presentation from Friday’s lesson, you’ll see the series of questions I mentioned earlier. For the last question you’ll see a rectangle that had width 7 and length x+2 and all my kids were telling me that the area was 21x. They wanted to combine 7x and 14. I spent a long time telling them that 21x is not the correct answer, not realizing how they were calculating 21x. I should have asked them to explain how they were getting 21x. If I had done this I could have saved time, since I would have realized that they already had derived the area expression. They were tracking with me, but that one misconception was a stumbling block for all of us. I often find myself doing things like that only to later realize that we could have moved on from that question earlier and my kids could have had time at the end of class to do more practice problems.

I use Desmos activity builder to make my activities for my students. You’ll see in the Desmos that my kids did a card sort after we completed the Q&A in the chat, and after that there were practice problems on page 3 and 4. Period 6 didn’t have time to go to those pages because we took too long on the last question where they derived the expression. But, the good news is that I think most of my students understood the lesson. I believe one of my strengths is activating previous knowledge. I think if I hadn’t started by asking them easy questions (calculate the area of a rectangle that has width 4 and length 3) and making the questions progressively harder (find the area of a rectangle that had width 7 and length x) they would not have been able to come up with an expression for a rectangle that had width 7 and length 2+x. Some of my kids were even asking me why I was asking them such easy questions. I always respond with something like, “you just wait, the hard ones are coming.” And then once I get to the last one I tell them, “Now here is your challenge. For all of you who said that those first 5 questions were way too easy, this is your moment to shine.”