Wonderful Moment

Two weeks ago I gained some confidence in my teaching abilities.  Being a student teacher and learning the nuances of teaching is exhausting.  More often than not, you see what you could have done better and focus on the aspects of your day that did not go so well trying to figure out better methods.  It is a learning process.  I need to remember to be kinder to myself because I am a student teacher and I am learning through working through these challenges.  But, when a moment shines that can keep your spirits up for a while you need to hang on to that.  This story was one of those moments.

Our school does Walk to Math.  My CT and I have the slowest paced math group for the whole 2nd grade with only 9 students in the class.    Their is a math tudor who is in the class to help specifically support two of the students.  Many students struggle with staying focused and many have lost their confidence in their ability to do math.  We were starting a unit on adding and subtracting double and triple digit numbers.  We had been working a week on adding and subtracting  10s and 100s from double and triple numbers.

On this particular day the tudor was out and my CT asked me to work with Bella (pseudonym).  We abandoned the worksheet as I saw she was mixing up her place values.  She would did not understand the value of a 3 in the tens place was 3 tens.  We needed to take a step back and understand what the value of each number was in a triple digit number.  We tried working with base ten blocks, but these did not really seem to help her.  I shifted gears and took out a white board and drew three columns.  I started by writing a triple digit number using the three columns as hundreds, tens and ones.  I would ask her the value of each of the numbers.  For example, for 345 I would ask Bella what the 3 was worth – what was its value.  What was the 5 worth.  We did this for a bit and then I handed the columned whiteboard to her and said a triple digit number to her out loud and had her write the number and tell me the value of the different numbers.

After we did this for a while we started to go back to the problems on the sheet.

345 – 20 =

We keep with the strategy of the columns because Bella needed to keep her place values straight.  We worked through the whole sheet of 8 problems together.  Class ended and I was not too sure about her capacity yet to do these problems on her own.

The next day my CT decided to give a test on the skills we had been working on because she felt some students were ready to move on and some who were not and she wanted to divide the class  according to their understanding level of the skill and work with them as two separate groups.  When I glanced at Bella’s test as she was working she was solving every problem correctly!  My CT and I couldn’t believe it.  She had been one of the two students that was just not making progress in her mathematical understanding, and thus, in her confidence in math.  She finished the test along with the other students and received 100%!  She was beaming.  My CT congratulated me. During the lesson afterwards she independently wrote answers on her whiteboard and silently celebrated every time my CT said, “Yes Bella, that’s correct.”

Later that day, when I was heading out after school, Bella was on the playground.  She ran over to me and warmly greeted me. She asked me if we were going to be doing the same kind of problems in math for a long time.  I could see she was still reveling in her glorious day in math.  She had gotten a taste of what it felt like to understand what was going on with the language of numbers and she wanted that feeling to last.  I told her we would be working with double and triple digit numbers for a while, but would be adding some challenges along the way.  She wasn’t too sure what to make of that, but nothing could ruin her day.

The following week Bella was a rock star.  At first she was a bit needy thinking I had to be at her side in order for her to understand the problems, but I quietly distanced myself from her and let her struggle when I knew she was comprehending.  At the end of this week she was the first to finish her timed test and the skills test on adding and subtracting all types of double digits even with borrowing.  That one day of going backwards and sorting out the value of a number based on its place made a difference.  but, the really difference came from the confidence Bella got from succeeding on her own on that first test.  I think she would almost call herself a mathematician now.  I think definitely by the end of the school year she will.