A Real World Connection to Learning

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A Real World Connection to Learning

  • August 25, 2021
  • Posted by: Caitlin McCallum
  • Category: Wow Story
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This past year I had the fantastic experience of working with the staff and students at Shepherd of the Lakes School in Brighton, Michigan. My prior work experience was in a public-school setting and I wondered how this would differ. While my background in language was filled with experience, I was a little “rusty” teaching math.

One of my first collaborations was with the 8th grade math teacher. She had a student that was struggling with math and she needed to keep the student engaged. While the class was moving on to Algebra, my student was working with decimals and fractions. I found that my student had some pretty good basic math skills but had a lot of difficulty with multi-step procedures, keeping his work organized, and understanding the language of math. When encouraged to work out math solutions and show his work, my student often could identify his error with encouragement.

We began solving problems converting fractions to percentages and percentages into decimals. We explored real word problems for determining discounts and tax. In our discussions, my student had an interest in being a mechanic. Researching necessary skills for that job, I was able to find Trade Essential skills for mechanics and a list of math skills essential for the trade. Many of the skills we addressed were listed in the manual. This provided a motivation for my student to keep working on his math skills.

I have learned a lot with this experience. I could see solving math problems at my student’s level involves a lot of implied information. I would ask myself, “How did you know how to solve this problem?”  I understood the implied steps in the math problems and knew I needed to add, subtract, multiply, divide, reduce or round numbers. I “just knew” what to do, because of the foundational skills I learned and can rapidly apply. This is where my student has difficulty and often needed a cue on how to solve the problem. He had foundational math skills but had trouble rapidly applying skills and needs a visual aid to organize the steps.

Working in partnership with my student’s math teacher, he is working on solving math problems with more independence.

~written by Teri Mickevicius, LSEM Teacher at Shepherd of the Lakes Lutheran School, Brighton, MI