Small wins

I’m a big believer in celebrating small wins. Even if something doesn’t go well, I try to find something positive to celebrate.

Here are a few small wins I’ve been celebrating in my classes recently:

In Math 2, we were having a partner quiz on right triangle trigonometry. D and her partner had set up a problem and solved for a side length, then said, “Wait… that can’t be right… we got that the leg is 6.9 but the hypotenuse is 6 and that’s the longest side… let’s try that again.” Similarly, L solved for a missing angle and told his partner, “This angle is supposed to be more than 45 degrees, I can tell because the opposite leg is longer than the adjacent leg, but I got that the angle is 37 degrees. I think I used the wrong trig function.” Can we pause for a moment and appreciate the sense-making going on here? And the perseverance and confidence in identifying their mistakes? Oh, and that D is a senior repeating Math 2 who has been telling me all semester that she sucks at math, and that L got so frustrated during a quiz earlier this year that he crumpled it up and threw it on the floor? The growth these two have shown this year is remarkable.

M is a student in my Math Foundations class who likes to doodle more than do math. I hadn’t seen a lot of quality work from her in the past few weeks, so I pulled her up to the board to solve a system using substitution, just to get a feel for where she was. She started working on the problem, looking at me for approval after each step; I’m just over here, poker face on, sipping my coffee, giving her absolutely nothing back. She did the whole problem, start to finish, perfectly with no help. When I said, “M, that was perfect!” she smiled, and said, “really?!?!?” “Yeah, really! You’ve got this!” She then went on to explain to her teammates how to do the problem, then did all of the remaining problems on her assignment. Then she created another problem for her teammate to solve. And – the MOST AMAZING PART OF ALL – M has not been off task once in class since (that was 2 weeks ago!!!).

K was eager to share that she earned a perfect score on her most recent Math 3 quiz, and L earned her first score of 4 ever! These young women are in my Math Lab class and have been working their tails off to be successful in Math 3. It’s amazing to see their hard work paying off.

Former student J wrote me a Christmas card that said “Calculus is hard! Thank you for teaching me to value making mistakes and learning from them.” I am so incredibly thankful for that because I feel like I’m not doing as well emphasizing that this year, and it keeps me striving to improve.

Surprise win – I gave the system of equations pictured above to my Math Foundations class (thank you IM) – it looks pretty intimidating at first. Many of my students tried starting at the top or didn’t try at all. I encouraged them to pause and look at the whole problem, to find the part that they think looks the easiest, and one student said, “the bottom equation looks easy, I can just divide by 2.” Once everyone saw that, the problem didn’t seem so complicated anymore. Every single student was able to find values for all 4 variables – even if it took the whole class period, they stuck with it! Something about this problem just clicked for them, and now they are solving much more algebraically complicated systems using substitution with ease.

I am so incredibly proud of these wins from my talented math students. Please join me in celebrating their hard work!