Have you ever had students like this in your class? Students who are always looking for the short cuts. I think we will begin to see more and more of these types of students because of technology. Do you know how many times I have picked up video game cheat sheets off the floor in my classroom or the hallway?
*** Yes! I pick up paper in the hallway and if a student is walking with me I make him or her pick up the paper as long as it is not a tissue. We keep our school clean and it works. You will be surprised at the information that you learn about the students just from picking up notes off of the floor. AMAZING!**
Anyways, I digress back to the topic.
These students are used to finding the short cuts to everything. They want to find the easier way to get to the goal line using the least amount of energy possible. If they are part of a district in which they are tested to death, then they treat test preparation as an unwanted and unneeded task, just something to get through. And if they they can show you that they can get the answer faster than you, they will do that! In the microwave generation, it is not necessary to understand the meaning behind what you do, YOU JUST DO IT!
For those people who have never seen “The Wire” and you work in an urban area, I highly suggest that you buy this video series for your video library. The season before last focused on the schools and this is where this episode is from and it was a WONDERFUL season! I found myself relating to the teachers, administrators and students in each episode. As a math teacher, it taught me the importance of making sure that I have one engaging activity every other day but everyday if possible. The kids love it and I love it!.
During the classroom lesson you see that the children are not focused and that the teacher definitely needed classroom management help. I would have had the students write the problem in their math journal and answer the problem, showing their work first. I have stickers, suckers, chips that I give out to the first students or the last five students or all the students. I vary the requirements because some of my students are going to be thorough but not fast and this gives all my students an opportunity to be recognized at least once for their test preparation journal. After doing this for five minutes, then I would have one of the students to teach their method of solving the problem to the class and why they chose this method.
This allows students to feel for a couple of minutes what it feels like to teach the class and you know what some of them like it! I have had quite a few students tell me that they want to become math teathers when they grow up because they like this strategy as well as the peer tutoring strategy that I use in my class.
In Conclusion, if this student was able to find the answer using the clues then he could definitely do well on the State Standardized tests using the test preparation strategies. I had to pay Kaplan BIG money to learn these same strategies that these students can learn for free!
