Maybe it’s just me (except I know it’s not) But it’s easy to get caught up in an unattainable quest for teacher perfection. Especially here on the interwebs, where drive by comments are easy, and only the Pinterest-perfect shows in our feeds.
But, if ever there was a year for letting go of teacher perfectionism….this is it.
This will be — for many of us — a year of adapting and flexing and mostly making the best we can of decidedly not optimal situations.
Personally, I am resolving to never complain about the photocopier again, because I so miss a physical office and a classroom that is not my laptop angled strategically for the best video conference background view. I will be grateful when we are back to it in a way I never was before.
And yet, the truth is: the photocopier frequently jammed, and it hasn’t stapled right in ages, and imperfect as it was, I will still be grateful to work on paper in a real classroom again (all the wistful sighs for group work, and physical manipulatives, and no more zoom sessions…)
That teaching is better, and dearly missed, and also imperfect.
I am hoping that this is a thing I will learn from all of this. (Because, we ought to learn something for all we’ve been through) To be grateful, to flex and adapt, and also, to give some grace to the imperfections. Maybe, even, to my own.
And so I’m thinking about the ways we adapt. Ourselves, but also our materials.
Because, there is a place for creating the custom thing, beautifully designed and crafted precisely to meet your students where they are at. And there’s a place for photocopying (or, uploading) the pretty good thing and giving your limited attention to something else.
Text books and worksheets are resources, if we use them well. I’m grateful for a shelf full (and grateful I brought them home when we first shut down)
And, yet. They are not perfect either.
Sometimes the examples are confusing or there isn’t enough practice or there’s too much of one thing. Or the critical thinking could be higher, or the focus clearer, or any number of other limitations.
So I hack it (read: adapt, modify)
Make a copy or a scan, block out the parts that don’t apply, hand-write in new instructions or questions, mix and match exercises or books, cut and paste if I have to. Make it work. (Mentally apologize to the human who labored to creat the resource in the first place)
The result is not the prettiest, perfect-looking activity. But it is a class that is planned, with a teacher who is calm(er?), and materials that are imperfect but good (like the rest of us) as we flex and adapt and make the best of it.
And so, 15 ways to hack math materials
(Get this as a PDF download in my free subscriber resources)
- Add a reading/writing/comprehension task:
Nudge students to examine the explanatory text and/or example problem (that always gets skipped!), by asking them to write a summary, or read/think/pair/share.
- Add a retrieval practice task.
Reading/writing task + neuroscience. Read the passage, turn the paper over, and write what you remember on the back or in your notebook.
- Isolate one skill.
Interleaving is great. But for the love of numbers, sometimes we need to learn one thing at a time. Select the questions that are most relevant, eliminate the others.
Use copies and a glue stick or scans and a computer to cut and paste questions from two skills together to review, or to practice distinguishing two similar tasks
- Add an annotation task.
Ask students to underline or circle a particular type of information in each question.
- Add a problem analysis task.
“Before you solve each question, write the units you are looking for/operation you will use/restate the question/etc.”
- Break the question into steps
Particularly useful for complex problems. Add a), b) and c) with prompts to scaffold thinking.
- Change the question/answer format:
Add or remove an answer bank, or convert multiple choice to open ended to differentiate or adjust the challenge level to you students
- Add or remove equivalent forms.
Ask students to give answer in two forms, or edit the answer key to accept un-simplified answers. Again, differentiation.
- Change number formats to reduce cognitive load
22/7 might be a better approximation of pi than 3.14, but sometimes you don’t want to reteach fractions in the middle of the geometry lesson. Sometimes you do.
- Make it an error correction exercise
Do the questions/worksheet, badly. Have students find and fix the mistakes. (Especially satisfying if they can use red pens…)
- Add a creation task
Ask students to write and solve their own questions(s) based on the examples provided
“How confident do you feel answering this kind of question? Which questions were hardest? Easiest? Why? “
- Convert it to an interactive activity
Copy and cut apart sections to make task cards, or put questions and answers on separate cards to make a sort.
