By Michael H. Brownstein
Today my fourth-grade class and I studied the cosine of an angle. I had recently won a grant to purchase very expensive trigonometry books. Didn’t know what to do with them. Fourth-grade teacher. So, I decided, Why not? I decided to work on a formula near the tome’s beginnings – cos (a) = a/h. Much to my amazement, the class stuck to it and tried and tried and helped each other and really worked their way through the problems.
Outside it’s just the right kind of cool Tom Sawyer daydreamed about – and I do too. All-day classes took a recess break – we don’t have a real recess in my school. Oh, you can ask for one. Especially on days like today. But we didn’t. We were working too hard studying the table of cos (a). And the students were enjoying themselves. They had to read the tables. They had to solve for the problem. They had to convert their answer to an angle.
There is nothing in the world greater than watching struggling students actively working on an enrichment activity and enjoying every inch of the experience.
We never did get outside, but we did solve a great number of problems. And guess what? For homework, my students are going to teach their parents how to do the math we learned today.
They were excited about that, too.
A great day to be a teacher.
| Copyright © 2021 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
I loved trig in school. I totally buy that your pupils had fun!
ReplyDeleteIt is wonderful to hear you have good days! From your descriptions of your trials and tribulations I would have thought you taught middle school at least. These kids are nine and ten? Wow. Thank you sir, for what must be a generally thankless job. People like you make the world a better place.
ReplyDeleteRoger,
ReplyDeleteYou are most kind--and you should know there are many more great days than bad ones. I'll begin posting some of the better ones--but first I have to tell you how I broke up fight with a kid who outweighed me and was almost six inches taller and brought him to his knees.
Roger,
ReplyDeleteYou are correct. For most of my teaching life, I taught 6th through 8th grade, 3rd grade for one year, and a half dozen in 5th and 4th. for may of those years I also taught GED in various housing projects.