Stop Sitting in Your Desk, Get up and Draw It!

No one, myself included, has ever labeled me as a conventional teacher. I try as hard as possible to do things differently in my math classroom because I hate math lectures as much as any of my students do. Now of course sometimes they are necessary- it is statistically very unlikely that my students would be able to derive the quadratic formula without me simply lecturing on it. That said, with geometry you can do a lot of hands-on activities if you just think creatively.

I think that's the reason why I love teaching geometry so much because it is an entirely visual math. Not only do you look at pictures and diagrams with every problem, but you can really dive into visual aspects of real life with almost every chapter. Today was one of those days in geometry- it was so fun!

We just started chapter 6 which is all about similar polygons. Similarity is something that we see everyday in our lives (think blue prints, maps, etc.) but don't really notice all the time. So instead of speeding through the beginning of the chapter which just introduces the concepts, I decided to take an extra day to do some scale drawings in my class. Why continue to have my students sit in their desks when they could grab a tape measure and start drawing them to scale?

I watched all my students crawling on the floor and measuring all of the nooks and crannies of their terribly small Taiwanese desks. It was awesome to see students who normally sleep through first hour actively arguing with the student next to them as to whether the top of the desk was 41 cm. wide or 42 cm. I'm also a big fan of having them figure it out for themselves so I generally stay out of arguments like that: they finally settled on 41.5 cm. which I thought was an excellent compromise.

It's exciting as a teacher to see students use the math that we learn in class right in front of your eyes. It is also my firm belief that speeding through the book just to get to the end is a terrible way to teach students- what will they remember from that? It is my hope that even if my students remember almost none of the formulas I teach them this year, they will at least remember how to draw something to scale. I think that's more practical anyway.