Saturday:10 Reasons Why I love what's going on in Math 8

1. Watching kids suddenly make a connection on their own totally makes my day.

• "Can I use that A squared B squared thing to do this?"
• "Wait, isn't this the same thing as a translation?"
• "It seems like a reflection is changing the order of all the letters naming the triangle."

2.  My students are thinking of methods and connections that I've never considered.

• "Is a tournament the same thing as repeated multiplication?"
• "Can I just use a scale factor to solve this problem?"

3. I love listening to conversations that my students have that incorporate math vocabulary that we are learning in class.

4. I love when students get so excited to SOLVE a problem they start grabbing resources that I never expected such as patty paper, markers and calculators.

5. I love when students get so excited to COMMUNICATE with their team members that they grab resources such as patty paper, markers and calculators.

6. I love when student observations and connections they make lead to mini lessons on topics I didn't even intend on teaching such as the Pythagorean Theorem, orientation, proper notation, etc.

7. While my students are young and don't have the mathematical sophistication to always have the correct name for what they are doing, they are developing tools to get their point across.

• "unsquaring" a number
• "these (irrational) numbers go for the rest of your life"

8. For possibly the first time in my career, I feel like I'm helping kids learn to think and problem solve, not just "do the math."

9. I never know what to expect.  Honestly, I think this is a big hook for the kids, too.  There are surprises for the kids and for me.  Sometimes the surprises for the kids were totally intentional on my part, sometimes I'm caught up in it, too.

10.  When I had students clean out folders after the first test, they didn't want to recycle their learning target sheets. : )