Math IS Fun

M and I worked for an entire hour on a math pretest last night!!

The third trimester at Chemawa began last week, so we have a whole new group of students on academic probation. Many returners, but quite a few new faces. I am assigned to work with one of the same students, and he was more willing than ever to do a little bit of work last night. On Monday, each student started a math pre-test which begins with addition and subtraction and works its way up to higher level skills. I don't think very many students finished it, but our task for last night was to correct what they had finished to try to determine in which areas they need help. It's a small success, but I was jazzed to work through a good 3 pages of the test, probably 40 problems out loud and see that M does have the skills. It was exciting to be able to explain it in a new way, show him some tricks, and just to be privy to his thought process. I asked him to "think out loud" as he was calculating, and he more than indulged me. We had a goal to finish the 3rd page by 7:50 when he had to leave for work, and we did just that.

When we had finished the last problem of the page, he put his pencil down, looked at me for a second and said, "That was kinda fun. See you later." Woohoo, right?! A couple of times throughout he'd made comments about feeling smart because he was catching on to a concept, or he'd remember a factor before I had to talk him through getting to the answer... really exciting. We're certainly making progress.