Mrs. Boldt's Busy B retweetledi
A couple of years ago, I was assigned to teach an 8th grade “math lab” class. The goal was to fill in any gaps the students might have had in their background knowledge prior to high school, so I had them work their way through a series of self-instructional, self-checking math activities I had developed, starting back at elementary addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and progressing sequentially through fractions, decimals, order of operations, negatives, expressions, 2-step equations and so forth.
Students from all math levels were assigned to the class, and one of them was the top kid in her Algebra 1 class and a 𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘭𝘺 conscientious student. Concerned that the material would be beneath her, I pulled her aside and told her she was free to skip ahead if she wanted to, but she declined, saying she would rather work through the activities with everyone else - which she dutifully did, at a much faster rate than the others. I figured much of what she was doing was unnecessary, but she seemed to be happy to do it, so I let it go.
Later that year, she pulled me aside one day during my lunch duty to ask me about some complex algebra problems she was working on at her lunch table. (Yes, she was 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 kid.) As I wrapped up my final explanation, she said to me under her breath, “I'm so glad I had you for math lab this year. That class made my life 𝘴𝘰 much easier.”
Never, never, 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 underestimate the need for students to both understand and master the basics.
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