Week ((((6 + 2) / 4 * 3 / 3) – 7 + 6 + 5 )/ 3 – 1 )* 1

Blather:  I thought I would send out my overview of how I spent my first week in designing and implementing curriculum for the course we titled, College Prep Math.

I used the first week to cover order of operations, (with some success). I figured the topic is a foundational topic and is necessary for nearly everything else that will be taught. Unfortunately, the computational skills of many are quite low and as such, many were able to show knowledge of which operation to do when but still ended up with the wrong answers. I also noticed a profound need for me to cover integer arithmetic. If I had it to do over again, I would have started there.

One bright spot in the week was to have the students work on the 10-operation expression that appeared in the now infamous Survivor episode. The expression was:

6 + 2 / 4 * 3 / 3 – 7 + 6 + 5 / 3 – 1 * 1

For most, it took 40 minutes until the expression was reduced to 6 1/6. But what joy it was to watch the emotion on their faces when they watched the Survivor Episode where one contestant starts the problem by writing “PEMDAS” before even beginning to simplify and the “winner” evaluates left to right and gets the answer of “1”! I had students who were literally ANGRY with the injustice of it all!

In one final flash of pedagogical brilliance, the next day, (Friday) I asked my students to pretend to be consultants for CBS and write out the expression in such a way that the answer would be evaluated left to right, simplifies to 1 and yet adheres to the order of operations. Many students came up with

((((((((((6 + 2) / 4) * 3) / 3) – 7) + 6) + 5) / 3) – 1) * 1) = 1

But one math buck argued that this expression would also work and uses fewer parenthesis:

((((6 + 2) / 4 * 3 / 3) – 7 + 6 + 5 )/ 3 – 1 )* 1 = 1

Clearly, this young man has a deep understanding of the order of operations. He is also thinking on a completely different plane as the other students in the class. I also have been in contact with the developer of the www.mathalicious.com site, Karim Logue. He is looking for feedback on the lessons he has posted on his site. Unfortunately, he did not have anything posted about The Order Of Operations that I could use. After writing to him of the exploits of my classes, he made an activity around the Survivor episode.


I finished off Friday by having the students do a unit conversion, (stoichiometry). I broke the students up into groups of four and each group was to determine how fast a fingernail grows in miles per hour. We started by agreeing that a fingernail grows 1/8 of an inch every 2 weeks and I let the students take it from there. I intended to Just let them fly with it but had to abandon this crazy notion as I was being called to each of the groups to give them some hints as to how to start the conversions. Thus, the activity quickly turned from student-centered to teacher-centered. This has always been one of my bones of contention with student-centered activities, they only work when either the students possess the foundational knowledge that support the activity or the activity is so structured that it guides them through the activity but the student never really has an opportunity to think for themselves. Nevertheless, I ended class with a worksheet containing two problems from a worksheet I got from the files of my predecessor, John Triscari. It asks the students to use the fact that Usain Bolt was able to run 100 meters in 9.58 seconds and state how fast this is in miles per hour. The second problem on the worksheet has the students find the number of coconuts originally in the pile if each of three sailors in turn wake up and divide the piles up into thirds, take their third, leave two thirds and throw the one remaining coconut to a monkey. In the morning, the three wake up and notice a much smaller pile. When the piles are divided, each sailor would get 7 coconuts, but there would be one left for the island’s monkey. The intent of this problem is to get the student’s to use the working backward problem solving strategy. Since most of the students have the computational skills to solve this problem, it will be interesting to see on Tuesday (we are off Labor Day) just how many actually had the desire to work on this problem long enough to find the answer.


Wince:  I still don’t have a clear direction for this class. I feel it is up to me to design my own curriculum and carry it out. I am putting way more time into this one class than I am in preparing for my two precalc classes. I feel as though it is both unfair and unwise for the district to expect their teachers, who are specialists in curriculum implementation to also serve as curriculum writers. While some teachers have the skills and time to write quality lessons and activities from my experience, most lack are at a lack for some combination of time and skill. Both teaching and curriculum writing are full-time jobs. I fear I will do both jobs poorly if I try to wear both hats. It also seems strange that each school has one teacher teaching this course and we are left to work on our own developing our own curricula. To put the importance of this course into perspective, John Triscari taught five sections of this class last year in his first year of teaching at Southwest. Last year, Southwest missed making AYP by the closest margin to date. According to SW Principal, Bill Smith, we missed AYP by just one ELL student on the math test. Imagine…Just one student! The SW math department credits the work of John Triscari and the work he put into developing both the curriculum as well as the curriculum’s implementation. It would be an understatement to say I don’t feel the weight of expectation on my shoulders now. I contend that this class and its curriculum should be of the highest priority. It seems odd that we have books and curriculum maps for all of our math classes except the one that will most help us meet AYP.