Sixth Grade Math

I’m not sure what to call sixth grade math because it’s even below Pre-algebra (which is seventh grade). Introductory Algebra, maybe? Mr. Griffin’s eighth grade class was finishing up their movie during MCAS week, A Beautiful Mind. I remember watching that movie when I took his class, and I also remember using John Nash as an example in my SAT essay. So that was definitely a useful movie to watch. It was also really good…

So instead of watching that movie with the eighth grade I went into MRS. GRIFFIN’S (yes, they’re married) classroom in the sixth grade. A much younger group, a lot more energy packed in these little sixth graders, and a different level of “maturity”.  It’s a lot harder to get this group to stop talking because they’re so energetic. Mrs. Griffin uses the “hands on your head” method, meaning, when she says, “hands on your head,” all the kids put their hands on their heads and pay attention.

She also really takes advantage of this new installation at this school, something like the SmartBoard. I forget what exactly it’s called. But she can project handouts in color on this screen and connect documents from her computer. And just like a SmartBoard, she write on it with a stylus if need be. When I was in sixth grade, she used to have to write everything on the white board, erase it, and then rewrite. Now, this process goes a lot faster when she uploads a document from her computer of all the vocab words she used to write down, onto this big screen. Ages have passed since projections and Vis-à-vis markers, which was what I used to learn from.

Anyway, the sixth graders focus a lot more on vocabulary than calculations like the eighth graders do, building the foundations of terms for Algebra. I have to mention that these two girls I’ve known since they were really small (like one or two years old) were in this class, and I haven’t seen them or talked to them in a long time. They’ve grown up. Ready for Davis (and Carter) to be like that, Mr. Kahn?

The class starts out with a gift from another student teacher—lollipops. That already gives the kids a huge sugar-high in their little bodies. And then they take notes off that SmartBoard thing from a document Mrs. Griffin had already created. Finally, she gives out the packet of homework for the next chapter and the class starts to work on the in-class worksheet, as well as the nightly homework. That’s when I come in. The kids in this class don’t ask for help as much (they’re just labeling lines, rays, segments, parallel, perpendicular, and intersecting) but because they have this free time and because they have a lot of energy, we became “friends,” more like they would show me weird and random things they think of. Like this one kid coordinated with another student in a short period of time and sang a short jingle/song for me. No worries, they still got their work done, but I thought it was hilarious. So this is what I was like in middle school…