How my first class went...

The first class of "social justice mathematics" happened yesterday. There were 7 students who attended, grades 6-8. There were 4 girls and 3 boys.

Overall, I felt like the class was great! I felt like the place I started was a very good place. We were able to start with ideas the students were familiar with, and build upon those. The lesson wasn't obscure for the students, culturally or mathematically, but the students engaged in higher level thinking in both areas.

None of the students could define what a census was at the beginning. One student knew that it might have something to do with our government. The activity where small groups examined the census results from our city in a particular area worked out really well. There were two groups of two and one group of three. I think that groups of three was a better size. One group looked at age distribution in Albany. I asked them which age range the majority of the population was in, and which age range the minority of the population was in. Then I asked them why they thought that particular break down in ages might occur. And then, how that information could be useful. The last two questions didn't have one right answer. Some of the students took a little while before they felt comfortable talking cause they thought they might get the "answer wrong". Once they felt more comfortable talking, their ideas were totally viable solutions to the question.

One major thing I would change was to break that lesson into two lessons; one on census and one on surveys. I was nervous ahead of time thinking that I wouldn't know enough to keep the students engaged, but it turned out I had way more input and ideas than I had thought I would. I thought the class would go about an hour, but we ended up staying in class for an hour and a half, and we could have spent longer. After class, the students continued to work on their surveys.

The part of the class where the students got to create their own surveys was especially exciting for them. Many of them had conducted surveys before, but it was a new experience for them to consider bias in their questioning, population and sample groups. This process of creating their own surveys enabled the lesson to become more relevant to the student's experience.

Next class we will get more into number operations as we begin to analyze the data results from their surveys.

Many of the students requested homework. I didn't have anything in mind ahead of time besides administering their survey. I told those students that wanted homework to look through a newspaper and find an article which used numbers, statistics, and/or mathematics.