Tag: Shawn Seeley

Dividing Fractions – How and Why

Ask many adults why flipping/inverting/multiplying by the reciprocal works, and you’ll likely find out that they are just as confused now as they were when they were young students. What’s a reciprocal, anyway?

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Multiplying by Multiples of Ten

This third grade standard has its roots in K-2 standards, and is fundamental to understanding more complex mathematical problems, including multi-digit multiplication and division.

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Slow is Smooth. Smooth is Fast.

Ok, here’s the deal: I feel like the way most of us currently assess and view mathematical fluency and ability (timed tests) is complete garbage. Now that I have that out of the way, let me explain myself….

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Four Stages of Learning

As a teacher and parent, I know how much discomfort there is when someone you care about and are heavily invested in, struggles.

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What Do Turtles Have to Do with Multiplication?

When teachers (and other well-meaning adults) can’t explain something in a way that students can understand, sometimes they resort to cute tricks, gimmicks, and shortcuts.

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Playing with Equations

Putting myself into the shoes of a fourth grade student, I can’t imagine a much more dry, repetitive, and boring task than filling out worksheets with numbers that don’t mean anything.

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Teach Them to Fail

There is much to be said about the benefit of failing, especially at a young age. Unfortunately, the “bubble of parental protection” can at times give students (and teachers) a false sense of proficiency, resulting in failure of a summative assessment. Productive struggle and early failure are vital to the learning process, build character and perseverance, and must become the norm.

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Start With the Heart

Too often, narratives are bogged down in introductions full of superfluous info, causing the heartbeat of their story to flatline because they rushed both it and the conclusion.

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As You Think, So They Are

What if we use confirmation bias and the self-fulfilling prophecy to our advantage? What if we believe in our students’ ability to meet high social and academic standards?

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Breaking Bread – Lunch with Students

We sit outside on the picnic bench under the eaves in the school courtyard and chat about life. I ask silly questions like, “If you had to eat one thing for every meal for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?”

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