Education Equals Hope Squared--An LCD Projector for a Bilingual Math Class

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

Flashback to your school days: "All right, class, remember that the 'm' or slope is the rise over run and the b is the y-intercept." Only now imagine that this sentence is in a language that's not your own, and that you are far from the place of your birth and surrounded by a new culture. That is the situation that most of my students find themselves in here at M.S. 118 in the Bronx. As a bilingual and special-education math instructor, I find myself in the interesting position of teaching new mathematical concepts at the same time that I am introducing my students to a new language and culture. My students are jumping head-first into learning their new language, even while struggling to master math that I wasn't exposed to until probably tenth or eleventh grade. I want to be able to meet their enthusiasm with everything the world has to offer them. That is why I am reaching out to you at this time. While all learners need to be exposed to a variety of teaching strategies, English-language learners especially respond well to visual representations. In our classroom we are always searching for ways to show what the mathematical idea we are discussing really means. The Internet and some software that is available are spectacular resources that represent in full color such disparate and devilishly difficult concepts as rotations on a coordinate plane, the Pythagorean theorem, or multiplying monomials. These concepts come to life in the form of video and interactive media, allowing the students to see exactly how a quadratic equation is graphed, while allowing for exploration and discussion. In our school, we have weekly access to laptop computers, one for every trio of students, but I have been unable to make full use of them because our department has no LCD projector to use for demonstrations and introductions of lessons. Such a powerful tool would help my students make concrete many abstract ideas and allow me to also teach them more about basic computer and Internet use as a group, not just individually. I am requesting an LCD Projector. My research has shown that the most useful and economical projector is the NEC VT47-R. I hope that you can help us out. Remember, education equals hope squared.