This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Students
"I sold my most valuable possession, but I knew that because I worked at Hewlett Packard, I could buy the next model calculator the very next month for a lower price than I sold the older one for!"
Steve Wozniak
Like the Woz, an advanced calculator is the "most valuable possession" that we need.
Every day, my students come into their classroom and are expected to jump right into math work and concepts.
The focus is one one objective taught to mastery, which leaves little room for extension or remediation except through centers.
My students are driven to learn more, but even as 7th and 8th graders, they lack many of the basic math supplies I was required to have in 5th grade -- colored pencils, individual calculators, and a floppy disk formatted for Macintosh -- I mean, a flash drive.
My students are a fabulous group of kids that accomplish great things through hard work. They have many interests -- basketball, of course, but we have a gymnast and dancers, leaders and helpers. We are a predominantly black school in an urban Philadelphia neighborhood with active and involved parents, teachers, and administration.
My Project
My students need 20 scientific calculators to help take the struggles with arithmetic out of learning algebra. You can't add or multiply fractions -- should that mean that you fail algebra and are doomed in math forever? Currently, we have 20 $1 calculators in our classroom -- we do not even have enough of those for every student for our state tests (PSSA).
The goal in my classroom is to introduce and engage my students with the ideas of mathematics, to have them analyze. I have known many scientists and even math teachers who struggle with arithmetic, even as they have gone on to higher level mathematics courses. My students need to THINK math, not STRUGGLE through calculations.
My students will use these calculators to master their algebra, data, and geometry standards as they take on the increasing challenges of Common Core Mathematics! The students are doing the work -- the thinking and the analyzing.
The more advanced calculators will take one layer of struggle out of instruction, allowing my students to focus on the details of Algebra and analysis of data.
My students need to believe that they are mathematicians -- to do that, they need to realize that mathematics is more than numbers and arithmetic.
These calculators will allow me to ask harder questions that engage my students on all levels. With these calculators, my students can look at the relationship between the mean, the median, and the outliers more easily. We can calculate best fit equations for our scatter plots.
These calculators will help my students SEE math in new ways!
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Leisman and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.