Skellzies!

When we walked into the room, this was on the board:

Teaching Problem: For three consecutive semesters, an adult education teacher began classes with roughly 36 students and ended with roughly 12 students. What can the teacher try that will help to reduce attrition?

Ramon started the meeting by telling us a bit about his experience over the last year and 1/2 as he has transitioned from his experience as a teacher and professional developer with CUNY Start, a college transition program, to being a math teacher at BMCC’s basic education program, working with a range of students from basic education to high school equivalency-level. He told us when he taught in CUNY Start, he wouldn’t lose more than a few students per semester, but in adult education, he has gone from overcrowded classes at the beginning of the semester to small classes at the end. Judging from the comments around the room, this didn’t seem unusual for other teachers.

Ramon has been really discouraged by the situation and has wanted to do something about it. He asked us to help answer the question on the board, what can the teacher do to reduce attrition. The notes on the conversation are below.

Ramon listened carefully to our suggestions and said that he would think about them for the next semester. He then described the plan he tried this semester. Ramon thought that maybe part of the reason that students were leaving his class was that they weren’t connecting to the math, what did it have to do with their lives? And maybe they didn’t feel like they were an important part of the class? He wanted to combat the idea some of his students had that “no one here really cares about me and who I am.”

To generate buy-in, he decided to invite students to reflect on and share a piece of their own culture and do research to find connections to math.

Some examples of student projects included the size of the crowds at the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade, a game from Senegal and investing in the stock market.

Launch

Ramon focused this CAMI meeting on a particular project from one of his students (who went on to pass the HSE test!). Joshua did his research project on skellzies, an NYC street game that goes by many names, depending on what part of the city you grew up in.  You can read Joshua’s short paper explaining the history of the game and how it is played; it is the Further Reading pdf link above.

Ramon had laid out the skellzies board on the classroom floor (usually, it is drawn with chalk on the street). Linda, Ann, and Mark – all native New Yorkers – all had childhood memories of playing the game, though there were some regional and generational variations in the exact rules.

Ramon told us to go to the side table to choose a cap to play with, then we played the game for a couple rounds so that everyone had the chance to try flicking the caps towards the numbered boxes. Mark, Ann, and Linda reminisced about using metal caps and melting crayons in them and smoothing them out by rubbing them against the concrete.

Since there were a lot of us playing, it would have probably taken a few hours to finish a game. Ramon interrupted us and asked us to look over some mathematical questions that he wrote related to the game. We spent the rest of the hour in small groups, choosing and exploring those questions with all of the tools Ramon put out for us – scales, rules, compasses, protractors, and markers.

Teacher Explorations

Mark & Maggie did some experiments to explore what happens when 1 skully cap hits another skully cap that is 4x heavier. They drew their results right on the table, observing the direction and the distance each skully cap went when the lighter one hit the heavier one.

Sophie & Audrey worked on the same problem, but they did their experiments on paper. The data they focused on were the distance the second cap moved after being struck and the angle between the paths of the

Additional Resources

If you want to do similar research projects with your students, Ramon shared the materials he used with students:

• Research Project about a Cultural Artifact: Student Instructions
• Scoring Rubric for Research Project

In Attendance: Betty, Maggie, Ann, Solange, Greg, Eric, Sophie, Audrey, Yi, Mark, Linda, Kevin, Ramon

Programs Represented: BMCC Adult Basic Education Program, CUNY Start, CUNY Adult Literacy & HSE Program, York College Adult Learning Center, Brooklyn Public Library, LaGuardia Community College

Respectfully submitted by Eric & Mark