Well, it’s almost Thanksgiving break, and boy do we need it.  I’m probably going to jinx everything by writing this post, but I think it’s important to step back and look at the good things that are going on.  It is very clear to me and my colleagues that the students have come to some sort of milestone in our geometry classes.  Girls who were not excited or engaged with the problems just a short 2 months ago, are now making efforts in class.  I have one student, who when faced with a problem introducing the Triangle Inequality Theorem, ripped a piece of paper from her notebook, folded it in half and then took one half of the paper and folded it again, showing that when you make a triangle out of two halves, (one half becoming two sides), the two put together must be bigger than the third side.  This is a girl who just 3 weeks ago, got back a problem set with a “B” on it and outrightly stated to the class “I hate math.”  Now I look back on that time and see how far she has come, but how do you get the students to see that?

I’ve heard similar stories from my colleagues.  One student said thank you to a teacher by saying, ” This is the first math class where I feel like what I think matters.”  Times like this definitely make us feel good about what we are doing and how much it means to the students.  Clearly, they are not intellectually mature enough to know what to thank us for or to articulate what they are getting out of this class right now.  However, that’s the nice thing about this type of curriculum.  It seems that the skills we are trying to impart to the students just kind of “sneak up” on them and they don’t even realize what they are learning.

So, we may be over the hump, or maybe just over one hump.  We have number of students invested in the process, and although they might not like it yet, they are learning and that’s a pretty darn good feeling.