In my haste to write about my experience at the primary school, I forgot to write about teaching at my current Singapore secondary school attachment, CCSS. Last week, I taught a Sec3E class and the topic was Graphs of Reciprocal Functions. Of course, I used Desmos, and I had many ‘teachable moments’ – that’s teacher lingo for seizing an opportunity to teach something that perhaps you didn’t anticipate that you would be teaching. Some of those teachable moments were for students and some of them were for myself.

I created the Desmos activity based on the resources that the teacher had already created, and I included what I thought would be easy review questions for the students to do before diving into the new material. I was wrong about the easy review questions. The first slide was a card sort slide in which students had to match positive and negative cubic and quadratic functions with their associated graphs. This was a challenge for most students. A few students didn’t understand how a negative cubic graph matched the function. We talked for a while about what the inputs and outputs of the function would be and how those would appear on the graph. I *think* I made some breakthroughs with some students.

Because the students didn’t already have their own Desmos accounts, when they logged in, their name wasn’t already pre-loaded into the name field. So, being normal teenagers, some of them created more playful names. I either should have required their names (even though I didn’t know them) or, better yet, required that they use a ‘name’ that denoted where they were sitting (Column 5, Pair 3). We had them work in pairs because it was less of a drain on the wifi and the school had 20 iPads, and 40 mini-iPads. We opted for the bigger screens and lower bandwidth demand. Also, working in pairs on Desmos activities can be quite productive when done well…even though this wasn’t always done well.

I had to ask the regular teacher who some of the students were as I was assessing their answers they were putting into Desmos. For some students, there were misconceptions that I wanted to address. For others, I had to address the silly answers that they were submitting. I walked over to a pair of students who had submitted a ridiculous answer. The boy of the pair was smiling with pride at what he submitted, while the girl was embarrassed. “You’re wasting your time when you could be learning something,” I scolded him. I didn’t stop there. “You’re wasting my time too. Please take this seriously and see what you can learn today.” He basically cowered when I capped that off with one of my teacher looks. He didn’t give me any more problems – or silly answers – for the rest of class. As Chance the Rapper says, “You don’t want no problem, want no problem with me.”

So, I probably could have done fewer (or none) of the kinds of questions where students submit their answers to the class, as opposed to just the teacher. Since this was their first time using Desmos, they valued the fact that they could send secret and silly messages to their friends in the room, instead of valuing the fact that they could peer-assess, which is why I use it in the activities. I should have made the activity shorter, too. My collaborating teacher told me that she liked what I created, that it was quite comprehensive, but it was too much for these students for the first time using Desmos. That was a big take-away for me.

Again, we didn’t finish it, so I had to leave it to the teacher to assign for homework. Since, the students didn’t login, the program would not save where they left off. I corrected a couple typos and sent the new version to the teacher and showed her how to make a copy and edit to make it her own.

Through my teaching here, I’ve learned more about the Singapore schools that what I could have learned through merely observing, which had already been a ton! My history of teaching here (and in the States, of course) gives me a little more street cred for a big sharing session that I have coming up tomorrow. All of the Fulbright teachers – both the Singapore teachers who went to the US and the US teachers here – are leading sharing sessions at AST. I’ll be sharing about what I have learned through my observations, but the bulk of my sharing will be about Desmos. Most teachers here have never used Desmos, so I am doing my best to spread this ICT (Information, Communication, Technology) love. I’ll be sure to share some of my own learning in having students use Desmos here and in the States.

Today I have the privilege of taking a professional development session on “Effective Use of Manipulatives in Primary Mathematics (P3 and P4).” I’m excited to learn even more about the foundational math program that seems to be a key lever in Singapore students’ performance on international assessments. Today is a learning day, tomorrow is more of a teaching day. But really, I can’t tell the difference anymore!