Students can learn far more than we ever expected and math fluency is one of the ways this is going to occur.
We want math fluency skill, but how are students going to get the skill? It's through the will to work hard. They work hard and they gain the skill. But what if they don't want to work hard? Why don't they? Well, it's because there is no thrill from the learning. It is just very clear that when students have gained thrill from the learning, they have the will to work hard and then they gain the skill that the adults want them to have.
We are going to talk about how to keep that thrill high, and we are going to do it in one of the craziest ways; the data. How you keep the data has a lot to do with the thrill.
If they don't have the thrill and they lose their will for working hard, what we do as adults is drag them. Think of a Tarantula Wasp; what she does is sting the Tarantula so it is paralyzed and then she drags it to her nest. Once at her nest, she will lay her eggs on the Tarantula's body so they have food to eat once they hatch. While morbid and graphic, that is what we do as adults, we drag kids to the graduation line. What we like is the kids pressuring us to teach them more instead of us pressuring them to learn more.
We are going to make math fluency one of the favorite things kids love to do at school. The fluency quizzes come in booklets (available on our website), one for each grade level, kindergarten to grade 8. It includes quizzes, the answer key and the graphs needed. We are going to replace harmful data with thrilling data. We are going to learn from athletics. Athletes know when they have a personal best and athletes also know when they have helped the team. The same kids that are on the sports teams are also sitting in your classrooms. In the classroom you can show a student when they have had a personal best and we are going to show them when they have helped the team. It is thrilling data.
Students can learn far more than we ever thought possible and math fluency is one of the ways this occurs. Check out the video presentation for even more great ideas and ways to accelerate and challenge your students.
