WHITE BOARDS. Who knew. Well...I knew, but I guess I didn't want to be overwhelmed. After reading several teaching books, I learned not to try and implement a hundred new tactics in your classroom during the first year of teaching. When I first started at the end of last year, I made the mistake of hearing about "best practices" and decided I wanted to do it all, so I would try something new constantly. This year is all about the routine for me. I guess 6 months of routines was finally enough to try something new.
I don't teach the most motivated kids or the nicest kids, but today, I truly felt like my students really liked math class. And if they didn't, they sure fooled me. Today was the first day I had 100% participation and those who teach similar populations, know how difficult and rare this is to come by. First, I went to Home Depot to buy a huge 8 x 11 white board to get cut into smaller boards. This is the cheapest way to buy white boards that I've heard of. Depending on who you ask, make sure that it's the actual white board because if I didn't make the worker go find an Expo marker and test out the board he was about to give me, I would've had 32 student boards that would not have been the right material for Expos. Also, if you find a cool worker, he'll cut the board up for free for you which of course is what I was aiming for. Otherwise there is some charge for every cut they make. Yes, it adds up.
After testing out white board usage in class, I figured students are responsible enough to bring their own markers and I provided them with old (but clean) socks as erasers. After watching some of them abuse the markers, I sure was glad I didn't spend any of my money providing those for them. I received an email about white board implementation from another teacher, so I bravely decided to use it on my most chaotic class. I split them into groups of 5 and held a competition using white boards. Winning group doesn't have to do homework and runner up only has to do half the problems versus everyone else doing all assigned problems. I had them hooked. Put in a "you must not go above a whisper or you'll have points deducted from your group" rule makes everything perfect. Each student in the group gets a letter: A, B, C, D, or E so when I randomly call out a letter, you best believe the rest of the group will hold the individual accountable if they get the question wrong or don't attempt the problem. I have NEVER seen these kids work so hard and boy did it make my job so much easier not having to deal with classroom management like any other day. The competition ended up being really close so I ended up not assigning any homework to everyone. I'm actually really looking forward to trying this technique with all my other periods now!
