Clip 1/19: Modeling through Geometry: Pre-Lesson Part 1

Overview

In their pre-lesson conversation, Molly McNinch and math colleague Jim Karditzas discuss how she prepared for the Rolling Cups lesson, and how she hopes to engage her students in “substantive mathematical discourse.”

Molly shares what she’d seen in her students’ prior learning related to their understanding of how cup-shaped objects roll, and the challenge of making the learning experience “approachable and tangible” for them. She notes that at the end of the lesson, she wants her students to have a “viable argument that they can justify.”

Teacher Commentary

This has been my first year of teaching the Enriched Geometry class, and I absolutely love them because the majority of them are freshmen, so they come in as these little babies ready to learn. I love it because I'm like, “All right, this is your first course at Woodside. We get to push the limits because you don’t know any better than to reach for your highest potential.” It's a lot of fun because I get to do a lot more of that deep math. The class that was filmed, I was actually a little bit nervous because when we first picked the date, it was still kind of ... I was having trouble with them breaking out of their shell. But they did great!