Saturday, April 23, 2011

Subtraction with Regrouping is NOT for the Faint of Heart

Especially if you are teaching first grade.

Recently I started 6 weeks with some pretty great first graders, and it has been a pretty seamless transition. The kids have been great, planning has been easy and they really seemed to be learning.

Until Thursday.

I knew it would be difficult. I knew it would take a little more than it had before. I even knew there would be kids that didn't understand.

But... I never could have imagined this.

The first example went really well. They were really impressed by what I had done and how easy it seemed. Subtraction with regrouping? Ha! No problem, we've got that!

The second example was when I started asking questions, hoping that with some prompting they'd be able to fill in the blanks. Cue the chirping crickets.

So, we did another... and another... and another.

And again, and again, and again.

I wanted to beat my head against the cement wall.

The things that were said to me were mind boggling. Despite what I thought, I have no idea how the brain of a 7 year old works.

If I have 1 cube, can I give 8 away?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. (You think at some point they would get that I was trying to find a different answer and someone would say no.)

So I tried something else. If I have 1 piece of pizza, can I give pizza to 8 of you?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

No, I can't.

Why Ms. J? Why won't you share?

Clearly that strategy wasn't working.

So I tried showing it with cubes, with crayons, with fingers, with human examples. While I think the muddy waters slowly began to transcend to murky, I still didn't have much hope that they understood.

So I went to telling them. We have to regroup. "We do?" Yes, we do. Because I said so, we have to regroup.

When we regroup we borrow from our tens. If I'm in my ones and I need to borrow, where do I borrow from?

The ones. The ones. Blue cubes (No, she did not have blue cubes in the tens, they were in the ones.) The ones. The ones. Add the ones (What? Where did that come from? Who is whispering lies in your ears? Help! Please! Someone save me!) The ones. The ones. The tens.

Yes! Hooray! Victory! Hallelujah! We borrow from our tens.

If I have 5 tens, and I need to take one how many are left?

One. Six. Three. Ten. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!! (<-----That one was me.)
Four. We have four left.

It didn't matter whether I showed them with numbers on the board, whether I demonstrated it with cubes on a work mat. Whether I prompted or whether I stood on my head. At the end of an excruciating 50 minutes I had 3 students who could successfully subtract with regrouping (with or without the help of cubes) and 11 who thought I was punking them. It was a big, fat teaching failure. We've all had them before and we'll all have them again. But that doesn't mean it was any easier to stomach. I still felt beaten down, exhausted, and like I needed a drink.

Luckily, all 5 of my first grade team members were experiencing similar fates, so I knew it wasn't just me.

So I am taking the weekend to regroup (ha ha) and hopefully on Monday I will feel refreshed and revitalized and be ready to dive back in to the depths of regrouping.

It can't be any worse than it was, right? Right? No, seriously- It can't get worse? Can it? Please... someone... anyone...

No comments:

Post a Comment