Teaching PEMDAS

Many readers may be saying, "What in the world is PEMDAS?" Simply put, it is an acronym for the mathematical order of operations. I work one-on-one with a middle school student and we spend fifth period each day in a sixth grade learning resource center math class. Many of these students struggle with math. They find multiplication mind boggling, division daunting, and fractions frightening. How could I expect these students to understand exponents, much less the order of operations. One day, in the middle of class, I suddenly had an idea; what if I turned the kids into the math problem? I used post-it notes and a very simple problem to test my idea. Order of operations was now very visual. A few days later I presented a full scale lesson based on this idea. The students were actively engaged, and one student even came up with a creative way to understand exponents. I was able to incorporate his idea into the lesson on the fly. Everyone enjoyed the lesson, and the students learned about both exponents and order of operations.



If you have difficulty viewing this video, it can be found at www.vimeo.com/kellysipe/pemdas

The video was taped using a simple Kodak digital camera in movie mode. The file was then converted to a MP4 file using I-Movie, and finally uploaded at vimeo.com. Vimeo is a free service, similar to You-Tube, that allows users to upload files up to 500MB in size. The web site was very easy to use and I will use often to post videos of my classroom.

Analyzing Student Data

Spreadsheets have been used in business for centuries. Beginning with early ledgers, hand written and calculated documents, to today's high tech spreadsheet programs, such as Excel or Google Sheets. Spreadsheets can be extremely effective in a classroom. First, spreadsheets provide an "at a glance" method of determining which students have missing assignments. Additionally, spreadsheets can be used to make calculations of grades quickly. In this assignment, the spreadsheet provided the averages of individual student scores, as well as the class average in seconds. This saves a great deal of time when one is preparing report cards.

However, more importantly, teachers can quickly sort data and identify which students are falling below the class average.

Additionally, spreadsheets simplify the graphing of individual student progress. This reduces the chances of a teacher overlooking the fact that a specific student is falling further behind his/her peers in a certain area of study.

Using spreadsheets and charts not only make it easy for a teacher to identify students that are missing assignments, it also makes it easy to see how students are progressing. A quick look at the chart above indicates that students test scores are improving, and a what rate they are improving. A teacher can know if his/her teaching methods are reaching individual students. By tracking what methods are used to teach each unit, teachers can identify learning styles of individual students and provide individualized instruction within that learning style.

Another benefit of spreadsheet charting is the choice of graph types, or changing them. I prefer a bar chart as above, but what if my building administrator prefers to view data in a line chart? Working in a spreadsheet, this is an easy conversion. Therefore in moments, I have a chart in the format my boss prefers.