It was a Monday - that much is definitive! After spending time working on finding perimeters and areas for the last couple of weeks (after trying the CMP book Filling & Wrapping with is all about surface area and volume but too tough for the majority of my students so we stepped back and did basic perimeter and area..) today we had a "mini'lab" with centimeter cubes. Students needed to use cm cubes to create rectangular prisms - for example - the first direction was to create a rect prism with 8 cubes that was 8 cm long. THen they had to record the dimensions (length, width, and heigth) in a pre-made table. THey had to also record the volume (which they could get one of 2 ways - count cubes - easiest obviously... or mulitply lxwxh) and then figure surface area by counting squares on all 6 sides of their prism. This we did together - the entire 8 cube prism - they then needed to create another 8 cube rect prism with different dimensions, then a 10 , then all the possible 12's, a 20, recording for each the dimensions, volume, and surface area. A few questions to answer - how do you know you have found all possibilities? How does surface area change as volume increases? then, the GIANT LEAP!!! Without cubes, find all possibilites for 36 cubes and answer some questions.

WOW!!! I don't know - sometimes I think I expect too much - other times, I think the students just simply do not want to do anything at all complicated. They refuse to attempt to do things on their own. THey want to be walked through everything step by step... You would have thought they'd never found areas before - never counted cubes before...

Something that was supposed to be fun and lead them into insightful reflection and discovery ended up being just frustrating for most...but my take... as we did the 8 cube together... quite a few simply zoned out - they refuse to even count the cubes... much less attempt to find the area of a side...GRRRR!!! and then there was Cody who struggles so with EVERYTHING.... working away... doing great all alone excpet an occasional check from me to make sure he was still headed in the right direction.

Some of them simply are not concerned about LEARNING - they want the grade, and want that grade to be an A... not work for the A at all.... simply be shown the easy road to it....

tomorrow- we go back into CMP - they will hate that even more.... life is a condundrum....in 7th grade math anyway...

social studies- we talked at what is means to be a person of virtue - what would you do if you found $5 but there was no way to find its owner... $20 that belonged to the old lady ahead of you in line at the store - $20 that belonged to the young well-dressed guy ahead of you in line - how all that related to working in the 7th grade store - very interesting insights here!!