My Questionable Teaching Methods

As I've mentioned before, I often get bored in the classroom. Math is just not interesting for me. I never asked to teach it; rather, it was thrust upon me, and we (math and I) have had a shaky relationship ever since. Sometimes I have trouble staying awake during my own lessons:

“So then, it should make sense that an angle formed by two secant lines cannot possibly have its (yawn)… vertex at the… ex… exterior of the…. [SNORE]”

“MS. COCCO!”

“Wha-!? … the, uh, exterior of the circle.”

Who’s interested in that garbage, anyway? I don’t blame my students for trying to sleep through my lessons. I should also mention that I work strictly out of the teachers’ edition of the book – no provided worksheets, no overhead projector, no activities. I have some homemade Algebra Tiles to model polynomial multiplication, and some small bits of construction paper to model adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers. I have some rulers that I periodically steal from the sewing class, that I usually have to give back when it has been discovered that I stole them. I was lucky to find cheap protractors on island, but no compasses, and certainly no TI-89 scientific calculators. The Internet provides little more than a bunch of lesson plans that are much more boring than my own.

Can you blame me for trying to spice things up in the classroom a little bit? But, sometimes, it turns out, I push the envelope just a little too far.

Sometimes I show off my cheer-leading moves that I picked up in 7^th grade during a short-lived week of fame as an alternate on the cheer-leading squad. Teaching an all-girls junior class means I get to really let loose. During a lesson on absolute value inequalities, I was trying to prompt the sixteen of them to say the word ‘split’ (which I must have already said twenty-five times in the span of that lesson) in reference to splitting the inequality into two in order to simplify. I prompted them verbally – “Ssss…?” Sssppppp…?” – and explored a number of other bodily movements – splitting apart two fingers, two hands, my whole arms – before resorting to the extreme: “Ready, okay!”, hands on the hips, hands together, and before any of us knew it, I was in a full split on the floor. “SPLITS!” they all exclaimed, before falling out of their chairs laughing as I struggled (and failed, twice) to get back on my feet.

My other cheer-leading move that, I pray, will remain in the hearts of my students for the rest of their lives, is the FOIL dance. FOIL, First Outside Inside Last, is the method used to multiply two binomials, thus creating one trinomial. It goes something like this: “Ready, okay! F – O – I – L! Bi– to the bi– to the tri-nomial!” Here is a diagram of my hand motions; please forgive its crude nature:

The FOIL Dance / Cheer-leading Routine.

For those who are thinking about trying it out, note that the first four beats are really a whole-body effort, similar to the YMCA dance. The last four beats are simply finger motions, similar to throwing up gang signs, which I have a suspicion is really the reason the students like the dance so much – they love throwing up “style” in Micronesia. A posed picture is incomplete without a face of intense attitude and a peace sign, hang ten, or more complicated form of “style.”

Sometimes I put mathematical concepts to song. For four days, I made the seniors sing, to the tune of “Frere Jacques”, a lovely song about the quadratic formula. Go ahead and sing along with us: “X equals negative B, X equals negative B, plus or minus square root, plus or minus square root, B squared minus 4 A C, B squared minus 4 A C, all over 2 A, all over 2 A.” They weren’t that upset about it at first, but after I made them sing it in rounds, their hatred for me was pretty solid. I thought they sounded like angels. But alas, guess who passed that test? Well, most of them. Some of them were lost causes.

Last week, I guess I took it too far. Or maybe they did. But I started it. We’re on Chapter 10 in freshman Algebra I, which means we’re talking about Relations and Functions – graphs, for those of you who have forgotten your Algebra terminology. Whenever we encounter new classification words, I try to explain them thoroughly in English and sometimes Pohnpeian so they can truly understand the new word. For example, when teaching substitution, I ask for other examples of things we substitute:

“When I can’t come to class because I’m sick, who stands up in front of you and gives you an assignment?
“Russell!”

“Now when I come back, is Russell still here?”

“No!”

“And how about when we’re cooking – if we substitute butter for margarine, do we also put in the butter?”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“Taste bad!”

By these curt exclamations, I can get a sense that the students really understand that when substituting a number for a variable, the variable is no longer present in the equation.

And so, in trying to explain relations and functions, I used an analogy that I thought would be appropriate for instruction in a Catholic high school, where we teach the Ten Commandments. It started out pretty innocently.


I taught them that a mathematical function is like a functioning marriage. Anyone can be in a relationship with anyone else, just like any two variables can have a relationship to one another. But in order to create a healthy, FUNCTIONING (are you seeing where I’m going here?) relationship, also known as a marriage, those two partners need to be faithful to one another. Similarly, to create a FUNCTION (can you tell I’m excited about this analogy?), each value of the domain, or set of x-values, cannot be paired with more than one value of the range, or set of y-values.

I should have stopped there. But these adorable, sly smiles started creeping onto their faces as they always do when they suspect I’m about to get silly, and I couldn’t end there. I pointed to the board:

“Is this relation a function?”

“No!”

“Who is being unfaithful?”

“Three!”

“How about this relation – is it a function?”

“Yes!”

“Yes, because no one is cheating on anyone else. How about this relation – is there any adultery going on here?”

“No!”

“And this one – are the partners of this relation breaking the eighth commandment?”

“Yes!”

“Who’s a cheater?”

“Six!”

Well, any lesson where the whole class is excited enough to answer in unison is a success story for me. Despite their laughter, I could tell that they were really understanding it. I walked out of the freshman classroom feeling good about myself.

This past Wednesday, they took their test. I must say, their cumulative average was one of the highest I have ever seen on one of my tests – a 90%! As I graded, however, I felt more and more uncomfortable with their responses. I didn’t think they would actually take my analogy too seriously, but I was wrong.

Here are some of their answers to the question: “Is this relation a function? Explain why or why not.”

“No, three is a cheater.”

 “Not a function because the domain has many partners.”

“No because the range is fooling around with two domain partners.”

“Not a function because 1 is cheating on 2, 3, 4, 9, and 5. Geez!”

“No because one x cannot have all of the y’s. That’s not the way God wants it.”

“Not a function because x is cheating on every y variable.”

“No because the domain value is having relationship with all the range.”

“X is a lying cheat.”

“It’s a function because x is being faithful to y.”

“Not a function because one cheated and have plenty relationship.”

“Three is having relationship with two people and one of them is going to find out.”

“No because I catch somebody cheating in the domain.”

“No because everyone is cheating on everyone.”

“Yes, no adultery.”

“No because everyone is breaking Commandments.”

“X is unfaithful.”

“No because 3 is cheating on 4 with 5, or on 5 with 4, depends on who is the married couple and who is the mistress.”

 “Yes because no adultery. Everyone married. No one cheating or sleeping in someone bed.”

I guess this will, at the very least, spark some lively discussion among the parents regarding my teaching methods. Whoops! Good thing I'm out of here in less than two months..


It's true - I will be back stateside on June 6, back in the Midwest June 12. It's honestly impossible to wrap my mind around; I can no more imagine myself back in that environment than I can imagine myself NOT in this one. Pohnpei has become my home; the people I call my friends here have become my family. I don't know how I will be able to pick myself up and drop myself back in that place I used to call "home," but I'm sure it will be a challenge. I look forward, however, to the immense support I know is waiting for me.


I'm still waiting to hear back from a couple of positions - one volunteer, one a "real job" - before I'll be able to say "what's next." I seem to remember, however, a little more than two years ago, less than four months before leaving the country, answering the question of "what's next?" with "who knows!?" So maybe I'm not so far off track. Isn't age 23 the exact age when you're supposed to be allowed to have such uncertainty ahead of you? I like to think of it as keeping my options open. After all, that's the attitude that brought me to Pohnpei. And I wouldn't trade this experience for the world.


See you all this summer! Thanks for reading.