Renee Jagodzinski									3/7/07
MED300/Cushman							Journal Week #5

Date: 3/5/07
	
	Today when doing the lesson on Order of Operations, I put PEMDAS on the 

board and wrote what it stands for on the board while we talked about it.  Once we started 

to go over the problems, I noticed that the students look at what they need to use when 

doing the problems.  By looking at what they need to use, they understood how to do the 

problems and tend to look back to check themselves.  For example, when we looked at 

one of the problems, they looked back up on the board to see what they should do first 

and then kept going on from there.

	So, I believe that teachers should teach their students to write what they need to 

know for a particular problem down before starting the problem.  Teachers should teach 

their students to look through a particular problem first to look for any terms or anything 

that they know and write down everything they know about that term.  This way, when 

the student starts to go through the problem, they can look back at what they wrote and 

remind themselves.  This way, they are not keeping all the information in their heads, 

which can be confusing to remember everything.

	I connected PEMDAS to a common saying usually known to many students, 

which is “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally”.  When going over the order of operations, 

I related this saying to the operations and the way in which these operations should be 

used.  I showed students what each letter of PEMDAS represented in the saying.  This 

way, if they have a hard time remembering PEMDAS, they could remember the saying 

and the other way around.  After introducing this saying, many of the students seemed to 

understand this very well and have seen this saying before.

	When teaching the lesson, I was mostly engaging them into working through the 

problems as much as they can and only helping then out when needed or have a 

misunderstanding about a specific problem.  But, while they were going through the 

problems, I monitored how they were doing.  After they finished a problem, we went over 

it together whether it was correct or incorrect.

	One misconception that I thought was interesting when looking at the problem              

100-50(4-2), is that they understood that they had to subtract the numbers in the 

parentheses first.  But, they subtracted 100-50 before they did 50(2).  This was because 

they didn’t understand that 50(2) was the same as 50 * 2.  I tried to clarify this more 

clearly for them by explaining that the parentheses and the multiplication sign mean the 

same thing in this situation.  However, it doesn’t always mean the same thing in every 

case.  

	I think I could’ve engaged them more by going through all the problems on the 

board together and have them talk me through each problem instead of having them go 

through the worksheets themselves and then going over them together afterwards.  By 

having them talk me through the problems, this can help with their communication skills 

and their explanations of things.  This will help them when they are doing parts II, III, and 

IV on the Math A exam that require explanations.

Date: 3/7/07
	
	Today we did a lesson on working with equations that have variables on both 

sides of the equation.  The first thing we did was work on the anticipatory set word 

problem together.  After working with the students on this word problem, I learned that 

students tend to understand and comprehend things better if you guide them in talking 

through a specific problem, instead of just giving them a problem and having them work 

through it themselves.  Teachers should teach their students to highlight or underline 

important information that will be useful to them when trying to solve problems.  For 

example, in the anticipatory set, while we were looking at the word problem, we wrote 

down the problem on the board and asked the students what we should underline that they 

feel is important into evaluating this problem.  We asked them what it is that we are 

looking for and how they would approach this problem.  We guided them through the 

problem even though they were deciding things for themselves in trying to understand the 

important parts of the problem.

	When looking at examples of equations that have variables on both sides of the 

equations, they seemed to have trouble when dealing with negative and positive integers.  

They have troubles doing simple operations, like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and 

division, involving positive and negative integers.  So, we tried connecting positive and 

negative integers to money situations.  For example, when adding a negative and positive 

number, we associated the negative number with money that you owed to someone and 

the positive number with money that you gave to that someone you owed money to.  They 

seemed to understand this much better.

	Throughout the lesson, we were mostly engaging the students instead of lecturing.  They were mostly talking us through problems and we would just stop to correct them or 

to answer any questions or misunderstandings.  We guided them through the problems by 

asking them what they would do in different situations and what steps they would take in 

solving for the variable in the equations.  When they were incorrect about something in 

the question, we tried to clarify their understanding by asking a question in another way 

to help them see why their way was incorrect.
 
One way I would modify this lesson, was have them do a problem by themselves 

after we went over the first couple.  By going over the first couple, this will give them an 

idea on how to do the problem.  Then, by allowing them to do a problem by themselves, 

they will be able to test themselves to see if they understand the material.  Also, you will 

have an idea what your students got out of the lesson and what they still don’t understand.