As I drove home from student teaching on Highway 100 east, I could not help but notice that something felt different about today. The uncomfortable cold that I had often felt walking from the classroom to the parking lot was not present today, and while I would not call the air particularly warm, it was comfortable, around seventy degrees. Often around this time of year, the weather would turn sunny and pleasant for a week or two; this Fake Spring would be followed by more wet, cool winter weather for a while. Today felt like it could be the start of this year’s Fake Spring. The orchards on the side of the highway were blooming, and the vibrant green grass of the pastures stood out against the blue sky.
I decided to try something different today. When I got home, I left the math textbook on my desk and put the textbook for the string cheese class in my backpack. But instead of getting on my bike, I walked toward Andrews Road. And when I reached Andrews Road, instead of waiting at the bus stop, I continued walking south, toward campus. I crossed Andrews Road at Redbud Drive, across the street from the elementary school where we had filmed a few scenes for the Dog Crap and Vince movie last year, and took a zigzag path through a quiet, tree-lined residential neighborhood, eventually leading to Elm Street. I was pretty sure that I had never been on this street before, and if I had, it was not one that I traversed often.
I turned south on Elm Street and crossed West Eighth Street at a light. The stretch of Elm Street that I was now on, between Eighth and Fifth, was unusual in that it had no intersections for about a third of a mile. Neither Sixth nor Seventh Street extended this far west. I had read in the local news that some residents of this street had petitioned the City Council for more streetlights, because it gets unusually dark at night. Their petition was rejected, because of the Jeromeville City Council’s pathological obsession with feeling like a small town, despite the fact that Jeromeville had a population of well over 50,000. According to Jeromeville’s elected officials and their ilk, as they would say, streetlights would bring traffic and crime to the area. I found this laughable; I grew up in the real world, and I knew that it was dark streets, not bright ones, that attracted crime. But I had no concerns walking this street early in the afternoon on a sunny day.
I crossed Fifth Street, which was also the border between the city of Jeromeville and the University of Jeromeville campus, at another light. Directly in front of me was a field used for recreational sports; I walked at a slight angle across the field until I reached Colt Avenue and continued south until the street narrowed to a bicycle path near Stone Hall and Ross Hall, where my undergraduate chemistry and physics classes had been. Education classes were in the confusingly-named Academic Building VIII, a little ways past Ross Hall. The name became even more confusing when considering the fact that Academic Buildings II, III, and VI existed, but Academic Buildings I, IV, V, and VII did not. I wondered if the missing numbered buildings had existed at one time, but had been renamed after wealthy donors who wanted their names on those specific buildings. Academic Building VIII was about two miles from my house, and it had taken thirty-two minutes to walk there. Not bad, especially on a nice day like this.
Today was my long day of classes. First I had the seminar with the other math student teachers. I had nothing too significant to report. Dr. Van Zandt talked a little bit about our upcoming portfolio project, where we would put together a portfolio of work from this year to go with our résumés and letters of recommendation, and this would be submitted with job applications. In April, the University of Jeromeville School of Education would host a job fair right here on campus, where school administrators from all over the region would come to Jeromeville to conduct job interviews with student teachers. I needed to think about what I could include in my portfolio. It was overwhelming to consider that, in a couple of months, I would be applying for actual jobs as a teacher. I was hoping that I could just get hired at Nueces High. I was having a good year student teaching there, and Nueces was reasonably close to Jeromeville that I could still live in Jeromeville and stay involved at Jeromeville Covenant Church.
Next, after a quick bathroom stop, I walked down the hall for the string cheese class. The class was officially called Reading In Secondary Schools, and as the title suggested, we learned about how reading skills integrate into classrooms of subjects other than reading or English. All these years later, the thing I remember the most from this class was string cheese. The class met once a week for three hours, from 3:10 to 6:00. Because of this difficult schedule, Dr. Austin, the professor, gave us a snack break in the middle of the class, with each of us responsible for bringing something once during the quarter. Early in the quarter, someone brought string cheese for the snack break, and it was such a hit with everyone that someone would make sure to bring string cheese every week.
At the start of each class, Dr. Austin, passed out a handout with the outline for the class, so we could take notes. I was intrigued by the final topic on today’s outline. Usually, at the end of class, Dr. Austin would demonstrate some kind of technique that could be used to stimulate classroom discussions. For today’s outline, though, the final segment of the class just said one word, not a word I expected to see on this class outline: “Baseball.”
By the time we reached the “Baseball” part of class, it was 5:17pm, and I was full of string cheese and potato chips. I had also eaten a banana and a bunch of grapes, because fruit made my snack healthy and that was totally how nutrition worked. Dr. Austin passed out a two-page article for us to read as he explained that Baseball was an activity for classroom discussions. Our tables were arranged in a U-shape around three walls of the classroom, and as we read the article silently, Dr. Austin placed four empty chairs in the middle of the classroom in the shape of a diamond, positioned like the four bases on a baseball field.
“So I have some questions about the article that I prepared on cards here,” Dr. Austin explained. “We’re going to take turns being the batter, and the batter will answer the question and build on the last batter’s discussion. I’m just going to go around the circle, taking turns. Mike, you’re up first. What is the author saying about the use of reading materials in classrooms?”
Mike, a student teacher from the science program, looked at his copy of the article and replied, “Reading material in classrooms needs to be age-appropriate.”
“Good,” Dr. Austin said. “You can go to first base.” Mike sat at the chair in the first base position as Dr. Austin continued, “Melissa? Anything to add?”
Melissa Becker, from the math student teaching program, said, “He said here that not all students are ready for grade-level reading material. So it’s important to make accommodations for students who aren’t.”
“Good. So you now go to first base, and Mike, advance to second base.”
I continued watching, answering a question myself when it was my turn, as we moved from one base to another. I also tried to think about how to adapt this for a math class. We did not read and discuss articles in math class, obviously. But maybe I could have students answer math problems in order to advance on the bases. I could work with this. I had walked to campus today, but I did not feel like walking home two miles in the dark. I took the bus home, thinking about making Dr. Austin’s baseball activity into a math activity the whole time.
About a week and a half later, after much planning, I walked from the teacher’s lounge at Nueces High to Judy’s classroom, ready to try my new idea in my actual student teaching classroom. I arrived to the classroom a few minutes early and put signs on the four walls, labeled “First Base,” “Second Base,” “Third Base,” and “Home.”
“You have a test tomorrow, remember,” I announced to the class. “Today we’re going to try a new activity I learned from one of my professors. It’s called Baseball.” At the mention of baseball, a few excited gasps and murmurs arose from the class. “Everyone get out a sheet of paper,” I instructed them. I had discussed my idea with Judy earlier this week, and she suggested having everyone do the problems on paper, whether or not it was their turn at bat, so that I could collect the papers and grade it like an assignment. This gave every student an incentive to participate.
After I explained the rules of the activity and answered students’ questions, I shuffled the cards that had the students’ names on them and picked one. “Andy,” I called out. I had prepared slides in advance with problems like those from the upcoming test, and stacked them in random order. Andy Rawlings looked up as I put one of these problems. “Find x,” I told Andy. “Everyone else, you find x too. Write your work on the paper.” Andy solved the problem without much difficulty, using cosine to find the missing side length in a right triangle. “Go to first base,” I said, pointing at the sign on the wall. Andy got out of his desk and stood at the First Base sign.
Next I called on T.J. McDuff, a quiet freshman whose proficiency in mathematics many of his classmates did not recognize. He had the only perfect score on the last unit test, and when the students were comparing their scores with the others sitting near them, many of T.J.’s neighbors in the class seemed surprised that he got a perfect score. I put another straightforward problem with trigonometric ratios on the screen, which T.J. solved correctly. He walked to first base, and Andy walked to second.
I called Kayla Welch next, and put a problem on the screen that was a little more complicated, requiring the inverse tangent to find an angle measure. Kayla thought about what to do, tried something on her calculator, and sheepishly said the wrong answer. “Sorry, that’s incorrect,” I said. The next card was Eduardo Ortiz. I said, “Eduardo? Same problem?” Eduardo answered the problem correctly, and moved to first base, advancing T.J. and Andy to the next bases.
Angelica Maldonado raised her hand, and asked, “Mr. Dennison? What’s the object of this game?”
“We’re just practicing the kind of questions that will be on the test?”
“Are we keeping score?”
“Mostly just for fun. You want to try to get on base and get your teammates home.”
“We should play in two teams, against each other,” Andy said from where he stood on third base.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “This is my first time doing anything like this, so I’m open to hearing your suggestions. Maybe I’ll do things differently next time. Let’s continue what we’re doing today, and you can tell me your thoughts at the end of the period.”
I continued running the baseball activity as I had planned, calling on students and giving them practice test problems, as the students walked the bases around the classroom. But even before the period ended, before I asked any of them for suggestions, I knew that Andy was right. Baseball was meant to be a competitive game. Dr. Austin’s suggestion might work well for classes where students discussed articles that they had read. But mathematics was not this kind of class. Math had problems to be worked out with correct answers, which did not always lend themselves to the kind of discussion that Dr. Austin had led in his activity. For next time, I needed to turn this into a competitive activity with two teams, and I needed to keep score.
A few weeks later, the geometry class was preparing for a test on surface area and volume. Two days before the test, I began class by saying, “I thought about some of your suggestions for the baseball review game, and I think this is going to be more fun. First, you’re going to be competing against each other.” I pointed with my finger, making an imaginary line down the middle of the classroom, then pointed to one side, and then the other, as I said, “This side of the room, you’re batting first, and this side, you’re fielding.” Some students reacted excitedly to this as I continued. “I’m going to call on one person from each team to answer the same question. If the team that is batting gets it right first, then the batter gets to go on the bases, like last time. But if the fielding team gets the question first, then the batter is out. And after three outs, we switch which team is batting and which is fielding, just like in real baseball.”
“I like this game better,” Andy said excitedly.
“I hope you will.” I pointed to my stack of overhead projector transparencies, on which I had written the questions, and continued, “Also, the questions are either singles, doubles, triples, or home runs, depending on the difficulty of the question. I have put the questions in random order. And you can get help from your teammates, but if you get help, it counts as a walk. You only go to first base, and the other runners don’t advance if they don’t have to. But if you get the question on your own, before the fielding team, you get to go however many bases the question is worth.”
Andy spoke up again. “This is gonna be fun.”
“I’m glad you think so,” I said, “but please don’t talk when the teacher is talking.”
“Sorry.”
The first problem in my stack of slides was a straightforward one about finding the volume of a triangular prism. T.J. answered correctly and advanced to first base. Next, I put up a word problem, involving a solid block of metal that had to be melted down to make cylindrical coins. “How many coins can you make from this block of metal?” I asked. After working for a few minutes, Andy answered correctly for the fielding team. “One out,” I said. Turning to Andy, I added, “Good thing you got that one, because it would have been a home run.”
“Aww,” several members of T.J.’s team said.
T.J. did score when a teammate answered the next question correctly for a triple, but the fielding team got two correct in quick succession after that for the second and third outs. The runner stranded on third went back to his desk. I continued calling names and giving questions; the batting team got enough questions right to load the bases, but the fielding team had answered two right for two outs. “Kayla batting, Eduardo fielding,” I called. The two of them walked up to the chalkboard, and I put a problem on the screen, to find the volume of a shape that looked like a truncated cone, with the tip cut off.
Eduardo stared at the problem and started writing some calculations on the board for finding the volume of a cylinder. He quickly raised his hand for me to check his answer. “Incorrect,” I said. He looked confused, having not figured out yet that a truncated cone was not a cylinder. The circle at the top was smaller than the one at the bottom.
Kayla, meanwhile, had written the formula for the volume of a cone, but when she realized that the figure was not a cone, and also not a cylinder, she called on her teammates for help. Andy and Angelica ran up to the board to help Kayla. Andy copied the truncated cone to the board and drew dotted lines above it to fill in the missing part of the cone. “Subtract the volume of the big cone minus the small cone that’s missing at the top,” he said to Angelica and Kayla. They began working on this excitedly, but paused a few seconds later when they realized that they did not know the height of the missing part. The three of them whispered to each other, trying to figure out what to do, but keeping it quiet enough so that Eduardo and his teammates would not hear. Eduardo had also asked for help, and his team seemed to get stuck at the exact same place. I watched the whole thing, wondering if anyone would figure this out.
Suddenly, maybe thirty seconds to a minute later, I heard furious scribbling on the batting side. Angelica had drawn a right triangle, representing the axis, radius, and slant height of the cone, with a smaller right triangle embedded inside where the missing part would be. She had labeled the missing height “x” and was solving a proportion to find the missing height, something that we had covered extensively in an earlier chapter of the textbook. She ran to her desk to get a calculator as Andy stood in front of the board, making sure that the other team could not see the breakthrough that they had discovered. I turned and looked at Judy, who smiled and nodded at me. She clearly seemed to have a positive impression of my skills at getting the class to participate and work together, at least today. Score a win for the student teacher.
Kayla, Angelica, and Andy enthusiastically raised their hands. “Mr. Dennison!” Kayla called out. I looked at their work and said, “That is correct.” Kayla’s entire team erupted into applause. “That’s only a walk, since you had help, but the bases were loaded, so the runner scores from third.”
Kayla’s team scored once more, and that score of two runs to one held to the end of the period. “One more thing,” I announced. “I put all of the problems for today on a worksheet. So, the paper you’ve been writing on today, staple it to this worksheet, and any problem from the worksheet that you didn’t do in class today, that’s your homework. I passed out the worksheet as the students packed up their things.
“I liked this baseball game better than the last one,” Andy said. “You should do this every time we have a test.”
“Yeah!” Kayla added.
In my decades of experience teaching, as I write this, I have been made to attend many training sessions and professional development workshops. A significant number of them have dealt with the topic of reading and writing in subject area classrooms. And, almost always, these sessions have something in common: the presenter will say something like, “And you can use these techniques in every subject area classroom. Except math. I couldn’t find an example of how to use this in math class.” In some years, the school where I was working focused schoolwide on reading, or writing, and I was required to do certain reading and writing activities in my math class. It always felt so forced and inauthentic.
I have continued leading games for the students to review for tests throughout my career. Over the next few years, I would refine the rules of Math Baseball to allow for more scoring. I also included a feature where, if the player got the question right on the first try without help, the team got to draw a card with the name of a special baseball play on it, like Double Play, or Sacrifice Fly, or Stolen Base. These could be used on future plays.
I also experimented with other games; some were more successful than others. Early in my paid teaching career, in addition to Math Baseball, I also started playing Jeopardy!, based on the TV game show, to review for tests. And I modified Math Baseball slightly to make Math Football, where the questions were worth different numbers of yards based on difficulty, and I kept score like in football instead of baseball. I have also continued my idea of making a worksheet with all of the problems, and then assigning whichever problems were not already done in class for homework. Most of the time, students enjoyed these games, although some definitely got into it more than others. These games tend to be something that students remember about my class for years to come.
At the time, when I was student teaching, the Math Baseball experience felt like an indication that things were starting to come together. I had found something to do in my role as a teacher that engaged the students in a way that they enjoyed. The job fair was coming soon. I would have an opportunity to present these successes to people looking to hire new teachers, and by the fall, I would be employed as a teacher in a high school somewhere, playing Math Baseball with a new class of students. Hopefully they would enjoy my teaching as much as Kayla and Andy and Angelica seemed to. All of those years of confusion, coming to Jeromeville with no clear idea of what I wanted to study, the rude awakenings in classes that were more difficult than I expected, the disillusionment with mathematics research after that summer in Oregon, all of that was behind me now.
Readers: Tell me in the comments about something you have done, for a class or for your job, that went really well.
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