Last Friday...

Fridays are tough. I teach period 5 and 6 which has in the past felt like trying to wring soapy water out of a dry dish sponge. The previous Friday resulted in story time about my life after my Year 10 class just could not bear another trigonometry question. Instead they heard about what my teen and uni years were like. Just maybe, they learned a lesson of a different sort, or perhaps they gained a new appreciation for the unambiguity and defined functions of sin, cos and tan after the explanation of my not so traditional path into teaching.

Friday mornings are a battle with my Year 9s. The transition from the freedom of tutor class to the expectations of maths class is difficult without actually transitioning classrooms. But Friday mornings might still be more productive than Monday double periods or after lunch on Wednesdays and Thursdays. We had missed many lessons already because of things like athletics day, Teacher's only day and parent teacher interviews and I was dragging out the number topic in the hopes of providing them with the solid basic skills necessary for survival in a numeracy-based world.

I had planned a lesson to teach them the important skill of finding a percentage of a number, required in life for things like calculating discounts when you're shopping or making sure you are paying the right amount of tax. However, just before the start of the period one of my student's mentioned "Oh miss we have to go down to social studies to work on our projects". I took a deep breath. Now I understood they had a project due on Wednesday and when you have a deadline, it becomes priority. But my priority was their maths. How would they get through life without being able to calculate percentages!

After the majority of my Year 9 class went down to their social studies class. Some stayed behind ready to do some maths. But not the lesson I had planned, the activities they had been working on earlier that week. I had to give them some credit though, at least they were doing maths, just not the maths I wanted them to learn on that particular day. One of the many benefits of the digital age is accessibility, so I knew that if my students didn't learn percentages here with me today, there will be opportunities for them later if they wanted to, they could look up a YouTube video or plain old google how to do it.

I just took it in and appreciated the fact that they were doing maths. They even seemed to be enjoying themselves and helped each other with their work. There were awesome moments of them challenging each other and feelings of pride and accomplishment that comes with learning a new skill. Maths after all is not just knowing how to do the maths but being able to use it to create, invent, solve and understand. And maybe, just maybe, my students will eventually keep on wanting to do more maths, even on Friday afternoons.