Rationale
Berkeley is home to one of the consistently rated top universities in the world. The district is considered a corridor district, serving students in cities to the north and south, which brings diversity to our student population. However, nearby is a large public university and the technology industry; this dichotomy creates a gap between our most and least privileged students. The student population of Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School reflects the diversity of the Bay Area. King is a large urban middle school, which houses the district’s Newcomer Program for English learners who have been in the country for less than a year. In my classroom alone there are more than six languages spoken at home. 35% of the student population qualifies for free and reduced lunch. The school setting is a departmentalized sixth through eighth grade; however, the sixth grade is cored for humanities and math/science; my students meet for a 90 minute block period, five days a week. During this block period, math/science core teachers have the flexibility to teach the math and science content by day or by splitting the time period by subject; however, the demand for math assessments has left little time for science. Currently, the district just finished its second year of the new science standards rollout, beginning with sixth grade, with 2018 being the first year of full implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The district is in its 5th year in implementing Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the current curriculum adoption is Eureka Math’s A Story of Ratios.
This unit is a math and science unit that can be taught in a math and science core class or self-contained classroom. As a math and science core teacher, it is often hard to fit in all the content when one subject is more heavily scrutinized by assessments. Science ends up coming second to math lessons and this unit is a way to bring science into middle school math in an engaging, culturally responsive way.
In the past, I have taught this ratios unit straight from the textbook. The unit starts with how to write ratios (using a colon, words, as a fraction) and then goes into the different models of ratios. I would bring concentration problems that examine how “chocolatey” milk is by examining the ratios3 or the Mathematics Assessment Project Formative Assessment Lesson “Using Proportional Reasoning” to supplement the adopted curriculum, but nevertheless, the lessons were still pencil and paper problems, no matter how higher level the problems were. Additionally, the math was taking most of the block and completely separate from the science. This thematic unit seeks to address the inequality of time spent on science in classrooms.
Comments: