Introduction
“If The Words Don’t Add Up, It's Usually Because the Truth Wasn’t Included In The Equation”. I found this quotation on Facebook and instantly shared it with my friends. Two days later, our school was having a fundraiser at a local bookstore and Sharon Flake was doing a reading and signing for her novel, The Skin I’m In. The next day, there was an informational meeting about the Yale National Initiative where I met with previous fellows and talked about applying. One of the former fellows wrote an entire unit using The Skin I’m In. From that moment, my goal was to become a fellow and write a unit marrying problem solving through literature with problem solving in mathematics.
My School
According to data from the Pittsburgh Public Schools’ website for Pittsburgh Colfax, there were over 900 enrolled students as of October 2016. Approximately half were Caucasian, a quarter were African American, and a quarter were Asian, Multiracial, or Hispanic. The students who leave for Greenway, another Pittsburgh Public School across town, to receive gifted services have been predominantly white students from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds. Out of the 52 students enrolled in my two sections of math this past school year, 17 went to Greenway, and they were all Caucasian. For the past few years, my school has had the largest achievement gap in the district. In our school-wide improvement plan, the number one goal for at least the last two years has been to close the achievement gap. I want this unit to serve that goal.
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