Demographics
George Shirakawa Sr. School is one of twenty-one schools in the Franklin McKinley School District, a Title 1 district, located in the east side of San Jose, California. Our school is a (kindergarten to eight grade) campus with a rich multi-ethnic population of 800-900 that consists of Hispanic (46%), Asian (44%), Caucasian (5%), African American (2%) Filipino (2%), and mixed race (1%) students, and of these students, 40% are categorized as English Language Learners (ELL). About 77% of our students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and their families also qualify for free breakfast and monthly food distribution sponsored by the county. The surrounding neighborhood is comprised of lower-income families where English is not the native language nor is it spoken at home. Grandparents or other guardians are raising students, some students have gang affiliations and some families live in homeless encampments. Considering these obstacles, I always try to make mathematics lessons culturally relevant, and to maintain a positive learning environment that allows students to feel safe, comfortable, and excited about school.
In 2014, our district adopted the Common Core State Standards for mathematics and language arts. The transition to common core instruction has been difficult for those of my students that prefer a more teacher-led approach. When planning lessons, I often rewrite word problems to make them more culturally relatable to all my students, and I often include supplementary practice problems from online resources and other textbooks.
The lesson on scientific notation in the district-adopted textbook is one of the most challenging for my students. The lesson is divide into two sections:
- Rewriting numbers and expressions involving measuring the length of skin cells and finding the distance between planets.
- Performing operations with numbers and expressions involving exponents (i.e., scientific notation).
My students find these problems far too abstract, which makes problems with extremely large and small numbers seem unmanageable. This unit helps my students gain perspective through relatable and personalized examples so they can better understand each component of scientific notation: the product of the first term (the coefficient) that tells us about accuracy and the second term (a power of ten) that tells us about magnitude.
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