As a teacher it is important to evaluate both your students and yourself. After finishing this lesson I tried to think of how this unit may have run in a real classroom and the hiccups or implications that it may have faced along the way.
The first thing that I would have liked to have changed would have been elements of the final project. I thoroughly enjoyed the first few lessons where the students were using various forms of media (i.e. the UNICEF website and grocery store fliers) to learn more about global poverty. I found it extremely creative and fun to be able to incorporate statistics about poverty to teach important math concepts. I especially liked my first and fourth lessons for this reason. When it came time for the students to create their own forms of media, however, I found using math a very difficult subject to use. While I came to the consensus to let them to do a project by presenting various poverty statistics to the community, I would have liked to have had a much stronger emphasis on the mathematical part of the unit as opposed to how to create effective media. To add to this point, I also do not think that the few lessons I prepared on the true math concepts about decimals, large numbers, and percentages, would have been enough for the students to really grasp the math processes. In this regard perhaps I would have liked to make my unit several lessons longer.
To alter the unit slightly differently so that students could have been given more time to work with the mathematical processes I would have tried to include the theme of poverty throughout several of the student’s subjects. Math would have been useful, as it was in my plan, to introduce the various statistics. Another subject such as computers or English could have then been used to discuss other aspects of the global problem. The UNICEF stories, how to create a presentation, and how to take action in the community, for example, could have been topics that would have been more appropriately discussed in the those subjects. If the unit ran this way, where it was spread out amongst various subjects, I think that each teacher would have had enough to time to really teach their curriculum required subject matter while still getting at the underlying theme of poverty.
In general, I really enjoyed my unit but can certainly see that there would be potential hiccups along the way if it were to be introduced to a real life classroom. The overall message that I got from this project was that it is simple to bring in aspects of the media or social issues into typical subject areas. I can see how this technique could be used for countless other issues and how it could be adapted to suit many other subjects. I hope that I will be able to implement a lesson with these underlying social issues when I get into my own classroom.
Understanding Poverty Through Numbers 