Friends and Peers

This week MayZin and I worked on reading graphs and slope-intercept form. I struggled helping her this week, mostly because she had a hard time understanding the relationship between x and y values along with fractions and decimals. These past few weeks I have started noticing a gap in MayZin’s mathematical learning. She is working on learning to write equations, but she has a hard time working with fractions converting decimals to fractions. This is a problem in foundations of algebra because fractions are a huge portion of algebra. I believe this is why she is struggling with slope-intercept form, because an understanding of fractions is important to find the slope of a line.

MayZin was much more motivated in her classes this week, especially her reading class. I had mentioned in earlier posts it is often difficult to get her to focus on her reading plus work. Earlier in the semester I noticed that she would become distracted during reading plus. This week, however, she started reading plus as soon as class started. She even asked some of her classmates to be quiet so that she could focus on what she was reading. I believe this change is mostly because progress reports were recently sent out. She seems to be trying harder these past few weeks. I wonder if this is because she was unhappy with these grades. I believe that she is trying to finish the school year on a stronger note, and she is headed in the right direction.

MayZin seems to spend a fair amount of time with her friends. Every week I ask her what she has planned for the weekend, and after some suggestions she often tells me she will probably hang out with her friends. She spends a lot of time socializing with her friends before class as well. Theorist Harry Stack Sullivan believed there were four positive aspects to intimate friendships. These four aspects developed higher self-esteem in adolescents (Arnett,2013). These four aspects are informational support, instrumental support, companionship support, and esteem support. I have noticed MayZin’s friends offer all four. When she is not in school her friends will text what she missed. They will also work together in class, helping each other with vocabulary worksheets. MayZin spends much of her time between classes with her friends showing that they rely on each other for company during structured social time. Finally, I often see them supporting each other through their successes. When someone gets a good grade they congratulate each other. If they didn’t do as well as they hoped they encourage each other to work harder.

Since we were working on graphs again this week I worked on MayZin’s reading level with her again this week.. According to the WIDA can do descriptors the ability to “evaluate usefulness of data or information supported visually or graphically” (Gottlieb, M., Cranley, M. E., & Cammilleri, A., 2007) is not attained until level 4. She struggled with reading the graphs that she was asked to work with again this week. I mostly worked with her on deciding which variable is the independent variable, and which variable is the dependent variable. From there I asked her leading questions until she was able to figure out the the x-value is the independent variable, and the y-value is the dependent variable, and why they are like this.