On Friday, I gave my students a little quiz on multiplying by two-digit numbers and long division - the most difficult and important math concepts to master in fourth grade. We studied these concepts earlier in the year and have been doing other things in math lately, like decimals and probability. But since multiplying by two-digit numbers and long division are so important for success in fifth grade math, I want to reteach them to students who still are having trouble, so I wanted to see who needed reteaching.
For the last part of the quiz, I had students write and solve 3 division problems - one they considered easy, one they considered medium, and one they considered hard. (This is a Marilyn Burns assessment idea.)
One of my math whizzes this year is Omar. He is a rail-thin student who came to the U.S. from Mexico when he was in first grade. He is a video game master. He has twin two-year old sisters. Some teenagers pointed guns at him and his family as they were coming home from a Halloween party this year. Writing in English is hard for him, and he gets a little mischievous when he is bored or uninterested in what we're doing in class. But he just loves math and has serious math skills that come from who-knows-where. One time Omar said to me, "How come math is so much funner than everything else?" as if this was a question that really stumped him. Another time back in December when he had a few minutes to kill in class, I came upon him solving a long multiplication problem. "What are you doing?" I asked. "I'm figuring out how many hours there are until Christmas," he answered. And sure enough, that's exactly what he was doing.
For his "hard" division problem on Friday, Omar gave himself the problem 123,456,789 divided by 2. And he got it right! That made my day.
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