Today we had a teacher inservice on assessments. It was actually very good, much better than some of the other teacher inservice days I have been to. I typically have a hard time sitting through these because I lose my focus easily and start to drift onto other things. Today I really only drifted once and I suddenly thought of something that happened in class yesterday during my math lesson.
This week the children have started learning basic statistics. Formulating a question, determining whether they wanted their question to be an open response or if they wanted to give choices for their sample population to pick from. We then used our results to make a bar graph, line graph, pictograph, and pie graph. The children loved these lessons because they got away from the typical addition, subtraction, multiplication and division they would normally have.
While formulating questions we then discussed how we want our questions to be valid and unbiased. So, of course the children would like to know what unbiased means. I decided to give an example question that was biased. So, I thought of what I could use as an example. I love chocolate and thought I would compare chocolate truffles and hershey kisses. I went to a student and said, "Which chocolate is your favorite: delicious soft centered chocolate truffles or..."
Before I could even finish my question, Benedict yells out, "Why would you want to eat chocolate covered mushrooms?"
In January, my class took a field trip to Wegmans. Wegmans has an awesome field trip for fourth graders on nutrition. Located by the mushrooms in a glass box were truffles. This was a big deal to my class, even myself because they cost $699.99 a pound. This apparently was such a remembered event by Benedict, that he immediately thought I was talking about chocolate covered mushrooms.
Things to remember: When giving an example for children, make sure your examples are ones that children will know or they might think you love to eat chocolate covered mushrooms.
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