Lesson Plans in Mathematics

 Richard Sciarrino, Verrazzano Class of 2021, completed major in Mathematics (7-12) 

For my capstone, I wanted to research a topic that I care about and will see as a high school mathematics teacher. Throughout my college experience, I have taken numerous mathematics and educational courses. In some of my classes, we spoke about the correlation between a student’s socio-economic status and their behavior in the classroom.  My paper, “Math Performance in Relation to SES”, is important because I will have students of various socio-economic backgrounds in my classroom and I will have to ensure that all of them succeed.

I found that researching the math performance of students in relation to their socio-economic statuses to be very interesting. Comparing the mathematical achievement of students across numerous countries was very informative. Viewing the data from the different countries, it was incredible to see which ones outperformed the others when incorporating those students from high and low socio-economic statuses. Researching for my thirteen resources was a bit challenging, including trying to find the right sources to use to support my point.

Reflecting back on my paper, my favorite part was the lesson plan section. Currently, I am student teaching at Port Richmond HS, and I have been learning how to be an effective educator both in-person and for virtual learning. When I was writing the lesson plan portion, I was incorporating my own methods that I learned along with other methods to create an effective lesson plan into the paper. I used the lesson called Compounding Continuously in the paper in my student teaching experience. I presented the lesson to my Algebra 2 class and it was extremely effective at engaging all of my students, along with the majority of them fully grasping the concepts and having the ability to apply it.