Smallest and Largest

Most of my 6th graders struggled with this handout today. Only 4 of 36 students scored 8 out of 8 on it. I offered no help on this except my reading the instructions to them and reiterating that for each operation, the two numbers must be different.

I retyped this task from the Noyce Foundation.

If you teach 6th grade math or if you could share this with a colleague who does, I'd be very curious to learn how your kids might do on this. (Guess I'm now wondering how 7th and 8th graders fare on this too.)

I'm feeling disheartened and ineffective with this group of 37 kids. If I squinted really hard, then maybe I could spot just a few tiny specks of mathematical growth in them.

This teaching thing is tough.