A few weeks ago the 6th grade was studying earth cycles and I had an activity where they were to calculate how many hours and minutes from sunrise to sunset. What a mess I discovered when I kicked over that rock! Of the 19 kids in the class (after spending a couple of class periods on the activity with clock manipulatives in hand) I have only one person who is competent at it and about 5 who can calculate relatively simple ones (sunrise 6:15 am and sunset 7:30 pm). There are several who can not figure out how many minutes there are between 6:15 am and 7:00 am. I believe some are used to ignoring a concept they find difficult because they know the teacher will move on soon enough. They are happy to daydream the period away and take a bad grade or two. They are about to have a new experience. On Monday the chart will go up which will show which kids that master the 'new' concepts. Those that don't master (90% on a test) will have these kinds of problems on every test from now on until they show mastery.
Another rock I kicked over this week is metric conversion, and a rock I kicked over today is estimating mass. The kids were finding the mass of air in a balloon. I passed around a weight that had a mass of 250 grams. We talked about how it would take 4 of those weights to make 1 kilogram. Then I asked them to predict what would be the mass of the air in a balloon. I had about 4 students guess something in the neighborhood of 5 grams or less, but the rest were well over 3 kilograms.
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