This past week I have been working on a video teaching how to solve a word problem involving lengths. This has to be the hardest video I have ever created and I think bad memories of me struggling with word problems have compounded it. In the making of the video I struggled to find the best way to teach it and I thought of many different ways but none of them fit what I wanted.
Learning word problems are difficult but as I incorporated length and my abilities to make the animations it became that much harder to find the right way to teach it. It finally came to me of how to best teach it after speaking with a 2nd grade teacher. I had this great elaborate way of putting two different ways to solve the problem. I typed up the script and set to work on recording. I thought everything would move smoothly from that point on but I soon found out I was losing my voice and as you will notice in some of the recordings it sounds like I squeak a lot (I admit it that I did). I was hoping that would be the end of my problems after editing all my sound mistakes but then the animation sequence came and boy did I have problems. I could not get the software to do anything I asked it to and then the computer decided it wanted a short vacation and shut down on me. And the list goes on and on and on.
Long story short I finally managed to get most of it done and I was about to scrap it yesterday until I got a reminder of why I am doing this. I was on a website cool math 4 kids and found a page where the teacher talked about being burned out and realizing something had to change. She realized it was her that had to change and came to this ahhh moment where she realized she is not just a teacher but a motivational speaker to these kids. Anyway you can look up the site it is pretty cool but after reading that I remembered why I started this whole thing. I did it because I struggled with math so much and I do not want kids to go through the same problems as I did. Now as I work on the animation I realize it does not look great but if it helps a child then it is worth it. So on to finish the animation and get it posted on the 2nd grade page!