Greetings and Salutations!
Let me introduce myself. My name is Harrison Mann, but everyone calls me Sonny. "Why?" you might ask. Maybe because my parents realized everyone would call me Harry Mann, which inevitably starting happening in middle school.
Call me Batman, not Harry Mann
Did you know what you wanted to be when you were younger? I sure did; I was going to be an NBA basketball player and make millions. When I stopped growing, I soon realized that my dream was not going to become a reality, so I attended the University of Wisconsin to find another career path.
After 4 years and a diploma, I still had no clue what kind of career I wanted. If there is one place to be if you are unaware of your future, I strongly recommend Hawaii. After spending a year hiking, swimming (surfing didn't pan out), reading and soul searching on the four main islands of the 50th state amended, I realized that I wanted to become a teacher. It was a job I knew would challenge me, allow me to use my creativity, and most importantly help other people. Sadly, I left Hawaii, but I had a new purpose in my life and attended National-Louis in Chicago to get my teaching degree and Masters.
Picture your dream work scenario. While most are not lucky enough to obtain that dream, I'm elated to tell you I have. I got a job teaching 5th grade (my wish), took on a role coaching basketball (my passion), and quickly became the school's Speech and Drama coordinator. Interesting fact: I use to act when I was younger and was in a commercial with Michael Jordan.
This is now my 10th year teaching and a few milestones have occurred along the way. I married my best friend Jen. We have an intelligent, kind, and loud son Trevor (5 years old), a beautiful and bossy daughter Olivia (2.5 years old), and coming in December we will meet our third child (gender and name unknown).
As for my interests and hobbies, traveling has to be up there. This past summer I was hiking up in the mountains of Estes Park, dancing in the streets of Austin, golfing the links of Lake Geneva, and swimming in Florida's gulf. You can be sure to find a good book in my backpack, a soundtrack on my iPhone, and a smile on my face.
Back to teaching. As mentioned before, I am in my tenth year of teaching. The first eight years, I taught reading, writing, language arts, and math. After the curriculum changes from Common Core, I asked my principal if I could spend a year just focusing on math, and luckily he agreed. Last year was amazing for me!
I fully immersed myself into math, attended a wealth of professional development, and read an article, "Why Do Americans Stink at Math?" in the New York Times, that greatly changed not only what I taught, but more importantly how I taught. A few of the big changes I made were:
1) Instead of a "Me, Y'all, You" approach to problem solving I switched to a "You, Y'all, We" approach. This means that instead of me showing students one way to solve a problem (Me), then have them try my method on a problem with a partner (Y'all), and finally by themselves (You), I switched to keeping my mouth shut and letting students solve a problem completely on their own (You), then compare answers and strategies with their peers (Y'all), and finally discuss the problem and variety of strategies used as a whole class (We). This exposed students to other students' thinking, caused them to defend and support their answers, and exposed them to how there are many different ways to solve one problem. It allowed me to do less lecturing, more facilitating, and a lot more learning.
2) I attended an ICE Conference (ICE Conferences) last year, and one of the seminars I attended was about authentic audiences. The speaker discussed many different ways to expand our class outside of the classroom. As a result, I created a website to display students' work, assigned projects on Explain Everything that were converted to YouTube instructional videos, and this year will be starting a shared math blog with other 5th grade students in a neighboring town. I truly believe when students know that someone besides their teacher will be viewing their work, their engagement and effort greatly increase.
