Magic Dice
I have been a gifted specialist in an elementary school for the last 7 years. I love it. As much as I love it, I also know that at heart, I’m a middle school teacher. I loved that, while reading Twelfth Night, kids looked up the word eunuch, then had to look up the word castrate. I can still see the face of the boy who desperately asked as he tried to clarify, “Uhhh…Ms. Espo, this CAN’T be the right definition?” Who wouldn’t miss those conversations?
But there is an ethereal magic inherent in elementary schools that, unless you’ve experienced it, defies description. Every year, a leprechaun breaks in to leave his tiny green footprints in classrooms throughout the building. He is a naughty leprechaun with a very small bladder. In every classroom he somehow manages to leave his tiny, glittery footprints on the toilet seat and, despite his small size, turn the water in the toilet green. On the 100th day of school the kindergartners dress up the way they believe people who are 100 years old might. When I pass them in the hallway, I pretend not to recognize them. One year, after being very insistent that a child needed a visitor’s pass from the office because we didn’t let just any 100-year old person walk around the building, a kindergartner - who was VERY exasperated with me - pushed down his suspenders and huffed, “It’s ME, <his name>.” Throughout the year, I’m handed flowers that were picked on their way to school, drawings, and notes.
Students launch themselves in your arms or ask for hugs. They ask you to take a picture of them doing work and text it to their adult. They cheer when you tell them they’re ready to learn something new. They sit, concentrating hard on the math in front of them, and when asked what they’re doing, will respond, “My brain is growing,” when just a month earlier, they’d have given up without trying too hard.
They argue with great earnestness on the subject of whether or not Strategy Girl is also the principal (she is not no matter what they tell you or how much they look alike). They show you every wiggly tooth (it is at these moments I miss middle school the most). As they walk into the building and see the back field covered in frost, they ask, rather perplexed, if it snowed. They stop in my classroom to give Monkey, a weighted stuff animal, a hug on their way to class. Sometimes they carry Monkey down to class so he can visit for awhile and then bring him back when the visit is over.
It is that magic that allows for so much of the other magic to happen.
As a gifted specialist who works for a division constantly working towards true equity, I work with all of the students in third and fourth grade. This means my job is differentiate whatever activity we’ll be doing. It’s actually a lot of fun to figure out how to make activities accessible to everyone. One of the easiest ways to make a math activity accessible often involves a simple tweak: Dice.
This is my best trick. Whenever possible, we give students the same or very similar math game to play, but they may be playing with different numbers. I realized early on that giving a 20-sided die to one student and a 4-sided die to another could sometimes cause problems as students wanted to know why someone else had something different. I order my stash of dice from Amazon and they always come in a big, black velvet-looking back. It took me unaccountably long to come up with this, which seems to be a recurring feature of my teaching career, but I had a flash of inspiration while planning a lesson. As I explained it to my principal, she told me that was the moment I really became an elementary school teacher.
Instead of carrying the dice in a regular Ziploc bag and/or already sorted by number of sides, I brought them in the black velvetish black. The Magic Dice were born.
Depending on the activity, they might all start out with “regular” dice and then move on Magic Dice. I might start some groups out with Magic Dice and others with regular dice. The second group might have to “earn” their Magic Dice. You never know who might start with the Magic Dice, but as the first group gets their Magic Dice, the whispering begins. Students work even harder because they want those Magic Dice. They call me or their classroom teacher over to look at their work and see all that they’ve accomplished because they want the Magic Dice. Once the Magic Dice come out, everyone has something from the bag pretty quickly, something that helps us tailor their mathematical experience. Your Magic Dice can change. You might start off with a 4-sided die or a 20-sided die and end up with a 10-sided one.
Yes, they see that other students have different dice, but they’re all Magic Dice. It looks random to the students, but I can feel around in the bag and pull out the die I want that child or group to have. As they get older, I explain that the bag of Magic Dice helps me to make sure that every student finds the activity just the right amount of hard because very often if school isn’t hard, you’re probably not learning as much as you could. That makes plenty of sense to my students.
Elementary school magic makes a difference. Sure, as students get older they see less magic in the world, but what if we let them hold onto that magic as long as they can? Someday, when I’m ready to move onto another adventure, I hope I can take that elementary school magic with me back to middle school.
There’s joy and wonder to be had in learning. How can we make changes to what we’re doing so that all students see value in what they’re doing and in what they’re classmates are doing, even if they’re not the same thing? How do we help them see that school should be a little bit hard for everyone and that if it’s not, you’re not learning as much as you could be?
As a gifted specialist, I’ve seen too many students whose entire identity is wrapped up in being a “good” student. Being a “good” student means getting everything really easily and definitely faster than their classmates. When school gets hard, they struggle to cope because struggle means they’re no longer a “good” student. We need to normalize taking risks and being wrong. We need to normalize learning from mistakes and knowing if you made a mistake, it’s more than likely there are other kids who made the same mistake. We need to normalize learning for learning’s sake and not for a grade or because it’s going to be on the test.
We can start with some elementary magic.
This is wonderful in so many ways. And I definitely see both of my offspring in your descriptions of different students -- one who thought everything was supposed to be easy and would give up when it got hard, one who struggled in different ways and needed both a little creativity and empathy.