Build Understanding & Application

Conditional statements look super simple on paper, especially when students are given the hypothesis and conclusion. It should be easy to just write, “If [hypothesis], then [conclusion],” but for my ELLs, this always seems to be a sticking point. The problem isn’t necessarily the logic, but the amount of language students are having to decode.

Getting my students to do homework this past school year was tough. They didn’t see the value in it, and honestly, why would they? They could plug the question into AI, get the answer in seconds, and move on. By the end of the year, it got so bad in one class that some days I stopped really checking homework altogether and just gave a completion grade.

My students could classify quadrilaterals and explain properties with confidence. But when it came to multi-step angle problems, everything fell apart. Here’s what teaching quadrilaterals taught me about recognition vs. application in geometry.

Geometry isn’t hard, understanding the question is. Learn how the RULES Framework helps students, especially English Language Learners, analyze geometry problems with confidence.