By Jared Gilman

As I sat down at my local coffee shop to plan my upcoming 5th grade unit on fractions, a wave of dread spread across my body. I started having flashbacks to last winter, when my students’ frustrations with fractions led to daily meltdowns. Looking back at my lesson plans, I noticed how many reteaching lessons I was forced to add into the middle of my unit. I recalled the painstaking hours of scouring YouTube for videos on the “easiest tricks” and “fastest shortcuts” for adding and subtracting fractions. “My students just didn’t get it,” I thought at the time. This year would be different, I told myself as I gulped down my large iced coffee.

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