My Experience - Learning Math in Junior High

Although junior high was a rough patch in my childhood with being bullied at school and not having many friends, now that I have grown enough to have some perspective, I am grateful to have been able to experience junior high in both Japan and the United States.

Trapezoid Lesson - United States

I remember learning about how to find the area of a parallelogram. The teacher said something like

"Doesn't this shape look pretty similar to what we just learned with finding the area of a rectangle and a square? Well, the good thing is, it's just as easy because the formula is exactly the same! Yup, just remember, base x height guys! Okay?"

After several practice problems with different numbers, the teacher moved onto the area of a trapezoid.

The teacher said "Now this shape looks a bit more confusing, doesn't it? Well, it's called a trapezoid and the formula for the area is a bit confusing too. Here is the formula for the area of the trapezoid. Make sure you write the formula nice and big in your notebook so you can find it easily!"

After being given the formula, our homework for that evening was about 10 problems on the area of parallelograms and 10 more on the area of trapezoids.

I "plugged" the numbers into the formula and completed my homework that night.

Trapezoid Lesson - Japan

I repeated the same lesson on the area of a trapezoid since this was a time when our family had to move back and forth between the two countries.

Just like in the United States, we covered the area of a parallelogram before moving onto trapezoids.

The teacher said "This is a weird shape. Hmm.....how should we find the area of this shape? Does anyone have any ideas?"

After a moment of silence in the classroom, the teacher suggested using our prior knowledge of triangles, squares, rectangles, and parallelograms to see if we could draw any correlations.

"The student that comes up with the most unique and original idea has no homework today!" smiled the teacher.

As I waited for the teacher to provide the class with a formula, the teacher remained silent for the next 10 minutes of class. Another 10 minutes went by and almost half of the class period was gone by then.

The method I came up with was drawing 2 lines to create 2 equivalent triangles and 1 rectangle. Since I had learned about finding the area of those shapes, it was easy for me to add them together to find the area.

Several other students had different ideas and one student suggested drawing another trapezoid and turning it over to make a bigger parallelogram. Since we all knew how to find the area of a parallelogram, the formula was easy to follow.

The teacher ended class by saying to the student "Congratulations, you have found the area of a shape called a trapezoid. You don't have any homework today."

Class dismissed.