by Craig Dutra
Every teacher knows what it’s like to get a new curriculum shoved at you at the beginning of a school year. Or the feeling of being handed a micro-managed, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute, district-wide cookie-cutter schedule designed by the bigwigs, without any input from the actual subject matter experts (cough cough, the classroom teachers). Overwhelming.
Now take both at the same time. Even more overwhelmingly overwhelming.
Especially when you’ve spent the last five years with something close to an open canvas. The freedom to build your schedule in the way that best serves you and your class (minus specialists, lunch, recess, and intervention blocks).
This year, jumping into a new ELA curriculum, CKLA, and a predetermined district-wide, grade-by-grade schedule, at the same damn time, was ultimately like swallowing a mouthful of shit sandwich, to say the least.
You’d think the math program I’ve been using since 2021–2022, Bridges, the one I know like the back of my hand (I know more of Brad’s balls than I care to admit), would be the saving-grace, auto-pilot, smooth-sailing part of my day.
But surprisingly, it wasn’t.
Not. At. All.
When Tried and True Unraveled in Front of My Eyes
If you would’ve asked my co-teacher and me what we thought worked well over the last few years, what we wouldn’t change a single thing about heading into the new school year, the unanimous answer would’ve been: our math block.
We had a good thing going.
We had a groove.
We knew what we were doing with math and honestly, we were doing it, and doing it, and doing it well.
We had it going on.
We had differentiated math groups built from real classroom assessments and actual student needs.
We had consistent, daily rotations.
We had a math menu.
We had teacher-table lessons.
We had built-in ST Math time for every group.
We even made it work for the kids who left for math intervention. They could still hit the teacher table and get Jiji minutes before or after they came back.
It worked.
We knew it.
Why would we ever consider doing anything different?
It just didn’t work anymore.
It was a slow realization.
Math wasn’t as smooth as it used to be. Since we only had 60 minutes dedicated to teaching our Bridges lessons, things I used to do simply couldn’t be done anymore.
After a solid 10–20 minutes spent teaching whole group, launching the lesson, working through problem strings, and reviewing workplace directions, there really wasn’t enough time left to cycle through math rotations.
And with such a needy group of students in front of me, all with different academic and attention needs, trying to circulate while they worked independently at their desks became daunting.
After throwing a life jacket to one student and pulling them back on board, I’d turn around to find five more hands waving and splashing while their heads dipped below the surface.
Even with both of us trying to rescue the countless overboard passengers drifting away from the ship, the cycle stayed the same. We’d save one, move on to the next, and turn around only to see the previous student plunge back into open water.
It didn’t work.
Not like it used to.
Not anymore.
And I couldn’t quite tell why.
It was hard to tell what the real culprit behind the math dissonance was.
Was it this group of kids?
Maybe. But that couldn’t be the only reason.
Was it the CKLA overload in the morning?
Possibly. CKLA can be a lot.
Was it the time of day?
Perhaps.
For the last five years, I always taught math in the morning and ELA in the afternoon. This year was different. To accommodate the 90 minutes required for the CKLA block, math was pushed to the afternoon.
Two o’clock.
Thirty minutes after lunch and recess.
The last academic subject of the day.
And for some reason, this didn’t work for my class.
But, what would work for my class?
Quest-ionable Solution?
You can only blame the time of day, the kids in front of you, and the schedule for so long before you realize there’s nothing you can actually do to change those things.
You can’t change the program you teach — and honestly, I wouldn’t want to.
I like Bridges.
I know Bridges.
But the way I taught Bridges didn’t work anymore.
It was time for a change.
I landed on Math Quests almost by accident. I don’t remember the exact moment the idea clicked. I had taken a course years ago on Learner’s Edge or The Teaching Channel (whatever it was called at the time) about creating adventure and engagement through gamification.
That year, I played around with some of those ideas such as Netflix, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok-style templates for character analysis in books we were reading. I liked the feel of it. The idea of gamifying the classroom. Bringing elements of games into learning.
The sense of achievement.
Badges.
Leveling up.
Visible progress.
I kept coming back to that feeling.
Maybe I could do something like that with math.
So I collaborated with my favorite virtual sidekick (ChatGPT). I explained my problem. I brainstormed some possibilities. I talked it through. And when push came to shove, I landed on Math Quests.
That was the start.
But I was nowhere close to where I was heading.
“Perfecting” the Quest Components
The quests started slowly.
First, I scaffolded the assignments.
Instead of putting two Bridges workbook pages on the Math Menu like I had in the past, I split those same two pages into five separate levels within a Math Quest.
For example, Pg. 67, “ Problem Solving with the LCM & GCF” used to be displayed on the Math Menu as a single task. Now it has become a series of missions.
Level 1’s mission is to complete questions 1 on page 67.
Level 2 is to complete question 2 .
Same work.
Different structure.
I broke the assignments down into more reasonable chunks.
Then I arranged the levels by importance of completion. The levels I wanted most students to reach by the end of the math block were placed at the beginning of the quest. The assignments that mattered less, or felt more like extension, were strategically placed toward the end.
That part was the easy part.
Things I used to do whole group were still introduced whole group. The difference was what happened next. Instead of completing those tasks together at the teacher table or pushing them into rotations, with rotations abandoned this year because of time constraints, they were now the first levels of the quest.
That’s when the shift really started to happen.
Crafting the Quests
The hard part is coming up with the quest ideas and then actually creating the quests. Even though I use ChatGPT to help with this process, there’s still a good amount of trial and error before I land in the perfect world for a quest.
My quest ideas come from all over the place.
They come from read-aloud books we’ve loved throughout the year. So far, I’ve had Because of Mr. Terupt, The Thief of Always, and A Christmas Carol quests.
They come from CKLA lessons. During and after our Maya, Aztec, and Inca unit, I’ve worked creation myths of the Mayans, Lake Titicaca references, and even Pok-a-Tok into different quests.
They come from my childhood. The actual theme of my classroom. And yes, 90s Nickelodeon cartoons.
We’ve had Rugrats quests. Hey Arnold! quests. You name it.
For the entire month of December, I ran a different Christmas movie for each quest; Home Alone 1 and 2, Elf, The Santa Clause, The Christmas Chronicles, and A Christmas Story. I even threw in the Rugrats Hanukkah special for good measure.
Now you’re probably wondering, “Okay… but where does ChatGPT come into play here?”
Well, thank you for asking, kind reader.
ChatGPT is technically the author of all of these beautiful quests. I can’t take full credit for them and I’m okay with that. My role is more creative director than writer.
I usually start with something like:
“Listen, Road Dawg, I’m trying to cook up a quest for my math block based around (insert quest topic here).”
Then I copy and paste information I’ve Googled about the topic, movie, or episode. I tell ChatGPT to keep it spicy (the way I like it). I explain which assignments or parts of assignments I want completed at each level.
And then…
bing bop boom boom boom bop bam.
Quest created.
Now, I read it through. Probably tweak it a little here and there.
Spicy level description here. Juicy introduction there. Add some badges. Insert a progress meter at the top.
Then when I feel like it’s ready to roll, I copy and paste it into a Google Doc, adjust the spacing and font size until it fits neatly on one page front and back, and call it good.
And that’s it.
That’s the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it. Uh huh uh huh.
Fine Tuning
Throughout this process, there’s been a whole hell of a lot of fine tuning.
Honestly, I’m still fine tuning.
As I’m writing this, I’m already thinking of things I could tweak or make just a little better.
Over time, though, I’ve become much more strategic with how I design the levels. I pay closer attention to the order, especially at the beginning of a quest, and try to have the levels gradually increase in rigor when I can.
You know…that whole scaffolding and gradual release jargon they’re always talking about.
The biggest area of fine tuning, by far, has been the gamification piece.
We started with gamer tags. And when I say we, I mean my co-teacher and me. He’s my real-life, in-the-classroom Road Dawg. He rolls with my crazy ideas, and I’m always open to the ones he throws my way.
The gamer tags and the Quest Leaderboard were actually his idea.
We set up a Quest Leaderboard at the front of the classroom. Each student wrote their name, or nickname, if they preferred, on a small section of a big sheet of paper. Then we laminated it, cut the names out, slapped an adhesive magnet on the back…
…and voilà. Gamer tags.
As students move through the quest, they physically move their gamer tag from level to level on the board. That simple action made progress visible in a way it never was before.
The Buy-In
A few days into this quest process, my co-teacher and I were sold.
We looked at each other and said, “This is working a little better than before. We might’ve stumbled upon something special here.”
And we’ve stuck with it ever since.
Now, moving in on a solid two or three months of daily math quests, I’m really starting to see the student buy-in.
Kids walk in first thing in the morning and check the morning message.
“Are we seriously doing another Italian Brainrot quest today?!”
They look forward to the next quest.
They send me quest re-quests.
I’m not going to lie, not every student reads every quest. But I do have kids who sit and read through the introduction and each level before even starting their math.
If that’s not a win, I don’t know what is.
Even my most reluctant learners are bragging when they get past Level 3.
“I made it to Level 5 today!”
They’re competing with themselves.
They’re competing with their classmates.
And sometimes, they’re even competing with my co-teacher and me.
On special days, like The Terrible Turkey Takeover, The Selfish Elf, or The Reindeer Roundup, we’ll jump into the quests alongside them. Those days are different. It’s more fun to work through the packets with them and check as we go than to bounce around the room watching them complete them.
I’m not saying Math Quests will work for everyone.
I’m not saying every day is smooth.
I’m just saying they’re working.
They’re working for me.
And I’m going to keep using them for the foreseeable future.
If your math block isn’t going quite as well as you hoped, this might be something worth trying.
Take a chance.
Make math a little adventurous for once.
Dutra Magic 
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