Hosts demonstrate classroom strategies — CUB, crib‑rails and the ‘Dorito’ — and highlight caller participation and prizes

Maggie Mixon and co‑host Canela Prado spent part of the livestream demonstrating instructional strategies teachers can use to help students avoid common integer errors and to speed problem solving during tests.

The segment matters for teachers and students because it pairs specific classroom techniques with live examples and shows how to check work in multi‑part questions.

Practical strategies shown:
- CUB: circle numbers, underline the question and box action words (used to parse word problems).
- Absolute‑value “crib rails” analogy: show absolute value bars as crib rails that make a negative number positive for the purpose of taking magnitude.
- Sign rules mnemonics: “same sign → positive; different signs → negative” for multiplication/division and a song for recall.
- The “Dorito” (triangle) technique: cover one factor at a time to determine the remaining sign in chained multiplications.

The hosts illustrated these approaches with live callers. Brandon from Williams worked through equivalency of −3/5 to decimal and fraction representations; Rasheed solved the five‑part pumpkin challenge and was announced as the first caller winner for that segment. The program also announced T‑shirt winners associated with local teachers and promoted sponsors Edgems (unit table of contents in district workbooks) and Mathnasium (local learning centers).

The hosts advised teachers to insist on labeling units and to re‑read questions to answer every part — practices they said reduce careless errors on tests. No external standards or curricular mandates were cited on the episode.