8P29 Post 11

I like to hope my tests will be more reasonable than that.
"Math Test Joke on Professor's Door." Retrieved from
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/hilarious-note-posted-maths-teachers-4565393

The more I spend time in the classroom, and attend the math course at Brock, the more I realize how different math class is now from when I was a child, and it is definitely a change for the better. There are far more activities and collaborative work compared to just sitting at your seat and answering textbook questions and there seems to be a greater focus on finding different ways to assess student learning than merely taking tests.

Of course, doing practice questions in the textbook or taking quizzes and tests still have their place in the classroom, and they will still be a reality in my own math class, but those don’t have to be a teacher’s only options anymore. Students should have opportunities to explain their thinking and to develop their metacognition, so that they can start to think about and even refine their problem solving process and figure out what strategies work best for them while problem solving. Students should have opportunities to work on math that is appropriate to their grade level, but also problems that could be applied to multiple grade levels and challenge their reasoning and math skills.

Lucky for educators, we have the internet, and there are a ton of cool resources to help us out with this endeavour. Dr. Khan showed us an example (Challenge 03 Finger Counting) from www.collaborativemath.org, which has a variety of challenge questions posed, but that is only one of many other places that you can find riddles and math problems that will engage and challenge students. Students could work on a difficult question like the Finger Counting over the period of a week or more, and then record their solution and reasoning in a brief video using the app Show Me. This is a way to assess students without having to rely on the traditional test-taking method. I don’t think this should be the main source of assessment material, but it is certainly a way to differentiate based on student interests, skill sets, etc.

 The main form of assessment will be observational notes, which makes a lot of sense. As I’m circulating my placement class and looking over student work, I’m making tabs on who seems to be getting it right out the gates, and who seems to need more practice. It’s important to have those moments so you can help the student build their knowledge before the test or quiz where there’s an achievement level associated with it. As an example from my own experience, I noticed one of the students (we’ll call him Abdul), was mixing up some of the steps when it came to multiplication and regrouping. I spent extra time walking him through the process and in my absence, my associate teacher sent home some additional practice problems for him to work on. When I saw him on my next observation day, there was such a difference! Abdul was solving problems quickly, often figuring out the answer well before many of his classmates and his work was free of error. If that had not been caught in my initial informal assessment, his mistakes may have adversely affected his test scores, and all over errors easily fixed through some addition instruction.

This first math course is nearing completion and I’m starting my practicum within a few weeks. I’ve learned a lot, but I’m sure I will make twenty-five million mistakes and when I think I’m finally getting the hang of it, I’ll make another mistake. But that’s teaching and that’s life. It’s best I just get in there and start trying.    

Here is a link to my digital portfolio, which is a "greatest hits" if you will of math resources compiled over the term: http://8p29digitalmathportfolio.blogspot.ca/

8P29 Post 10

We’re coming to the end of the year in our first math course of teacher’s college and this week we worked on what I’m pretty sure is the last unit we’ll be working on: data management and probability. The next few weeks will be on assessment and lesson/unit planning, or at least that’s my prediction based on what I’ve looked at in the syllabus.

Data management and probability is a relatively short unit compared to some of the other ones, such as number sense and numeration. I think the intention in my placement is for the data management unit to only be 2-3 weeks. Nevertheless, this unit is a great opportunity for your class to let loose and have a little fun, because there are many games you can play to help demonstrate probability concepts.

One such game we did in class on Friday was the horse race game to show the most likely dice rolls when rolling 2 dice. Students have to set up a racetrack (graph) numbering all the possible dice outcomes from 2 to 12. Each number represents a different horse. To make things interesting, have students pick a “horse” they think will win. Students than have to roll the dice and the result is the horse that moves forward e.g. roll an 8, then horse 8 gets a tick on the racetrack. The first horse to get to 7 (or some other agreed-upon number) is the winner. Students will notice that most of the time, 7 will be the winner, or very close to it. From there, you can launch into a lesson demonstrating why this is the case. I am definitely going to use this activity in my placement classroom because I think the students will get really into it.

Anthony92931. "Suffolk Downs Horse Race." August 1 2007.
Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_racing#/media/File:Suffolk_Downs_horse_racing.JPG

 Another reason data management and probability is fun is because students get to do surveys and record their collected data. Students can be creative in these activities and make up a survey on anything they’d like to ask their schoolmates about e.g. music tastes, video game, eye colour. It gets them up and moving, which is a welcome reprieve from sitting still in their seats all day.

Something that is important as a mathematics teacher is varying the activities that you do in the classroom. There is a time and place for students to sit and answer practice questions at their desk individually, but there is also a time to see math in action, though games and tasks like the ones mentioned above. I feel very lucky in my placement because the students seem pretty pumped to do math problems each day. I’m not sure if that is unique to this class, or if 9 and 10-year-olds are always this excitable. I really don’t remember cheering after completing math problems as a class, but now I wish that we had done that every year of math, even in high school! That enthusiasm gives me flexibility in what I can do in the classroom.  

"Yay math!"
"Children Cheering." Retrieved from http://goo.gl/DqRu5i

8P29 Post 9

Watterson, Bill. "Measurement Homework." Retrieved from http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2014/03/how-to-make-your-kids-smarter/

           This week we are working on teaching measurement, which is usually a relatively brief, albeit important unit. Regardless of grade, measurement is a unit that allows students to be hands on with their learning, using actual measurement tools to record and analyze real world things. I am thankful in Canada we use the metric system rather than the imperial system that the Americans use because honestly, I think the metric system is much tidier and easier to memorize in terms of converting between different units e.g. centimetres to metres.

            In the textbook Making Math Meaningful, Small uses a standard formula for introducing different measurement concepts to students. There are three phases involved: definition/comparison, nonstandard units, and standard units. With definition/comparison, students simply identify what concept they would be measuring and then become able to recognize how different items can be bigger or smaller than others in terms of measurement. Using capacity as our exemplar, students will learn that capacity is the maximum amount something can contain. Showing them two differently sized buckets filled with sand, they should be able to see that these two objects probably have different capacities.

The next phase would be measuring with nonstandard units. Students use a little scoop to put the sand in the bucket, noting that it takes 10 scoops to fill the bucket. This stage seems like one that with most students you could move on from fairly quickly into standard units because if your students can understand the bucket’s capacity is 10 scoops, it shouldn’t be that much harder to make the jump that the bucket’s capacity is 500 mL. You can apply this strategy no matter what the unit of measurement is, although as I mentioned before, depending on the class, I don’t think it’s necessary to linger on phase one and two.

Measurement can be incorporated/combined with different subjects because many fields of study measure things in some way. For example, something we did in class today that was very fun was measuring distance of a standing long jump. Group members had to estimate how far they would jump and then prove their worth by making the leap. This is a very common measurement activity in physical education, as many times teachers have students record their process throughout the year, noting how many push ups or laps they can do at the start of the year and recording changes in progress periodically. As touched on earlier, students can have a lot of fun with these sorts of activities. It give students a welcome break from simply sitting and answering questions from the textbook, although there is a time and place for that as well.

I did my final learning activity presentation today. It was a hard one to make because I had to go with my Plan B option when I realized my Plan A idea really wouldn’t work that well with the unit. I had been reading some Lewis Carroll and came across a word problem I wanted to use. I thought students would find it interesting to do a math problem made by the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. However, I realized that although the problem in question dealt with elapsed time and calculating distance, it really was more a question about rates than about measurement. Instead I made a word problem based on the show Adventure Time! I don’t think many people got the references, but then again, my audience was not a classroom of 8 and 9-year-olds (otherwise their enthusiasm and knowledge for the show would’ve been much higher). But I suppose that’s one of those inevitable things as a teacher. Sometimes you’ll want to do something and it won’t quite fit, so you have to use your Plan B (or C, D, etc.). 

8P29 Post 8

This week in class was pretty busy because we were looking at geometry and spatial sense. The geometry unit is huge no matter what grade you teach, so there is always a lot of ground to tackle, and almost an overload of things you can do with the class to help them learn. Manipulatives such as geoboards, toothpicks and modelling clay, and even blocks that young children play with are all appropriate for geometry because it is such a visual math unit.

Thinking about geometry and spatial sense is something that students can incorporate into their daily lives because shapes are everywhere. It is useful to have an awareness of one’s surroundings and the objects in them. An activity we did in class this week that I really enjoyed was a “geometry scavenger hunt” where you needed to go around the school and find different 2D and 3D shapes. Most of what you’ll find is rectangular prisms, but I lucked out and somehow found a dodecahedron and heptagon too, which are not really shapes that you necessarily expect to find every day.

One of the things I was reflecting on most this week is taking an interdisciplinary approach to the classroom. There are only so many hours in the day and if you teach all subjects to your students rather than them being on a rotary, it can sometimes be tricky to find time to fit everything in. One way to address this issue is by incorporating different skills or subjects into class projects.

"Geometric Paper Ornaments." Retrieved from
goo.gl/dw7Fyb

Geometry lends itself to art tidily. Drawing is at its core putting together multiple smaller shapes to put together a cohesive picture. It’d be good to show your students, especially those who love art, that learning to represent 3D shapes can really step up their drawing game. Having that knowledge of perspective and spatial awareness really enhances the realism of a drawing. When learning about 3D shapes, you could give your students an activity where they have to create a perspective drawing of a room or a city street. Students then have to establish a vanishing point, and then create a series of shapes (primarily cubes and rectangular prisms most likely) oriented towards their perspective point. I loved making drawings like that when I was in art class, without ever realizing it was helping me practice representing 3D shapes.

Aude Sapere. "Two Point Perspective." Retrieved from
http://aude--sapere.deviantart.com/art/Two-Point-Perspective-City-337052681

Other art or craft-like projects that actually help students develop their geometry skills is through using nets to make shapes, such as animals, or by making geometric paper lanterns or ornaments with toothpick skeletons and tissue paper. Regardless, there are many ways to make geometry fun for students and keep them learning without them realizing it.

Geometry was never something I was really passionate about as a student; I always found rotation on a plane to be difficult for example. I also found it frustrating because in some geometry assignments, you’re marked on neatness, and I’m left-handed so my hand would smudge the pencil lead across the page and I would get marks off. But I think a way to get me more excited about the topic (and hopefully get the students excited too) is through some of the activities like the ones I just shared. 

8P29 Post 7

Anonymous. "Teacher Lesson Plan Ecard." Retrieved from
http://www.teachjunkie.com/filing-cabinet/teaching-realities/
NOTE: This is not what happened to me when working on my
lesson plan haha!

           It’s getting to be an exciting time in teacher’s college because we’re starting to ramp up to actually teaching lessons to students! Woo! All the foundation work in every class, not just 8P29, is finally going to be applied and put to a practical use.

This week I worked on my first draft of the math lesson plan we’re have to complete. I actually had a lot of fun doing it, and have ideas for how to create follow up lessons to start creating a unit. It was not without its difficulties though. I decided to make my lesson as practical as possible, so I tailored it for the students in my placement (a grade 4/5 split). I was initially stumped because I wasn’t sure how to create activities that didn’t dumb things down for the grade 5s but wouldn’t be alienating for the grade 4s. Luckily the topic of my lesson (introduction to telling time) has associated learning expectations that are similar. The only difference between the time expectations for grade 4 and 5 is that grade 4s need to identify time on a clock down to a minute, and grade 5s need to be able to identify seconds as well. Within the direct instruction portion of the lesson, I can still teach all the students the same things, but then ask the grade 5 students of the class some more complicated questions about calculating time. Grade 4s can feel free to answer but precedence is on a grade 5 answering the question correctly. We’ll see how that actually works in practice, but in theory it should turn out alright!

I can tell that 8P29 is rubbing off on me because during my lesson plan, I automatically started thinking of multiple strategies students could use to work on their homework problems, which is not a level of reflection I had at the start of the year. Visual aids and manipulatives never really helped me that much in math when I was a child, so I wasn’t in the habit of thinking about using or talking about those methods, but now it is becoming part of my automatic brainstorming about activities to try to incorporate those elements into lessons **when possible**.

On the topic of manipulatives and visual aids in math, one suggestion from the textbook I enjoyed the most this week was using balance scales and paper bags to help students visualize balancing equations in the patterning and algebra unit. Using this method, I feel like students of many ages and abilities could grasp how approach finding x in a problem because it shows the direct consequence of what happens when you don’t balance the equation (literally!).

I wouldn’t mind testing out this method on my friend’s 8-year-old daughter, as the last time she was over, once she finished her place value homework, she expressed an interest in figuring out linear algebra problems (isn’t it amazing how children natural want to know things and challenge themselves?). She was able to grasp a fairly straightforward question (n +5 = 7) by counting that 7 is 2 more than 5, so n is 2. But when she asked for a harder one, I gave her n + 4 =11-3, and she was having a bit of trouble understanding balancing. I think with the scales and paper bags this would be much more evident for her.

There’s so much more I want to talk about; I’ve found this course inspired my creativity, something I honestly didn’t think would happen with teaching math, but I’ll leave it at this for now.

8P29 Week 6 Post

This was the week I did my learning activity assignment, which consists of a 10-minute presentation where you lead your peers through an activity you could do with students and the different strategies for solving the problem. It went surprisingly better than I thought it would; I had had nightmares about it the night before, and usually presentations don’t faze me. This week’s theme was on proportional reasoning and includes questions on ratio, rate, and percent. Proportional reasoning can be a trick thing to teach students because it relies on students being able to change the way they think from multiplicative to additive thinking, and also relies on a firm understanding and snap knowledge of multiplication, division, and factors. Considering how many students (and adults!) rely on calculators to do even basic math, this can be a bit of a challenge. But with the proper practise and scaffolding through the use of charts, manipulatives and hundreds grids anything is possible.

Pythagoras and the Ratios book cover. Retrieved from
http://www.amazon.com/Pythagoras-Ratios-A-Math-Adventure/dp/1570917760

I liked exploring the different children’s books recommended at the end of the proportional thinking chapter of Small’s Making Math Meaningful. Pythagoras and the Ratios by Julie Ellis is a fun way to introduce children to mathematical history and the idea of ratios. The book deals more with ratios in musical chords than it does with other types of ratios, but I think that’s still acceptable because it can show the student that math doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but actually shows up in all parts of their life. Something I’m learning through my placement is that it’s often hard for teachers to fit everything they want to teach into a day, because activities inevitably almost always take longer than estimated. That is why it’s a good idea to integrate subjects as much as possible. Have students read about book about science or math, that way you kill two birds with one stone.

The activity I used in my ratio presentation had to do with adjusting recipes based on serving size, but I brainstormed a couple other ideas I think students might find fun. Having seen the movie Antman a few months ago, it got me thinking about how an ant’s relative strength is much much higher compared to its mass than a human’s strength is. It might be fun to learn about different animals and ratios by finding other animals and insects with “superpowers” like the ants and figuring out how that strength scales if that animal was the size of a human. I haven’t fleshed out this idea though, so it may be too complicated to put into practice in a classroom, we’ll see.  This year is going to be full of trial and error, but I don’t mind. No one ever learned anything doing the same thing every day.  

8P29 Week 5 Post

This week the focus was on integers. Integers aren’t too bad once you learn the rules. The trick is to understand the logic behind the rules, otherwise they become harder to remember and you can mix them up depending on what operation you’re completing (for example, thinking two negatives make a positive when you’re subtracting, rather than multiplying or dividing integers). But once students understand the rules, it becomes simple computation, something students would have been doing for years already.

I may have mentioned this before, but I have to say that Marian Small’s book Making Math Meaningful is a tremendous resource for pre-service teachers. Everything in the book is laid out clearly and there are plenty of class activity ideas within each chapter. If you’re a pre- or in-service teacher looking to improve their skills teaching math concepts, go out and buy this book, you won’t regret it.  Small’s chapter on integers is no exception to the rule. She suggests a fun card game called Integro to help students practice adding and subtracting integers. Have an Integro tournament in your class to see who will reign supreme as Imperator Integro (that’s a working title for the winner of the tournament, message me if you think of a cool one).

Making Math Meaningful by Marian Small p. 327

It’s easier to teach if you can get students to connect the concepts to something in the “real world”. Small suggests temperature, altitude, and sea level, but I think the real world example I like the best is debt. One, it’s good in general to teach students that debt is an awful hole that makes you think you have money, but really you don’t, and two, you can apply the debt situation to any of the operations. Here’s a quick example:

If I’m broke and I borrow 5 from Tony and 3 from Pauly, how much total debt do I have?

(-5) + (-3) = (-8)

Here you can see adding together two negatives puts you deeper in the hole, because I start at 0 and now I owe money I don’t have. Now let’s say I have a windfall:

Tony, in his magnanimity, has forgiven my debt, but Pauly still wants me to deliver. However, Silvio also gave me $4 birthday money as a gift. Now what’s my total debt?

(-8) – (-5) + (+4) = (+1)

See, I paid back Pauly, because he was starting to scare me a little (his eyes get all buggy when he’s angry), which makes me debt free, and also not broke anymore (thanks Silvio!). Putting it in a story like this makes it make a lot more sense than trying to memorize a set of rules. Add in some manipulatives and a number line (number line is key), and your lesson would hit a lot of bases.

What this is teaching me about teaching math is that there’s a lot more to students learning rules than them just learning the rules to certain concepts. Without the “why” there is very little retention, or common mistakes and mix-ups can occur. The “why” doesn’t have to be tremendously complex, but without context math is meaningless punching in figures like computers, and we aren't trying to make students into automatons, but autonomous, curious, problem-solving individuals.    

8P29 Week 4 Post

Anonymous. "Billy Madison Math Class." Retrieved from
http://quotepix.com/That-Moment-When-You-Understand-Something-In-Math-Class-4603/order/top

I learned some valuable lessons on teaching this week, not just about teaching math but teaching in general. As part of a report for school, I was required to observe some subjects (preferably students) completing grade 6 EQAO questions, focusing in particular on their problem solving process. Now I don’t have easy access to a grade 6 subject pool, so I thought I would make do with my resources available. A friend’s 8-year-old daughter Amy (pseudonym) volunteered to help me out and try her hardest on the problems.

         
The first question she found approachable enough, she was required to draw a 3D shape from the net given, but during the second question we ran into some serious problems, and this was the error on my part. The second question is a multi-step word problem that during one step requires you to divide decimals. Amy, having just started grade 4 has neither encountered long division nor decimals, rendering the question impossible without the aid of a calculator (but even then if you don’t entirely understand the question, that can only take you so far). To make a long story short, she gave it the old college try but became upset and frustrated, leaving the room at one point with what I’m hoping wasn’t watery eyes. Luckily, the night wasn’t completely ruined because pizza arrived to save the day and we put problem solving to rest for the time being.

I learned a couple things from this experience. One, when I go into a classroom to teach, I need to make sure I am familiar with the curriculum, so I know activities that students can and can’t reasonably complete, otherwise there will be frustration all around. Some students have fragile egos and can become disheartened when they can’t complete a question, and take it personally, or even to extremes. They can get a question wrong and then out of their mouths come, “I suck at math!” Well no, I don’t think you can make that broad a claim. You just didn’t get this particular question right. Thus, making sure students have appropriate challenges is important for their self-esteem and overall learning. Especially with a subject like math, where students seem to quite easily get hang-ups, I don’t want to scare students away from trying new things and growing.

            
Two, I need to be more self-aware of my vocabulary when I speak. Amy was sometimes becoming confused with my explanations because I was using language she didn’t understand. I need to think about the language I’m using to ensure that I’m saying things in a way that a student of that age and maturity can understand. I also need to make sure I have a few ways to explain things, just in case one method doesn’t make sense to the student.

            
On the subject of alternative methods, we were learning about teaching strategies for fractions today in class, and a classmate shared a method I had never encountered before! For adding/subtracting fractions with unlike denominators, I always went to the tried and true Lowest Common Denominators, but the Macarena Method is fantastic! It’s fast, it’s easy, it makes you want to dance…there is nothing more you could want from a math strategy. I always liked fractions, apart from trigonometry and quadratics, I always liked fractions the best. I’m so pleased to find a way to make it more enjoyable (I hope the students like it too!!). It’s very encouraging being able to find so many resources online to help make math easier and more amusing. I like all the math parody songs you can find on YouTube as well, for example this place value song based off of “Rude” by Magic!:

The grade 4/5’s in my placement are on place value right now, so I may share this with them and see if they found it catchy like I did. I like that it goes through different types of notation as well, which is something the students have been getting mixed up. If you try it in a classroom, comment below and tell me how they liked it!

8P29 Week 3 Post

            “It’s elementary, really, once you get the hang of it.”

                        --Shinra, Final Fantasy X-2    

Anonymous. "Sphere Break." Final Fantasy X-2. 
Retrieved from http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Sphere_Break

         One more week gone by. I went out on my first observation day to a grade 4/5 split. During the math portion of the day (review for a Patterning and Algebra test), there wasn’t any technique that came up in class that was any different from when I went to school. A couple patterns were put on the board and students were asked to figure out on their own what type of pattern it was (growing, shrinking, etc.) and what the rule of the pattern was (e.g. subtract by 2 each time). Students had time to work independently, share their work in pairs, and then take up the answers as a class. The previous class though (one I wasn’t there for), they had to solve word problems in groups, first using manipulatives, then trying to solve using T-charts. Students then reflected on what worked and what didn’t the next day, ultimately deciding that T-charts were the preferred method of representation. What this has shown me so far in teaching math is that there is a time and place for everything. Sometimes doing drills and practice problems are helpful, like when you need concepts to be fully lodged in your brain before a test, and there’s also a time to explore and test with games, word problems, group work, etc.

Another resource outside the classroom that reinforces that idea for me is the Jo Boaler video on “brain crossing”, where she states that you need to develop multiple neural pathways to aid in memory retention of a concept. That’s why it’s good to know how say, to represent numbers in different ways, for example to know that 10 is also 5+5 is also 12-2 is also 3+3+3+1, or how to represent 10 as a picture, like a square array of dots. In Making Math Meaningful, Marian Small says that the more flexible students are, the more successful they will be in mathematics (28).  

This is how math games come in handy as well. If students use their math skills in multiple contexts, those concepts are just in one part of their brain associated with school, but are associated with other activities. And besides that, sometimes you have to “trick” kids into learning. If they think they’re doing something just for fun all of a sudden it’s appealing, even if there are valuable skills they’re developing through their gameplay.

One such game I played a lot as a child that I never really thought was helping me with my mental math was the mini-game Sphere Break from Final Fantasy X-2. Admittedly one of the weaker games of the Final Fantasy franchise (I still liked it), but Sphere Break, which you play in tournaments to unlock items and dresspheres, involves quick addition and multiplication, as you race against a timer to make multiples of a core sphere based on randomized coins with number values on them. The Google Play store has an app of Sphere Break. It definitely doesn’t look as cool as in X-2, but the math skills still apply, and it is still as addicting. This game is appropriate for students in grades 4 and up, as the curriculum states that by grade 4 students can multiply and divide two-digit whole numbers by one-digit whole numbers (64), therefore, there would be enough basic knowledge of factors to play some levels. You may even be able to get away with playing earlier since most of the math work in the game is based on addition.

I investigated some other cool games this week, but because in class we were looking at number sense and numeration, I’ll stick to sharing Sphere Break for now. Let me know if you like the game, or think younger or older grades could play it!  

Anonymous. "Gullwing Airship Paine Dialogue." Final Fantasy X-2. 
Retrieved from http://lparchive.org/Final-Fantasy-X-2/Update%2007/"

8P29 Week 2 Post

I loved this game as a kid! Go-to game during computer lab free time
Anonymous. "Math Circus Start Menu." Retrieved from
http://www.myabandonware.com/game/m-a-t-h-s-circus-1gg

This marks the first official week of class for 8P29 (introduction classes never really count the same). Most of class was devoted to working on “The Handshake Problem” and how you could use this problem for multiple grade levels, depending on what you focus on and what tools you use e.g. do you use manipulatives, do you have an algorithm, etc. I actually really enjoyed the underlying point of the exercise, because it showed how fluid some math problems are. The only limit is the creativity of the math teacher. I like that math problems are versatile; it makes my job as an educator easier because resources or problems may work regardless of what grade I end up teaching.  

            I think what makes an excellent mathematics teacher is a person who is a creative and easygoing. Every student has a story about losing marks on a test because they didn’t solve the problem in the way the teacher wanted them to. Knowing and allowing for the fact that there is more than one way to do things will hopefully keep students creative and open-minded too, rather than hunting immediately for the magic formula they can plug in without any further thought. These types of teachers are something math really needs considering the bad rap it gets.

            Carolyn Y. Johnson’s article and the montage she posted really reminded me how anti-math we are as a society. I would argue that North American culture is increasingly anti-intellectual in general, but that is a rant for another day. Many people, myself included, are still infected with some of the older, ineffective ways of teaching math, through drills, and boring problems that seemed to have no bearing on real life and mainly just through working through questions in a textbook and calling it a day. I don’t feel the same as my younger self did about math; now I’m envious of people who are naturally good at it, and wish that I had continued with it past grade 11.

            I know very little of mathematics education; I’ve tutored students grade 6 and younger that had some math questions/difficulties, but in terms of teaching it in a classroom setting, I know pretty much nothing. That can be a good and bad thing. Bad in the sense that obviously you need to know what you’re talking about it you want to be an effective teacher. Good in that because I have no preconceived notions on what I want to do in a math classroom, I can be built from scratch into something interesting and useful.

            I do have some strategies I’d like to use in a J/I classroom though. First, I’d like to be very visual. Using manipulatives or technology, I’d like to help students visualize what’s happening in a math problem, which helps with memory retention because now they have a visual and a written example of a problem, and if we’ve done an activity in class, there’s kinetic memory thrown in there as well. I’d also like to make use of the many apps and math-related games that are out there, or even try to make math more game-like in general. If students think of things more as a puzzle to solve than a homework question to do, it makes the experience much more satisfying.

The sections of the mathematics curriculum I’d like to focus the most on in this course is well, all of them, but if I have to pick, Number Sense and Numeration, Patterning and Algebra, and Data Management and Probability. Many students seem to have trouble with fractions, decimals, and percent, so I’d like to make sure I have good resources to be able to teach those concepts well. Patterning and Algebra is something that is incredibly important as you get into the higher grades, so I want to make sure I know how to prepare students well for more abstract math. Data Management will probably be pretty fun to teach because it is relevant to everyday life. I want to make sure I have some strong strategies for bringing the real world into the classroom with Data Management.

Anyways, that’s enough musing for one week. Stay posted for more fun updates on my journey through mathmagic land. 

Anonymous. "Math Circus Screenshot." Retrieved from
http://www.old-games.com/download/3310/m-a-t-h-s

Welcome to Mathmagic Land

Durer, Albrecht. "Melancholia I." (1514)
[Copper Plate Engraving] Retrieved from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_art

Hello everyone!

            This section of my blog is devoted to the wonderful world of math, specifically my reflections and experiences relating to the course 8P29. Although my background is wholly in English and the Humanities (I have an Hon B.A. in English and an M.A. in English, both from McMaster University), I am eager to expand my skill set and while I’m doing so brush up on some of the math I’ve forgotten over the years.

            We live in interesting times in general, and especially as educators. The role of teacher and student is changing, and the educational resources we have at our disposal are more varied and diverse than ever. With SmartBoards, educational apps, games, and other mathematical modelling tools being developed, teachers don’t have to look very far to make their math classrooms interesting. I’m hoping with the guidance of my instructor and my peers, I can gain the skills and resources to make my classroom interactive, fun, and most importantly, educational. I want my students to come away from my classroom having learned some math skills they can hopefully retain the rest of their lives.

  

          Before I end this post, I’d like to give a little explanation for the title of this section of the blog. “Mathmagic Land” is actually a reference to a 1959 Walt Disney educational video entitled Donald in Mathmagic Land, where Donald Duck learns about all the way math influences our lives, from its relationship to music, architecture, art, and even how it can help you be better at billiards! I watched that video in my grade 10 math class, and you can actually find it all on YouTube here. The teacher, Mr. Turingia, was my favourite math teacher because although he was soft-spoken, he had an incredible ability to help me understand mathematical concepts. I hope I can even be half as good as he is at making math approachable to students.

            Well, that’s all for now. I’m sure I’ll have much more to say in the upcoming posts, so stay tuned!