11/1/12 Reading

The family math night that LaChance describes sounds like a lot of fun, especially for younger students. I can envision it working really well, especially in an elementary school setting. I would love to participate in a family math night, or even host one, unfortunately I really don’t feel like it’s an appropriate fit for the school I am in now, and perhaps would be better pulled off with more years experience, and a decent chance at some kind of turn out for participating parents and students. I would really like to see some of the activities they used in action.

A couple of the ideas from the NCTM website were good. I wish I had tried to call all my parents the first week of school when I started this year. I will start the next semester that way. Knox County already has a lot of parent contact in place, like all the grades on-line and the schoolfusion pages. I really need to do a better job of trying to keep the webpage up to date, but most days I really can’t because it is all I can do just to stay on top of grading and planning.

10/25/12 Readings

I read the “How Many Blades of Grass” article earlier and was very impressed with where such open ended questions can lead if teachers have enough time and let the students discover their own methods of solving the problem.

The Saraco article had some great ideas for a project. I’ve thought about doing something similar, but have not due to my own lack of knowledge. I also am pressed for time, but this might actually fit in great for after the EOC test. With better planning I would be able to integrate it into my school year the way it was presented. I really liked the fact that if focused on minorities and women. Like in the article, I don’t think I could name 5 important mathematicians that aren’t white males.

I also like Keleher’s project of solving contextual problems. I would worry that many students wouldn’t know where to begin the problems and I would need to make sure that there were some check in on the progress before the due date. Also, getting the problems, working through them to make sure they are appropriate and building a library of the problems sounds time consuming. Perhaps that would be a summer teacher project.

10/18/12

 I’ve never used algebra tiles, and when I came to the school that I’m working at now I was actually given some to use. However, when I asked how they were used I was only given an old book of transparencies. I looked at it briefly and then it went into a stack in my cupboard where I keep all the stuff that will most likely never get around to using. Now having read the Leitze article I see how they may have helped when I taught my students factoring. Other than that they would probably be most useful in Algebra 1. Reading the article also made me wish that I had algebra tiles when I was working at a Montessori middle school last year. It would have fit with the curriculum well.

Reading Rubenstein reminded me of what a technical language mathematics is. I usually tell students that learning math is like learning a foreign language, only harder because there are calculations involved. Students have to acquire this language in order to participate and become part of the discourse community in the classroom. I just finished teaching a chapter about polynomials and one piece of working with polynomials includes naming them by their degree and number of terms. I focused on this the first day and continued to use the specific language (i.e. cubic trinomial) and asked the students to use it also. It was difficult at first, but I see some improvements. By explicitly making connections to the roots of the words I hoped to help the students remember. However sometimes I think that the specific language can also turn off students, especially when they are behind because they have less comprehension of what is going on in the classroom when the technical language is used without explanation.

I liked the fact that the Coburn article had some alternative approaches to working with polynomials. I never remember factoring quadratics the way the author proposes, and I like that the fraction methods makes the zeros more apparent, but my students freak out any time they see a fraction in a problem. Fractions combined with factoring would cause me students to use other F words. On the other hand, I liked the “push principle” used to find the sign of an interval. The last method presented to solve quadratics seemed a bit complicated. I suppose it’s convenient for finding the zeros, maybe, but I’m just not sold on it. I had to read through it three times before I could figure out what he was doing and why.

10/4/ Reading Response

Smith has some great points about how to shape class discussions so that they unfold nicely for learning.

It is important to anticipate student responses. This is something that I am still weak in, just because I have not been teaching very long.

Monitoring the student work as they are working helps keep students working and helps when deciding who to call on during group discussions. I try to point out different methods of doing the same problem. I also don’t want to embarrass people when they do not have the right answer, so I will be especially careful about calling on the students who sort of hide in class, and I will make sure I call on them when I know they have the correct answer or correct method so that I can boost their confidence.

I have not thought much about the sequencing of student responses. The furthest I have considered is calling on lower performing students more in the beginning so that they can participate. I think the Smith article points out that teachers need to pay even more attention and plan ahead of time how they want to student discussion and learning to unfold.

In the selected reading from the text one sentence hit home, “the geometry curriculum in the United States has been somewhat of an eclectic mix of activities and lists of “bold print words” –too much emphasis has been placed on learning terminology.” I think memorizing words does have a lot of emphasis. I don’t want to say that it’s not important, it is, but the language is just a tool to talk about the math, it shouldn’t be the focus. The van Hiele levels could be useful when teaching, but I don’t really think that a teacher needs to know what number level a student is at, it all seemed pretty common sense to me, and just extra educational categories that the educational people like to construct.