The All Important "What did I learn" Post

Before I get started I'd like to say that our professor this quarter was one in a million.....no a billion!  She waxed poetic about what life will be like for us in the classroom, she gave motivational speeches with passion, and she used playing cards in class.  Now, to me, this is a world class educator with nary a selfish bone in her body.  Most importantly though she held her ground against one of the largest cohorts that has come through the system in a long while...and even got us to be quiet a couple of times.

So what did I learn this quarter? 

Well, the most important thing I learned with math is to stick with it.  For me, teaching it was the tough part.  I spent two weeks teaching math to my 6th grade class and they felt more confused after my teaching than before.  Here we are at the end of the quarter and I've been banned from ever teaching math again in that classroom.....wait, that was just what I thought was going to happen.  The truth is I talked to the kids about some of the things I was learning in our college math class, such as Miras, and the awesome website gapminder.com.  They realized I actually know what I'm talking about, and sure enough they began to listen.  With the gapminder discussion we were able to pull some data from one of the graphs and the students were able to come up with their own thoughts about what the numbers meant.  It was a treat watching them use their life experience to wonder what might be going on around the world.

On that note (cool things), we learned a plethora of neat tools that will help us in the classroom:

• Gapminder and Miras have already been mentioned
• The Data and Story Library
• This awesome website is used in conjunction with another piece of graphing software we were introduced to called Fathom.  It is pricey, but the students get to use a virtual manipulative concerning shapes of all sizes and forms.
• Tangrams!!  These little buggers cause a good size headache one afternoon as I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to make a square out of a bunch of other shapes.  It was like in Apollo 13 when Ed Harris said "I suggest you gentleman invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole": 

To make it worse we then were asked to make a dinosaur out of the shapes.  Yes, based on the trouble we 37 adults had putting it together, I think it is fair to say middle school students will have just as much of a challenge. 
• Tinker Plots:  More headaches waiting to happen, but this time virtually.
• wolframalpha.com:  I told several teachers about this math information site and all had the same reaction, "I don't want the kids getting the answers".  It is a great check up for them, and quite a learning tool if you can make sure they understand that the numbers are just answers, but ideas.

We did read a bunch of articles to help us think about how students see math in our classrooms and like the psychologist I will never become, I was intrigued most by an article we read late in the quarter dealing with how students see mathematics.  One option was that students feel they must be "obedient" to math as the rules are not to be tampered with.  You could make the case 10 + 10 is always 20 in our realistic world.  But you sure can confuse a computer programmer with that speak as they are used to base 2.  The main idea I took from the piece is that students who fell obedient to math are almost certain to steer clear of it after they graduate.  These could be students with phenomenal math brains who are stuck thinking math has reached its limits.  They know all the rules by heart now so what is going to be exciting about a career in math?  This idea made sense and basically yields us as teachers to prepare ourselves to show our students that math is dynamic and can be used to solve a lot of the worlds problems.

Now if it could only solve the problem of my grades and West-E Test scores.  Oh yeah, I get to do that!

Thanks for the great quarter.