Looking over all my posts, I realize that I haven't answered all my questions but i've learned more than I could have ever imagined. As challenging as I thought this course, because I'm not a math major, I still managed to learn alot about how to teach math with applications in other subjects. The Inspire Math Academy was a nice touch, I cherished the opportunity to observe the interaction of students and volunteer teachers and the feedback was very useful. We got the chance to try out all the stuff we learned in class. When I saw how it worked out, I was even more convinced that i could and should use this in my classroom.
The big mountain for me was task creation. The information shared was tremendous, but when I sat down to actually create a task from scratch that was culturally relevant and cognitively demanding plus mathematically rich, I just wanted to hide under the bed.
i'm not sure how beneficial it was for me (not a math major) to take this course before taking math content courses. I know that I have a responsibility to catch up and don't mind, but the time constraints with deadlines for graded assignments made the extra work I had to put in a yeoman task. My thing is, don't you have to know something pretty well before you can teach it effectively?
That said, I have a healthy respect for this revolutionary idea of culturally relevant constructivist teaching. Letting go and letting students DO mathematics (or any other subject), strategic questioning to make students think, reflect and refine. There were many epiphany-like moments when someting that I heard a thousand times suddenly made crystal clear sense when we discussed it in class. For example - I never realized how ineffective lecturing was as a major form of instruction in the classroom.
Some of the things I will take back with me: the real purpose of the big ideas and what it actually is, thinking about students and what that means, how a lesson is supposed to flow and the types of questions that should be asked to move students toward sophistication of strategies and ideas.
These are some of the thoughts that I thought when I reviewed my posts to date.
(P.S. - Dr. Matthews, please don't ask me to do anything else... my brain is fried!)
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1 comment:
Wow! This is "the Mother of all Blogs!" What an excellent reflection on the semester. Made me think of things I failed to mention in my last blog. Very insightful.
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