Final Reflection

Over the last few months, I've appreciated the progression, engagement, and diversity of ideas in this course a lot. I've learned how to develop lessons for mathematics education in a creative way and become more cemented in my teaching identity. Math has always been able to lend itself to more interdisciplinary ways of structuring classes, and yet, it's so easy to get caught up in the lecture style that has less efficacy in inspiring today's students. That led to why I really loved the activities we were able to try in the garden. Having the opportunity to try outdoor-learning with a STEM (inspired) class made it seem a lot more achievable, and I'm so much more likely to try recreating that experience for some of my future students. 

Unit Planning Assignment

 Here's my unit plan:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JNjxshJjMJXSZ9j-RJCnmm3froVigO2DyjOH8ubrpIE/edit?usp=sharing

Reflection: Wagner & Herbel-Eisenmann on textbooks

I thought a lot about what a math textbook meant to me as a high school student. Unfortunately, it was nothing close to what teachers or authors may have intended- it was simply a place where homework problems came from, with a cool fact here and there. My sisters, both AP Math students, also agreed that their textbooks did not mean very much to them, simply a responsibility to keep it in good condition until the end of the year. 

On one hand, that meant that we relied a lot more on the teacher's notes and other contents to succeed during the year, but on the other, the textbooks don't seem to have served their purpose. 

Reflection: Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi's TED Talk on Flow

During his TED Talk, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly reflected on many moments where meaningfulness in life was separate from materialism. At some point he remarked, "whether it's mathematics or music, it takes that long to be able to change something in a way that it's better than what was there before," in regards to a level of commitment, creativity, and expertise. With comfort in creativity, one can embrace challenges and attain 'flow.

Dave Hewitt and Mathematical Awareness and Fractions Reflection

Here was my attempt to the activities proposed by Dave Hewitt in the video:

Reflection: “Arbitrary and Necessary Part 1: a Way of Viewing the Mathematics Curriculum” by Dave Hewitt

The irony of this reading was that in order to understand the terminology, “arbitrary” and “necessary”, I had to memorize Hewitt's definitions because it wasn’t a natural deduction for myself. I thought of “necessary” in terms of having to lay the groundwork with definitions, and “arbitrary” as the formulas (because quantities are unspecified). That initial confusion helped drive the argument home though, because sometimes the point is to memorize properties and function to succeed in appropriate contexts. 

"The Giant Soup Can of Hornby Island"

I found that estimating the volume of water in the Giant Soup Can Tank a very similar problem to that which would be solved in a Physics class. Fermi Problems are generally used to estimate the order of magnitude for a quantity in a given space. These problems usually have very flexible approaches, because the end goal simply justifying the closest possible guess. 

Pro-D Day Plan and Reflection

 For the Pro D Day on October 20th, I attended UBC's "Introduction to SOGI in the K-12 Context." It was a really informative workshop, and I took away a lot of ideas on creating safe spaces in the classroom.

Battleground Schools Reflection

 "Battleground schools" by Mathison and Ross was a very enlightening read. I was not aware of the many pushes in mathematics education over the years, assuming that it stayed relatively constant until the most recent curriculum shift. I think that view was partially motivated by conversations from my elders. My family received a standard British Education in the Caribbean, and likewise with our friends from the UK, India, Hong Kong, etc. From those discussions I had understood that the North American Education system was slightly lower in some respects to the British System, but didn't know of the movements that polarized educators- especially for math! I thought that the shifts were in connection to subjects such as language arts, English, Drama, Music, Social Studies, etc.

"What is meant by 'curriculum'?" Reflection

Throughout Eisner’s, “The Three Curricula That All Schools Teach,” I found myself in agreement with the descriptions of the three curricula. Eisner mentions how students who graduate from secondary school spend 12,000 hours in school settings, which is a considerable amount of time for their exposure and compliances to the goals of the curriculum.