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.