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. 

My favourite reading was by Richard Skemp on relational and instrumental understanding. Attaching a word to the concept that we intuitively sensed was really powerful. This idea has been beneficial when planning lessons and determining what I'll expect my students to know. In the context of today's students and the availability of technology, the difference between relational and instrumental understanding is even more important since the students have so much access to information. Yet, there is so much value in being able to do math independently, which leads to the idea of flow. Given that, I'd have to rank my preference of the readings as "relational / instrumental", "flow", and "arbitrary vs necessary." 

I thought that "battleground schools", "Lockhart's Lament", "math textbooks", and "implicit / null curricula", were also valuable reads and I hope that the ideas and sentiments are something that I can build more experience around as the practicum will progress. During conversations with other math educators, the ideas in these readings were more prevalent, which confirms my guess that with more expertise, these ideas are more relatable and applicable. 

In regards to activity, I LOVED doing the math art project from the Bridges Conference. It was a lot of fun and I'm really excited to try an activity like this with more students. I think this activity fit a lot into the kind of teacher I want to become, and I was able to connect this to a few other topics within the course itself. 

The opportunities we got to share post-practicum were nice, and making a human histogram to rate the experiences was such a cool activity! A notable experience from practicum that connected to this course was the shift in curriculum over the last few years (and decades) which is difficult to tackle in one conversation. The shifts result from many layers of factors and can be different across districts, which I wasn't super aware of. I think some more conversations on this during class would have been more helpful, especially in terms of learning where to find the policies, how to read them, and discuss the implications of it, but the variance and ambiguity can be tough to navigate.

Overall, I thought that this course was transformative and I look forward to reflecting on how the experiences we had here relate post-practicum.