Math Class

Hello and welcome to my blog! Im Shawna, a second year J/I student a Brock university. Throughout this page on my blog, I will be reflecting and exploring the ideas we discuss and uncover during my journey through my mathematics course. 

Week 1

This week in math class, to start off our first class of the year, we discussed everyones feelings towards math. We discussed our fears, our excitements, our history as math students and how we felt about becoming a math teacher. The most common comment made I found was that peers expressed how they had always disliked math when they were in school. Because of this dislike, they found that they felt the most worried about teaching this particular subject. This ties in to what we explored this week during our online class activities. We explored this "dislike" towards mathematics and why so many people and students felt this way. There are many different and common reasons according to Patrick Bet- David such as: 
-its a new language the people don't have the patience to learn
-they don't care or see the importance of why they need to know mathematics
-its "cool" to hate math 
-it takes a lot of thought and problem solving skills
-there is a right or wrong answer which does not have much room for debate 
-they had a terrible math teacher that did not help them learn to think and problem solve

This discussion allowed for deeper thought into this topic and how we can make sure we as teachers make math meaningful for students. Making math meaningful for students can be done easily according to these teaching secrets by Cossondra George:
-creating real life examples of the concepts you are learning so that students see how math can infect be used in real life to better understand the concepts in their brain 
-use small group presentations of students to teach each other math as you learn something better when you are teaching it and it forces you think think stronger and deeper about the concepts being studied 
-ask students if their answer is logical as this will allow for critical thinking and for them to actually understand the meaning of the problem being solved, rather than knowing how to use a formula
-use technology to engage students to allow for interactive math activities 
- have studnets rework problems they missed to help them learn to identify their mistakes
By making math more meaningful for students, hopefully this will allow to eliminate the "dislike" students feel towards math and allow our students to fully engage and grow within the subject.