Throughout this semester I have continued to make connections to the math ed world and how what we are learning in this class will affect my future career. In this class we have tackled some very big and complex mathematical ideas, that sometimes I have never heard of and had not a clue what was going on. With the help of others in the class I was able to figure out, most of, the ideas we were exploring and this made a huge connection to my future career. As i was struggling through the work and wanting to give up I would connect myself to what I have learned in my previous classes and I would remember that I needed to have a growth mindset. Although sometimes the mathematics was really complex I knew that giving up and feeling discouraged would not help me understand the math more than I did now. I remembered that sometimes in order to learn you have to be faced with a challenge that may seem completely impossible to you but having a positive attitude about tackling it will help you to succeed in that task. Having a growth mindset has helped me be successful in this course and has shown me that having a growth mindset really is crucial to learning.
Having this connection to growth mindsets has shown me the importance of teaching my students to have these mindsets. Creating classroom norms in my classroom that sets up my students to have a growth mindset has become very important to me. I have heard a lot about the importance of this but seeing it within myself this semester has really verified the importance it will be to my future students. Throughout this class I have also had to reflect and learn with others. Collaboration has played a huge role in my success this semester. This connects to my future because i want to have a collaborative classroom. Having the opportunity to be in a collaborative classroom twice a week for the entire semesters helps my to vision what my future classroom will look like. I want to give my students the chance to work together to make new discoveries, come up with formulas, and understand content and this class has given me a great model to remember for my future. Overall, this course has really helped me to make connections to things that will actually happen in my future. All semester I have been able to reflect upon myself as a mathematician and a teacher and also to connect my ongoing experiences to things that will happen in my future.
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Before college I never really thought about math other than it being my thing. In grade school math was always my subject. I loved math and I was better at it than all the other subjects. When college came around and I had to pick an emphasis for my teaching degree and there was no doubt that I would choose math. As I started taking college math courses my vision about math began to change. Math isn't someones "thing" and there isn't "math people" anybody can be a math person and this is really starting to help shape how I think math should be taught.
To start I think math should be taught in a way that everyone is welcomed to try, fail, revise, experiment, and succeed. Mathematics requires trial and error, mistakes, and taking risks. In my future classroom I want math to be a welcoming subject where my students are not afraid to take risks, share their thinking, and make and revise mistakes. My vision that everyone can be a math person has helped me realize this. Math should be welcoming not scary to students. I want everyone in my classroom to love math and not think they are bad at it. Math is a subject that everyone can try and be good at, and I really hope to see this in my future classroom. Going off of this idea, I think math should be taught in a way to promote a growth mindset. I think that students should also be learning and growing a growth mindset while learning math. It is important to me that my students will have confidence in what they are doing and they won't be afraid to be wrong. I also want my students to not be afraid to share their mathematical thinking. This is going to play a huge role in my future classroom, so I hope my students have a mindset that will allow them to do this. Having a fixed mindset only makes it more difficult for a student to learn because they are afraid of failing or think they are not good enough. In order to be successful in math I believe you have to have a growth mindset and I plan on shaping my classroom in this way. I also vision math as fun. Over the years I have done so many experiments, group work, and discovering new formulas/ideas that math has become fun. I now see math in a way that I didn't in grade school. I see it as a fun way to learn the material that will help me for the reset of my life. Because I view math as a fun I think this is going to play an important role in my future classroom. I want to teach math in a fun way. I want my students to be playing games, doing group activities, and making discoveries so they are not only learning but they are also engaged and having fun. Overall, I believe the way the teacher views math will have a big impact on their classroom. I am thankful GVSU has taught me a new way to view math and I hope that I can use my views to help my students view math in a fun, positive, and welcoming way. Every since I was a little girl teaching has been a passion of mine. I used to force all of my friends to play school with me and of course they could never be the teacher. As I got older people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and of course my response was still the same, a teacher! People would always point out that teachers didn't make that much, worked long hours, and had to deal with kids all day but none of that mattered to me. Making a difference and helping support kids education has always been what mattered. Now that I am almost done with college teaching has become my biggest passion. A second doesn't go by that i am not excited about my future and all of the kiddos I am going to get to support. I have spent hours and hours prepping for the day I finally reach my goal. I have spent so many hours that my spare time now revolves around teaching. I'm now always volunteering in schools, doing research on how to enhance the teacher preparation program, and also traveling the world to gain experience.
Last summer I traveled abroad to Arusha, Tanzania where I taught 3rd and 5th grades for a month. I have never felt such a big impact on my life and the experience was unforgettable. I remember standing in front of my fifth graders teaching them how to find square roots and I found myself falling in love with teaching all over again. The kids drive for success and education only motivated me to become a teacher more. Their love for school and respect for teachers made me want to fast forward to having my own classroom. The students in Tanzania left an impact on my life that will last me forever. An impact that drives me to become a better educator everyday and drives me to be a role model to every student I work with. Most of my spare time this semester has been spent on the research project I am apart of with a classmate and fellow GVSU professors. We have been looking at the importance of field-based experiences before student teaching and how to take theory into practice. Through this research project I have spent many hours researching these ideas and also spending time in a MTH222 class where I have watched the preservice teachers teach lessons to third graders and then I have helped them reflect by giving them feedback. Other than the things stated above i always find myself thinking about math, making connections to things i have learned in my math courses, and also watching and reading math stories and strategies. So when I think of a past time I have my mind automatically goes to teaching. I am always practicing, researching, and thinking about past experiences I have and how I can use those to better my future. Our latest assignment in capstone was to read a book and then give a book talk on our selected piece. I choose the book How to Bake Pi because it really intrigued me. As soon as I read the title I had a feeling lots of connections to the real world would be made and to me that is the best way to understand mathematics. As I began to read I almost instantly realized my prediction was correct. In How to Bake Pi Eugenia Cheng did an excellent job at taking all the ideas that make up mathematics and breaking them down into understandable parts. Cheng did this all through real life examples and ideas that anyone can understand.
This book was great for me because I am going to be an elementary education teacher and Cheng has showed me that this big complex ideas can be broken down just like any idea in mathematics. This book has also helped me to see many connections throughout all the math courses i have taken here at GVSU that I didn't see before reading it. If you are looking for a book that breaks down what math is and gives funny and relatable examples, How to Bake Pi may be the perfect choice for you. For the past 4 weeks we have been learning about early mathematicians and their contributions to mathematics and honestly it has been a lot of information. Many names, stories, and strategies have been thrown our way but as always Pythagoras stuck out to me. As an elementary education major I have been struggling to make connections to my future career when learning about all these very important people, but after sitting here and thinking about Pythagoras it all clicked.
Many people know Pythagoras for his famous Pythagorean Theorem, even if he wasn't the one to come up with it, and because I have heard his name many times I made the most connections with him. In many of my math ed class we have learned about having a growth mindset (this means that we need to think we can do something, takes risks, accept challenges and believe in our self in order to even do something) is so important in the world of mathematics and Pythagoras has helped teach me that. In Euclidean Geometry one of our assignments was to prove the Pythagorean Theorem and I never needed a growth mindset more then I did while working on that assignment. It took us so many tries, we worked through so many errors, and we ended up with a 4 page proof that was so rewarding. To me, in a way Pythagoras helped me have a growth mindset and tough me the importance of a growth mindset to pass on to my future students. Another thing Pythagoras has helped me see is that doing things in multiple ways is important in mathematics. In class when we were going over the proof for the Pythagorean Theorem it was totally different than the proof I mentioned above. This helped me realize that every student truly does learn differently and not all my students are going to do their math work the same and it is going to be important for me to be able to gain an understanding into my students thinking and allow my students to share the variety of ways they are doing their math work because it could potentially help another student. Every child learns differently, even in college, and Pythagoras has helped me see this. Overall, although Pythagoras may not still be here I find myself making connections to my future based mainly off of the Pythagorean Theorem, and whether or not he actually came up with it I am still giving him the credit for teaching me many valuable lessons that will help me be more successful in my future. What is math? The main answer to this question is going to be that math is using numbers, symbols, operations, etc. to solve given problems but to me math is much more than just numbers and symbols. Math is all about problem solving and using critical thinking to work through questions and to come up with a logical answer. Math is figuring out everyday life needs in a way that makes sense. Math is also the use of patterns and sequences. To some people when they are asked what is math there response is going to be "math is hard" but math is really just about having an open mind and using numbers, symbols, operations, and logic to work through and solve a problem.
The top 5 discoveries in math are the value of pi, the strong right angle theorem, Pythagorean Theorem, the discovery of logarithms, the discovery of negative numbers. I believe all of these things are great discoveries because without them a lot of the math we do today would not be possible. These things have all been building blocks to many of the ideas in a lot of my math classes. |
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