Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Typical Texts
The typical texts in math are really only textbooks, especially when it comes to high school. I don't remember using anything other than a textbook for math until I got to college and took some classes up here. The only thing that one of my teachers did that was remotely close to using another text was a song she taught us to remember the equation on how to find x's roots in a quadratic equation. To this day, I still remember that time in class and have never forgotten the song. I plan to use the song to teach my future students. I really liked that experience because it was fun and it put some variety in the day compared to every other day where we would come in, sit down, take notes, and work on homework with the remaining class time. It was a day where everyone was smiling and having fun which isn't a common occurance in math classes! I would say that once I got to Calculus 2 here at the university is when I wasn't able to really understand the text. Math is hard enough to learn from a text, but even harder when your teacher doesn't explain things well. As a teacher, I hope to make every day enjoyable, make the students smile or laugh. If not from the subject matter, then at least from my personality. I hope to show the students that you don't have to be boring to like math! Ordinary, spunky, fun people can enjoy math. I would like to be able to find many texts that would help them in their learning experience to help clear concepts up. Maybe with these other texts, they may think math is more enjoyable and not the worst thing in their lives!
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I agree that math, for the most part, is taught through textbooks, although you might also consider writings on the whiteboard as texts. These days, there are many cool data visualization websites and virtual manipulative that might also be considered "texts" (depending on your definition of "text"). More and more, people are also starting to make books related to mathematics, such as books that use math to understand extreme sports, and there are magazines like this one too that are good for middle school students.
ReplyDeletehttp://shop.scholastic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?productId=64955&langId=-1&storeId=10001&catalogId=10004
Providing many engaging texts is one way to engage your students in math, along with your personality. :)
Math can be really hard to make interesting, but it sounds like you have the right idea! Using music like the experience you had is such a great idea, and it helps students to remember things easier than just by reading the text book. You have such a fun and upbeat personality, the students are going to love you! I think it is so important to always stay positive when you are around students because they look up to you as a teacher in so many ways. You are going to be an awesome math teacher :)
ReplyDeleteI agree with so many things you say. Personality is so important as teacher as well as being positive. Making things fun for your students is a key element in becoming an effective teacher. I always struggled with math for some reason but the teachers who were upbeat, fun, as well as incredibly patient made the subject a lot more enjoyable. I recently saw this movie or documentary I rented from netflix called "Between the folds". I thought of you... it was all about geometry and origami and paper sculptures. I know you have an interest in art. Some of the people being interviewed were math teachers who were doing math and origami with their students and coming up with some really creative results. This is just a thought but I think you could integrate other types of ideas like this into your classroom and become known for being a "fabulous" math teacher. Your openness to different possibilities is a good place to start.
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