Final reflections

*NEW* Read through all your blogs for the course and reflect on

(i) what you have learned,

The thing that I learned that stands out the most was the thinking classroom. Using vertical, erasable surfaces to explore ideas and try things without a fear of failure makes a lot of sense to me and is something that I am eager to try out. I have noticed a lot of people “hiding” during math because they don’t want to expose their inability. This approach addresses that problem. On that note, the overall theme of the course really resonated with me. It is so helpful for learning to have hands-on activities to engage students. I agree with this because I feel that the main issue in teaching math is motivating students and engaging activities increase and inspire motivation in students. Also, these hands-on activities help students see that math is not strictly a pen and paper or computer related discipline. It extends outside the classroom and can be applied to help with almost anything.

 

(ii) how your ideas may have changed throughout the course, and

My ideas in regards to hands-on, engaging activities have changed because I now see them as much more valuable and effective than I did before when I thought of them as fun but maybe not so helpful for the test. Now I see that they promote mathematical thinking more generally which is very helpful on the test but also the tests are not that important because there are many ways to assess, evaluate, and judge understanding.

 

(iii) suggestions to improve the course for next year.

I would say keep the articles and posting about them. That was good. More discussion on them every week would also be fun. Maybe reconsider the art project to make it smaller because I had a hard time with that one. For example, maybe just a standard blog post instead of a presentation.