Heather Robinson article - Response

I always feel a little bit guilty when it comes to "trying new things" with students. I think it's partly because the students in practicum aren't "my" students, and instead these are the students for whom my sponsor teacher is ultimately responsible. Because of this, as much as I want to try out different ideas, and no matter how supportive the sponsor teacher is (and he has been lovely, for sure), I always feel as though my experimentation may prove to be unethical, or may detriment my students. So although I understand the optimism with which Heather Robinson writes about "still [having] insights into [her] aspects of pedagogy and instruction" (pp. 62) despite lesson plans not working for her, I still feel as though I am a bit of a cheat, taking "bits and pieces" from other people to create my "own" practice. I suppose that all knowledge is built on previous experiences and does not require a person to "reinvent the wheel", so to speak, but when students' success is at stake, ironically, the students' enjoyment and ability also become the ultimate reason why a teacher would try something out in the first place. Heather Robinson's article sounds like me, though; I have yet to teach with a purpose other than for teaching math, and am still somewhat detached from the lessons I teach. I love math, I really do, but I also know its applications, and that's what it makes it relevant to me. Making mathematics relevant to thirty students, times six blocks, is a huge challenge!

Although I would like to say that my detachment from math teaching is because I am not writing lesson plans for my own class, but for someone else's, I ultimately know that I need to write my lesson plans, and find a reason to teach math. I think this is largely due to an overlap of my personal opinion and the classroom mixing together. I like the idea of provoking students and discussion. I don't know how much liberty I can take to doing that in a classroom that isn't my own, though, and I've been losing quite a bit of sleep over it. IB is supposed to be interdisciplinary, yet every classroom seems like it isn't; it's just a bunch of stuff to learn. I know that there are students who will just learn the math because they're expected to, but I want them to enjoy it, as well. Where can we get questions like the "Alternative Assessments" and "Enrichment Masters" which Heather Robinson mentions in the article? What about the ones we've used in our EDCP 342A class? I'd love to expand my resources to include such materials. There's also a social justice in mathematics textbook in the Education Library which I'd like to pick up.

I love the idea of Jigsaw activities; one concern in math, however, is whether or not students will teach each other incorrectly. However, this is something that seems to work better in my math 9 class than when I taught them, so I am considering having students teach each other in that sense, because they aren't benefiting from lecture.

The other issue I have is that the evaluation of mathematics remains the same even though the methods of instruction are all different. Mathematics remains a written form. I would be interested in having an interview setting, instead of tests, for one test out of the year, to see how well students can explain their ideas. No prompting, and correct answer = top mark, slight prompting and correct answer = A- or B+, etc. That would certainly help for students who have problems with written output, but perhaps are very strong verbally. Some countries certainly had interviews as part of their evaluation. These would have to be short, however, likely spread across an entire week; perhaps they could be an option for students to complete instead of a test, if they were struggling a great deal. This sort of interview type testing is used informally in various Skills/Learning Assistance periods when students write tests under the supervision or with aid of a support worker.

Practicum Experience Response

I didn't find anything easy about teaching math at my sponsor school. It's not that I found the subject difficult, but teaching math in a way that was still exciting to students was a challenge. When it comes to relative difficulty, however, I realized that I preferred to use the whiteboard over the tablet in a classroom, which is a huge revelation for me, because I always thought I did really well with the tablet. There's still something about moving around when you teach that, according to one student, is more appealing about teaching on a whiteboard, whereas I found that the tablet keeps you locked in one place, for the most part. In general, tablets are big and bulky and can't really be held up for walking around the room. I found it easy to talk to students, though; that was nice. I think I'm still young enough to be able to talk to them (I realized I use a slight touch of slang, like "s'all good" or "no worries"; though, is that slang, or just an expression used by my expression? I definitely called a large math expression a "holy mother of a cow". This seemed confusing to some, but I had their attention, which was nice. It was pretty easy for me to connect with the students, which was nice. They weren't shy when I would ask them questions, which was nice, and I asked them for their honest feedback. Although there was slight hesitation, I pointed out that I was a student learning to be a teacher. Although that's a dangerous move when it comes to keeping authority, they were still able to tell me what they liked and what they didn't like. 

The most difficult thing was probably to make math exciting. I did a lot of activities which were very upbeat and didn't allow for practice of material as much as I think I should have. I tried the "Japanese model" of teaching we discussed in one of the articles (Hoffier?), but I quickly found that students have come to expect being fed information and practicing it, so when I gave them a problem, there was such a large amount of complaining! My goodness! And with the small number of students in the school, by the time the next grade 8 class had come in, the previous class had already informed them that the class involved "a very difficult activity that nobody got", even though the students had learned all the information they needed to solve the problem. Although I don't expect all students to be problem-solvers, I realized that for the second class, I needed to explain a little more about how to solve the problem I had assigned, and from there, some people pounced on it immediately. Also, time management! Tiiiiime management, I'm still struggling with this so much! I've finally got control of my students, which is thanks to my sponsor teacher, who suggested that I have clear transitions between activities, and that worked. Also, I realized how not to be boring. That was huge. I realized as I was boring myself to tears, that other people were probably also pretty unimpressed at the moment, and so I became a little more theatrical. It helped!

I think the most interesting thing about teaching math is how helpful it is to have a problem worked out ahead of time. A problem in surface area, for instance, is much easier to teach if you have information prepared ahead of time and pre-organized. Another lovely thing; I divided up my boards into three columns to organize my work, and that helped tremendously. Finally, no matter how you try to turn cards into a teachable moment in probability and statistics, the junior level will always want to play poker, so don't use playing cards to organize people into groups....