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6/8/11 Initial Thoughts

Hi Readers,

I thought it would be a nice start to my blog to share my experience over the first two days of meeting with the people at Hy-Vee, and share my ideas and expectations as I go into this externship.

The people at Hy-Vee have been great so far! I went into this kind of clueless about the specifics, and even though I know we have a lot to learn before we can get into projects of our own, I have already learned a lot of interesting things about Hy-Vee that make me excited to learn more and help with whatever I can. I've seen math used in various places and in ways that I had never thought about before, and I've only been through two days of training so I can only imagine how much more math I'm going to experience over the course of the summer. It is true that most employees don't sit down at their desks, pull out a parabola, and start finding zeroes, but I can see that just having good number sense is invaluable for so many different positions in the company, and I'm sure it's the same in every big company. That right there is something that I need to remind myself every single day as a teacher. My kids need to be comfortable with decimals, percents, fractions, charts, tables, graphs, percent increase/decrease, averages, and so much more. These things, for the most part, aren't specific units in my geometry or algebra 2 curriculum, but I need to be infusing these ideas into lessons consistently throughout the entire year. Number sense and logic are things that needs to be underlying themes every time I plan and teach a lesson. 

I have really enjoyed working with Sam and James so far! I love collaborating, and I think I'm more confident and work better with a team. This is another thing I need to remember as I'm planning lessons for my students. Usually in the business world, they're not going to be given an assignment to complete entirely on their own, and then share with their boss in secret while others work on the same assignment privately. That would be ridiculous. Employees often share ideas, debate changes, or complete tasks by combining their strengths to produce an end product or proposal. I need to be teaching my kids good team work skills. I think that is as important as teaching them math. This also brings to mind different assessment strategies.  

From these next six weeks, I hope to continue learning how math is used in the business world. I want to take some of those ways, and create lesson plans that will get students working together and problem solving similar scenarios tweaked for their background knowledge and content area. I am hopeful that I will leave the summer with a collection of new ideas!

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