Skip to main content

7 Weeks In

So the last week we've had two nights of conferences. They went really well this year! I felt like I did such a better job of letting parents know throughout the semester about concerns or options for additional help for students that needed it before conferences instead of discussing what we could start doing to get some kids help at conferences.

We are right in the middle of a unit on proofs. The way we teach them really bother me. I'm not talking about how my collegues and I have chosen to deliver instruction, scaffold, and build up to harder and harder proofs. I'm talking about the idea of messy confusing incredibly inelegant 2-column proofs... Proofs should be simple and elegant. If we could teach them with that idea always in mind and let kids explain however they want (this would be a perfect place to allow more writing in math) they would seem so much more meaningful in my opinion.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Definitions, Axioms, Math, and God

 Tonight I'm thinking about the unique way that God has created me.  I have been a math teacher. That has been my only career until being a coach these last 3 years. I've continued to be a math teacher while coaching. God created me with a deep love of learning. Mathematics is a bunch of well defined rules that give us an incredible playground of puzzles. I became a teacher because I wanted to do mathematics and work with people. I would never have become a teacher of any other subject. I get that you can learn in Science and Social Studies and English, so why do I love math so much? I love the definitions. Something is how we define it. I think of the stupid Neature Walk videos from high school... "It's called an aspen because that's what it is..." But really, the world operates a certain way, but in mathematics, the world exists in perfection in our minds. When we say something is a circle, we mean it is the set of all points equidistant from a center. Where...
Post a Comment
Read more

God Loves Math: 1 John 3:24

In this blog post, I will look up a random Bible verse and consider how reading it in context and with a mathematical perspective can teach me something about God.  Today I used this random Bible verse generator . The verse it gave me is 1 John 3:24. "The one who keeps God's commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that God lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us." Before I go any farther, I'm going to ask God to open my eyes and mind and heart to everything he has for me to learn from this verse. In verse 23, it says that God's command is to "believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us." So the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God and who loves his neighbor as himself will live in God and God will live in that person. And God's Spirit is the evidence of God living in us.  The first mathematical thought that comes to mind is the difference between 0.999 and 0.999... ...
Post a Comment
Read more

School vs. Real Life

I read a post on facebook today about things in the real world that students don't learn in school. It got me thinking about how we spiral everything in Geometry and Algebra 2. Here's how it works... We teach a brand new unit for about 2 weeks. During that time, we review something from a particular previous unit each day so that by the end of those two weeks, they have learned all the new material a little bit each day and reviewed all the "spiral" material a little bit each day. Then we give two tests, one over the new material and one over the "spiral" material. By doing this, they will experience all material once as new and a second time as spiral. This will allow them to take two tests over every unit. Their first test score affects their grade, but if they score higher on the second test, they get to keep just the higher score. If they score lower on the second test, we average the two test scores. Most students score higher on the second test becau...
2 comments
Read more