Over the last month I have discovered a lot of things about math that I had never really thought about before. This class has shown me just how willing I was to learn whatever the teacher told me without really thinking about why this math worked. I always just figured as long as I understood the method that the teacher told me to use and got the correct answer than I didn't really have to think about why this worked.
In the last month we had been learning about areas. We started out with simple areas that we already knew, like the rectangle and triangle. We then branched out into more complicated figures. We found ways that we could use what we already knew from these two figures and combine our knowledge for these figures, some of which we did not even know the names of. We were pushed to find how to use our previous knowledge on these new figures. In the end we were able to generate our own formulas to use on figures to find their areas.
One thing that I thought was important about our using this knowledge was that many of us knew the formula for rectangles and triangles already, some people even remembered the formulas for other shapes. So our knowledge was very different from the students that we are going to have to teach in the future. To me this meant that at some point we are going to have to tell students some formulas.
Pick's theorem was an interesting assignment. I really struggled to find the relationship between the formulas I was able to find, but once I was able to find the correct connections that they each have I was able to really see how I could apply this formula in other cases.
I really liked the assignment for finding the formula of a quadrilateral. I thought this really helped me to see the process that students would have to go through to understand this information. I also thought that, while at the beginning it was difficult for me, once I just concentrated on it I was able to understand the information and would be able to relate the information to students to help them understand.
Overall, I learned a lot this month. I really think that its really imporant for me to understand these concepts in order to make me a better teacher.
Monday, March 3, 2008
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