Blog #1-New insights and their implications

Throughout class so far this semester, I have gained a lot of new insights towards the field of mathematics. I think the biggest thing I have learned so far is in teaching math to students. Growing up, I had the traditional math teacher that did two or three examples on the board and assigned problems 1-25 to give us practice. My senior year of math was a joke because we did accelerated math on the computer where we would print out our assignments and have to figure it out. When we asked for help often times our teacher did not even know how to do the problem. Where this story is going is that I have learned through our ELED 330 course, that math should be a class where students can use their own path of thinking to come up with the right answer. Students don’t need the magical formula to get them to the right answer. I have always looked at math as being a problem with one right solution and one right path to get there. Through the handshake problem, I came to the understanding that one problem can be done any number of ways to still come up with the same answer. Additionally, the handshake problem showed me that students can benefit from sharing their strategies with their peers. I had not even thought of doing the handshake problem the way that some of my classmates had done. Overall, I have gained a lot of insight about teaching math in these first few weeks. I now know that my students need to be challenged and that it is okay for them to struggle, the value of sharing strategies, and some problem solving tools, such as George Polya’s problem solving strategies, that may benefit my students. I am looking forward to the rest of the semester and what information I will learn that will help me in teaching my future students mathematics.