Yeni's EDCP 342 Blog

In the reading, the author made some good points about how teachers should teach math and how math can be a great language to communicate. His ideas on how we should "distinguish between using things in the world around us to do math, and using math to understand the world around us" really struck me. Many textbooks use "real-world examples" to put the topic into students' perspectives, however, such problems just make students wonder why they have to learn all that and eventually grow to hate the subject. Even though those problems have been made to link math to students' daily life, some even fail to address the importance of learning such math concepts and how those are applied to certain real-life situations. Rather than just introducing new math concepts and giving them problems to solve using those concepts, school textbooks should let students do more critical thinking about how they can relate math to the real world and how math can explain things ar...

If I were to teach this lesson again, I would still teach students the difference between the formal and informal ways to say hello in Russian and show them some situations where each word is appropriate. However, I would prepare some more greeting words other than hello so that students can get engaged till the end of the lesson.

The first thing that stopped me was the table of conservative and progressive stances on math education. The two stances have pretty much opposing arguments in every area of interest. Reading the table, I realized that I am very used to the conservative way of learning as in high school I was a student who only focused on the facts and algorithms that I was taught and was barely challenged to "present engagement with and development of mathematical modes of thinking that will expand [my] modes of thought and develop flexible problem-solving abilities" (p. 393). However, as a teacher candidate now I see how "progressive" the progressive stances are. Teaching students inquiry will have them focus more on their understanding of math than the abilities to solve problems. Given autonomy, teachers will be able to assess their learners' knowledge and skill levels better. Another stop was the public criticisms of school mathematics in the late nineteenth century. The...

I was surprised to see how accurate the results are. Except the fact that the scores are generally higher than I expected them to be, I think the results represent my perspectives pretty well. The test allows me to review my philosophical viewpoint. According to the results, nurturing is my dominant perspective whereas social reform is my recessive perspective. I was surprised by this because that is exactly what my perspectives are on roles as an educator (or a math teacher). The intention bar of the nurturing perspective is the highest and its action bar is the lowest. This result raises a question: Will the result change after my practicum? Will it change again when I really become a teacher? Since the test was taken assuming I have an experience teaching a classroom or currently work as a teacher, taking the test again when I actually have an experience might change the result. I might realize that another perspective other than the nurturing perspective is a lot more important. ...

While reading the article, I was stopped when Eisner mentions about how "the differentiation of classes into ability groups" can motivate students. Successful academic performances are rewarded both by grades and by admission to honours classes. Such reward system motivates and pushes students to complete tasks. Another part that struck me was the implicit curriculum. What schools advertise is not everything that students and their parents can expect. The implicit curriculum is something that is not advertised but can be even more important than the explicit curriculum. The attitude towards learning or their classmates can be observed and absorbed informally and unintentionally. The concept of the null curriculum is very interesting because it makes me wonder what the boundary would be for teachers. I agree that what schools do not teach is also important to consider. However, if one starts to wonder what schools have been neglecting, it will be impossible to list all the ...

Our math art project was based on  Margaret Kepner's A Magic Knight's Tour . A knight's tour is a path that visits each cell of the 8 by 8 chessboard once in knight's moves. All the moves are connected with black lines, and we can see that it is a closed magic path, where a starting point can also be an ending point. Observing Kepner's art, we realized that the inner squares change colour every move in a specific order. As there are 8 colours that were used, the colours keep changing, and the sequence repeats after the 8 colours. The background colour also changes. The first 8 outer squares - the first colour being red since the small black circle is the starting point of the path as described - are red, the second 8 are orange, the third 8 are yellow, etc. The colour black is used when the inner shape's colour matches the outer square's colour. In this way, there are a lot of interesting patterns that have been embodied in Kepner's art. It was at fir...