Stocker: Math that Matters

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 around the world. Doing so, students will learn to make connections between math and social justice. Social justice issues are always around them, and if they learn that they could relate math to some of those, they will definitely show more interest in math.

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Course Reflection

Reading thorough my old posts I have written during this term, I realized something interesting. When I read articles and had to write reflections on them, I found them quite interesting but did not really reinforce those thoughts in myself. I thought they all had great ideas, but I did not pay attention afterwards. As I worked on various assignments for the course, including the math art project, two micro teaching lessons, and the final unit plan, and as I experienced many different teaching philosophies and styles of other peer TC's, I gradually became more adaptable to accept and change. Like other courses that have emphasized diversity in the classroom, the EDCP 342 course has helped me to accept others' opinions and behaviours. I liked how we had chances to experience different aspects of teaching almost every class. The class activity where we discussed how formation of desks affects students' learning was very inspiring. It allowed me to think about other possible...

Math Art Project - The Magic Path

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...

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