Week 2 Reflection

After the second session of my Mathematics class, I still have mixed feelings about math. I’ve never been particularly fond of math. I was pretty good at it in elementary school and I thought I was good at it, but by the time I was in grade 9 math, I realized I was not very good at math. I was always really lost and confused in my math classes in high school. After grade 11 I thought I was done with math classes. When I was registering for classes at Brock Education, and I saw that one of my mandatory classes was a math, I was really worried. I’m still a little confused in this class, but I’m hoping that by the end of this course I will be able to understand math much better, so that I will be able to instruct my students.

I think that being a good math student means finding different ways to solve problems, rather than just one solution. The same thing with being a good math teacher, you should use different methods to teach students how to problem solve. As a good math teacher you should let students find ways to solve problems, instead of just giving them a formula for them to plug in the information to find the answer. We did something similar in the second session of our math class. Our prof asked us to find the answer to the question “how many handshakes will 30 people make if they all shake each other’s hands?” He didn’t give us a formula, he just asked us to solve the problem. Different students used different methods, using blocks, using different calculations.

Woolley, E. © 2015

 My group modelled the problem by getting the 6 of us to shake each other’s hands. We found that if there are 6 people, then there will be 5 handshakes. From this, we were able to calculate how many handshakes 30 people will make.

Woolley, E. © 2015

One of the optional articles we were given to read for this session led to me finding this article, which really peaked my interest. It talked about how math is poorly represented in tv and movies. This is probably one of the reasons that kids don't like math. It is either shown in a negative way and so the kids view it as a bad thing, or it viewed as hard problems, but is actually fairly simple  (like on Numb3rs), so that kids think that math is not difficult but then they can't figure it out in class. I think one thing teachers should teach in the classroom, is that math is not a bad thing, and it really is used in everyday life.