Final Reflection

 I have learned so much about the combined use of maths and art this term (an area I have never been able to incorporate into my practical teaching before) my favorite was the maths art  topic and learning to draw a maze post, in the maths art topic we chose as a group I incorporated one of my favorite maths lessons from university, knot theory, into our display and I also really enjoy doing crafts and I showed how to weave an intricate and beautiful Chinese knot. My most rewarding lesson was my micro-teaching class, I never thought I would be teaching a whole class and it was a great exercise for me. I love musical theatre, the combination of singing and dancing with drama is the most beautiful form of art in my opinion, and in this class I learned how to group and distribute students. I also enjoyed the puzzles in 342, even though I found some of the puzzles logically challenging for me (who has a math major), these puzzles are great examples of what I can teach my students to explore in the future. It also gives me a great example of a maths assignment for students that could be for them to write about what they think the topic is thinking and what stuck with them.

I don't think the assignment for designing a unit plan should be at the end of the list, for me I feel that unit plans are an area of my teaching that I am not very good at because I have never taught an entire chapter of a lesson at the appropriate grade level. I feel it is a little too late to receive comments and make changes after the semester. I need more time to talk to my students and prof about how to edit it.

Inquiry project

 Inquiry Powerpoint

Inquiry project reflection: 

I have learned a lot in this project. At first, our topic was "How Mathematics Curriculum Changes", but when we entered school, we found that our project problems were not very suitable for research/resources were limited, and we were unable to gain a deeper understanding. So we modified our direction based on the original question purpose. The first thing I learned was how to determine the topic. During our interviews with teachers and parents, we found that even though "equity" has been achieved to some extent, there are still some drawbacks. Therefore, our future direction may be more inclined to delve deeper into the benefits and drawbacks of equity brought about by this approach. What I also learned in this project is how to conduct interviews. In our "connect to the real world" section, we need to go to the school to learn and conduct interviews with our SA, parents, as well as teachers and staff from other departments of the school. The questions I initially asked confused the teachers a bit and they didn't know what the focus of the questions was. Later, after I made revisions and prepared some effective questions, the teachers could provide me with detailed answers. We do not have the opportunity to directly interact with parents regarding their views, and can only provide us with some information through the interaction between SA and parents before. There may be an information gap in between, and after the long practicum, there may be an opportunity to have direct contact with parents.

Nov.16 Annotated Bibliography

 Annotated Bibliography

Oct 19 Entrance slip Braiding Sweetgrass

I am so thankful that I was able to read this article, especially since I read it before my practicum started. It has been very impactful as well as encouraging to me. First of all, as a non-native English speaker, I have felt many moments of inner loneliness since I came to Canada, such as wanting to express so much, but because of my language skills, what I want to say and what I say are often not on the same level. But the last sentence of the last paragraph of this article really comforted me, I can say it in my heart.

Secondly, I think I need to improve my maths terminology in my classroom. Being used to discussing maths with my peers and asking my professors for advice, I realized that these ways of expressing mathematical vocabulary and the logic of the language are very different from the way I teach my students in the classroom. Not only that, but the use of English vocabulary needs to be more formal and standardized, and there should be no use of words that may confuse students. I think I will take this into my practicum and consult my SA more often.

The article mentions that "To actually speak, of course, requires verbs" (p. 153) I think I should try to accumulate as many things as possible in my life, in my studies, in my readings, more localized verbs, so that I can express myself more clearly.

Inquiry project

Here is the link to our inquiry project

Inquiry project

Homework reading for Oct.17

 The first 'stop' that stopped me from thinking for a while is the sentence from the first paragraph "But schools teach much more---and much less---than they intend to teach."(p.87). I began to think about what it means to teach more and what it means to teach less. I think this is because there is a gradual increase in the number of courses involved in schools today, with school professors developing more and more courses, and a lot of social skills, time management, and life issues. And the ability to communicate with elders and peers. But what is less taught in schools is that, as mentioned in the article we read last week, the overly formal and rigid way of teaching can lead to a gradual loss of interest (especially for maths). There are also problems that students will encounter in life or later in life when they go out into the community, etc. that schools cannot cover completely.

Another stop for me came from the bit in the article about schools fostering submissive behavior. Before reading the article, the examples the author gave in the article, the so-called incentives, etc., had not occurred to me as a way of being a way of fostering submissive behavior. Suggestions or rules and regulations made by the school when implemented in this way become a way of fostering submissive behaviours. This kind of reward system is likely to make students lose interest in what they are doing and become overly concerned with rewards. In the long run, this may lead to a sense of "routine" in their future work. I think it is difficult to avoid using rewards while achieving the goal of regulating students' behavior and cultivating their interests, and schools can't avoid "asking" students to do something. The way I can think of to avoid this at the moment is to allow students to reward themselves, i.e. instead of setting a common "reward" each student writes down how they think they should be rewarded. They can then reward themselves when they have done it.

The school curriculum in Eisner's view tends to emphasize the development of a concept of having thinking in line with thinking in the three core competencies in the BC curriculum.

Entrance Slip for Oct. 5

  As stated in the article, students, time, lessons, and resources are uncountable as well as complicated and tedious (Gerofsky & Ostertag, 2018, p. 173).  Especially for me as a maths student, I want to be able to organize things in a way that is clear and visual, and that ensures that there is no possibility of negligence. I hope that in my future career, I can help each student to understand and organize their studies to the best of their ability. With this in mind, the "grid" approach to teaching and learning is really the way to go. But I also hope that my future classroom will be lively, flexible, and interesting for my students. However, traditional teaching methods and past experiences have shown that students are not very interested in maths classes. I think by reading this article and through our experience of having lessons in the garden, I would like to bring my maths class outdoors, for example, by setting up drawing lessons outdoors, so that students can step out of the regular straight and stereotypical environment and focus in the outdoors, and to give maths lessons a fresh format so that they can bring more interest to the students.

The image I gained was that of a 'grid', and by reading this article I learned something I had never thought or imagined before, that the grid represents control and ownership of the intellectual space. There is also the image of 'swing', swing music, and swing dance which represents jumping around, being upbeat, being off the beat, and also “out of the beat and play with the beat” (Gerofsky & Ostertag, 2018, p. 183)

I strongly agree with the article about escaping from the 'grid' of traditional education and finding new ways of doing things. Still, as the last paragraph of the article raises the question, I think that just because new teachers can accept and refer to this idea and bring it into their classrooms, it doesn't mean that all of them will accept and practice this idea. For those teachers who are not very imaginative, arranging a classroom that is completely in an area that is unfamiliar to them may present many classroom problems. So teacher candidates can take what they can get away with, making sure that they can manage the discipline and pace of the classroom foremost, and then experimenting with new ways of teaching.