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.