Just A Math Teacher

I forgot to post last week ... I apologize to my six fans. Truthfully I found this week's lesson more interesting to write about than last week's anyway, so maybe it's for the best. In class today we played games. All class. All. Class. Not a bad way to get a university degree right? In this interactive session on engaging students in their learning, we played a Hedbanz-esque graphing game, along with a Guess Who graphing game and a puzzle solving game (also with graphing). Although it sounds repetitive, each of these activities were very engaging! In fact, I was only able to take a couple photos of the lesson at all. The Hedbanz-type activity. The goal: to draw your graph and/or write in vertex form. The Guess Who activity, after the professor ruined our fun. To me, these games are an amazing alternate form of assessment and observing students' knowledge. With the online games, teachers are able to observe what each of the students are doing i...

Hello out there to the 7 people who read my blog! Today in class we learned about differentiated instruction just as we do in all teachers college courses, and for good reason... it's important! But I must say that every time I learn about this topic I get this uneasy feeling and my pulse spikes a bit. The reason? Because it reminds me that every class is different and I can't possibly prepare for the class I will have in my placement or in the future. An example of a task that caters to different styles of learning. All of these mean the exact same thing! In each course I take we learn about different things we can use to make sure that our classrooms can accommodate all styles of learning and thinking (see above as an example). However, while I have enough experience working with students that I should feel confident in my abilities, this lesson on differentiated instruction reminds me that every teaching experience is truly unique and that there is no way to truly...