Just A Math Teacher

In an attempt to stay on top of my work, I have prepared this blog post about two weeks before it is due! While there are other things for me to do, watching videos was about all my brain could handle at the time. First I wanted to watch Peter Lilijedahl's video about Building thinking classrooms. Here he explored areas of the classroom that could be altered to create a better learning and thinking environment for students. These areas along with his proposed solutions are below: Full disclosure: I also watched the videos that I could find on YouTube because it meant I could watch then at 1.75x speed I saw some of these strategies being used when I was on placement, and they were really valuable! Two of the great pieces of advice from this that I gathered were using random groups and vertical non-permanent surfaces. From there I moved on to Teaching as Professional Work  which, sadly, I could not watch at 1.75x speed. One of the things I grabbed from this video were th...

Hi everyone! We've had three classes since my last post: for one of them I led a station for students to learn about misrepresentation of statistics; another I participated in stations (so easy), and I missed the third to remain at home during a wintry Armageddon. Last post I wrote about how asking good questions is important to engage students and keep them focused on a task. This week I want to discuss the mathematical questions we ask. Also in these last three weeks, I submitted a math problem for other students in my class to dissect. Not going to lie, I think I killed it. Apparently my teacher did too, since I got a shoutout during the Armageddon class: Look mom, I'm famous! Part of what made this question fun for me is that this is something people will actually ask themselves when driving! People want to know if they will be late, and using a little bit of math they have the tools to figure it out.  When Chari (my teacher-student friend) and I ran a stat...