Thinking about teaching & learning gardens: Entrance slip for our Sept 24 class

I think I only had one big stop while reading this article: land on university turfs are prioritized for economic value, which creates pressure to replace gardens with say dorm buildings. In addition, most garden projects depend on volunteers and fundraising. I would imagine, say someone really loves gardens, giving gardens values like being a classroom where students can learn in / from provides more values to schools, and might avoid demolishing the garden. Perhaps this can even be understood as a survival strategy? If we put enough educational value to gardens, playgrounds, or anything that doesn't traditionally related to "education", we can make our classes more diverse and engaging, and still save our hobbies!

I think one thing I can do with gardens is exploring geometry. We can teach geometric ideas like perimeter and area, and assign our students to plan out their own garden design. Furthermore, if we teach calculus, we can use derivatives to find an optimized size for our gardens. 

One problem I can think of at the moment is the lack of resources. What if the school I work for has administrations that are more "practical" and believes gardens are not worth maintaining, or they simply lack the budget to maintain a garden. Another concern is that if I have a class of energic students, how would I maintain structure when we are leaving the classroom? How do I prevent students from just skipping class when I am not looking? 

 

Sept 17 Exit Slip

The sit spot today was nice. It was definitely strange & interesting at first that we were asked to draw pictures in a math class, but the end discussion & results were very cool. I noticed that most things in nature have a lot of randomness in their mathematical properties, whereas human made structures have mostly symmetric and "nice" mathematical properties, say 90 degree angles. It would be a nice activity to do with students in the future if I have the resources, and it would also be a nice homework assignment to let students research on common math properties in real life, like why is everything 90 degrees?

Sept 17 entrance slip

1)

1.     I think this article does speak to me as a new teacher candidate. Traditionally, I think the way math has been taught is that teachers demonstrate techniques and problems, students then practice solving problems using the techniques the teacher taught. In the article, the two authors emphasized that students with other cultural and historical perspectives might not understand the same materials as me. For example, I grew up learning long multiplication in China, but some students in Canada are also taught the lattice method. Rather than assuming long multiplication is superior because it is familiar to me, I should also examine lattice method and see if it has any advantages. In the future, I should be mindful of different perspectives and adapt my lessons accordingly.

Some of the terms and examples used in the articles are dated and unrelated to us. For instance, “handicapped” was used when discussing students with disabilities, which feels a bit dated in today’s world.  

 

2)

2.      My takeaway is that teacher inquiry is not just “thinking about how the class went”. For example, after teaching long multiplication the way I learned it, and my students get the practice questions right, a basic reflection of my lesson could be: “the lesson went well, since my students got the problem right?” In reality, I should be reflecting on whether my students understood why the algorithm works or are there better methods that might suit some students’ needs better.

I think one thing I am somewhat conflicted with is that that “teachers should take considerable responsibility for examining and improving their own practices. While that is true, from my experiences, teachers don’t often control every part of their teaching environment. For instance, one student might need a lot more help than others, but I have 30 other students to teach without any education assistance to help me. All in all, teachers’ self-reflections need adequate resources and support, since individual teachers cannot address all types of problems in a classroom.

Sept 10 Exit Slip

 

One of the quotes / idea that stuck with me was "Be open to students about ourselves." I wholeheartedly agree with this take, since I personally have benefitted from this before. I believe teachers should be sharing things related to us to students, within a level that we are comfortable with. It helps us build connections to students that have similar interests, and even those that do not since they could now be interested / comfortable with sharing their interests with us once we open up ourselves. Two years ago, I was assigned a student who was very shy, and he had a lot of problems interacting with other teachers due to his shyness. He was coming for two hour sessions every Thursday with me, and I gave him a 10 minute break during the hour transition to relax. During those breaks, I noticed that he would always look up Minecraft mod tutorials. Since I also played Minecraft, I though we could have some common language together. Since then, during our breaks, I would talk to him about my experiences playing Minecraft, and he would sometimes teach me things that he knows. From these interactions, he eventually warmed up to me, and most of the problems other teachers had (not listening to instructions, talking back, etc...) just disappeared. We spent a year together doing programming problems and talking about Minecraft. Eventually, when he attempted the same programming contest he did prior being in my class, his grade bumped from 15/75 to 56/75. He was happy, and his parents gave me some great feedback, which made me happy!

 Hello World!

psyduck