I thought about starting off this post with some lyrics of the song "Brand New Day", the one from Dr. Horrible. But I figured that might be a bit off-putting.
It's the start of a new year. I still wish to maintain my regular posts on this blog during the school year, so here I am. Typing. New classroom, everything seems very...empty. On the plus side, I have windows! Can't complain about that, my old room was a dungeon.
Opening up is supposed to be about my attempts to reform my teaching, to make me a better teacher. I think I will set one major goal this year:
I want to be less boring.
I think I mentioned it before, but I had an epiphany over the summer. The way that I see math being taught is boring. Frankly, I totally understand why so many students hate math. We start off math lessons with explanations and terminology and instructions which are completely irrelevant and not meaningful.
I personally think that we need to start off a lesson with context. A context in which this is actually applied (and not purchasing 60 watermelons). Then we need to let students explore, play, ask questions, discuss, make mistakes. They need to draw their own conclusions, right or wrong. When they discover things that don't work, they need to figure out why.
Then, we can have the instructions and the explanation. To me, this is a more authentic model for real learning. A student can add fractions together easily, but completely lose the process when it's applied to rational expressions. Why? Because they learned a method, a set of steps, but never really understood the concept of WHY we have a common denominator, or how to get one.
Furthermore, I think that by giving context first and letting students explore, they are more engaged in the lesson and are much less likely to tune out. And isn't that the first step to learning?
Those are my thoughts for today.
