MathsClass

2011 (my 6th year of teaching) was a year of befuddlement¹.

For 4 weeks this term, I handed over 3 of my classes (Year 7, 8 and 9 5.3) to a pre-service teacher from UWS. This is an important time for a pre-service teacher when in total they only spend 8 weeks in the classroom before ‘becoming a teacher’.

A quote:

Learning math is like learning to play the piano. First menial arithmetic and endless scales, but then Chopin and one’s imagination. @mathematicsprof

Having done both (learn maths and learn the piano) I love this quote. I hated scales when learning the piano. It wasn’t till I had got through my many years of formal piano lessons that I understood how fundamental learning scales was to everything I can do on the piano. As teachers of maths, we face that same kid, trying to convince them that what they are learning now will bring them greater understanding later.

Four years ago today, the first post on this blog was published.

Returning from a few weeks leave, it wasn’t clear where my Year 8s were up to. I figured they had started looking at grouped data, but I didn’t want to repeat work they might have already seen.

I showed WCYDWT: Spacing Evenly to some of my classes this week. A couple of reflections…

Things are tough at my school at the moment, tougher than normal. There are many reasons for that, this is not the post to discuss them though.

After 2 terms as a relieving Head Teacher, moving back to the normal classroom teacher load has been a bit of a shock. Even with faculty matters, I found myself achieving more of the extra things as a Head Teacher.

It’s that time of year again… that’s right… Year 8 solving equations.

A different term to say the least. The lack of posts on this site illustrates how busy things were.

This is where I hope I’m headed in 2010.

Usually I would reflect here on the year past. To be completely honest, I couldn’t be bothered reflecting on 2009. If I were to write down my thoughts, it would pretty much read like the post from February of 2009: Looking to 2009. It was a tiring and quite often frustrating year.

This week, my Year 8s have been looking at inequality signs, graphing inequalities and solving simple (one-step) inequalities. Today, after solving inequalities, we played a simple game. A simple, obvious game, that really doesn’t warrant a blog post.

Week 1 is over, and I need to reflect on what happen when I introduced laptops into my classroom.

Year 8 were recently assessed on solving equations and I was a little perplexed by the results.

This article is not a “how-to” but rather some thinking about using GeoGebra (a discussion starter maybe).

From The Australian, Technology lesson one: teach the teachers comes this:

… “This isn’t just about teaching teachers to use the technology,” Professor Stoney said.
“It’s about teaching them to use it for learning. How do students learn with technology?

My previous post on having an IWB in my classroom was written about three weeks after it’s installation. Tomorrow, we’ve got an IWB consultant/trainer/type-person-thingy coming to school, and I was asked to share what I’ve been doing with the IWB. So I wrote a quick list.

This may be the first of several posts as I review the effectiveness of having an Interactive Whiteboard in my classroom.

It’s a new school year. This post, therefore, should be full of optimism and goals. But, please indulge me in a short whine.

It’s hot, ridiculously hot.

2009 will be my fourth year of teaching. There are a few things happening this year that I want to note now, so I can reflect on their outcomes at the end of the year.

This post is my entry to Dan Meyer’s contest My Annual Report II.

Recently Dan Meyer posted his thoughts on the ideal maths textbook, which would actually be a digital archive of very interesting mathematical media.  This is a great idea, and whilst I don’t have a projector in my classroom yet (although fingers-crossed), it would be something that I would buy/subscribe to.  Anyway, there was a challenge in this for me: being mindful of the media I consume and the world around me to collect digital bits and pieces that might help explain a mathematical concept (I commented on Dan’s blog that I missed the opportunity to take a picture of 3m³ of dirt I had delivered).  The second, to my mind harder, challenge is to take that item and make a meaningful and engaging connection with a concept being taught in class.

Continuing my review of teaching in 2008.

In my post Thinking about 2008 I noted four things to improve my teaching in 2008, here I review how I did.

There’s a lot said in university lectures, teacher inservices and blogs about how we should be teaching.

Each year, we review the four basic operations with Year 7.  We don’t re-teach, because they would have already developed a method in primary school.  So, for each operation, we mind map different methods for solving a couple of different problems.

Thinking about my 3rd year of teaching… 2008.

I had a chance the other day, rare, to reflect on what was happening in my classroom during class time.  I noted one of the inconsistencies in my language.

University teacher training can only teach you so much, there are many aspects of being a teacher that university does not prepare you for.

One of the difficulties I found in my first year, was using technology in the classroom for the teaching and learning of mathematics.