Final Blog

What was your greatest "learning" this semester with regard to teaching children mathematics? How has your thinking shifted?

The past of the semester that has impacted my view of how to teach children mathematics was when we were given the opportunity to participate in the SNAP math fair. I really enjoyed the fact that many of the problems presented to us did not necessarily have one correct answer and that there was a lot of thinking required to find an answer that worked. In fact, once Zack and I decided which problem we would present for the math fair, we spent hours playing "wild tic tac toe", trying to find a solution. What we found was that there were many strategies and that some worked better than others depending on the game situation. It wasn't until the day of the math fair, when we were sharing our projects with the rest of the class that we found that strategy that worked best in the majority of cases. Even then, we were not sure that we found the "correct" answer and really, we had no way of knowing until we found a "better" way.

This is something that I never had the chance to experience when I was going through school. I was taught that math required working through an equation, using the many mathematical processes to find a single correct answer. Personally, I was always concerned with finding the correct answer to a problem and would frequently check with my teacher, parents and peers to see if it was right before moving onto the next problem. I never really thought to pay much attention to the process involved in finding an answer. Luckily, this semester has taught me that the answer should not be the most important thing in mathematics and that an equal amount of attention (if not more) should be paid to the cognitive processes that go into solving a problem.

Having experience with the math fair, peer teaching and the various manipulatives that are used in today's classrooms has given me a positive outlook about teaching mathematics in the future. Having an understanding about some of the learning strategies that are helpful to students makes me feel a little more at ease about teaching mathematics.