Yijia's Blog

By going over my old blog posts, I find that I learned a lot in the past 3 months from this course. The reading about instrumental and relational math is really thoughtful. It made me think a lot about if we should teach the instrumental or relational math and how to balance the two would benefit the students the most. I also had a chance to think about when I like math and when I don't, so that I could refer my teaching to my personal experiences. The TPI test also helped me in understanding myself as a teaching and what my beliefs are. It was also interesting to work on the Math Art project, as it brings a new perspective of math that math does not always have to be solving problems and algebras. The mini-lesson made me think about my time management skills and I have to work on it more for more successful lessons during my practicum and in my career. Overall I think the course is helpful and I have learned many different perspectives. Thank you, Susan, for the great course, I

I think the math fair was really thoughtful. It is enjoyable to see the projects that the kids made, they spent a lot of time and efforts into designing the games and making the posters. Most of the kids had done a great job in explaining their games and the reasons and the explanations were well organized as well, I could tell that they had a deep understanding of the topic. I think this kind of project or activity would engage the students in math more because it was hands-on and fun. This fair also gave the kids a sense of pride, as they could show the end products to their relatives and friends, which would interest them more in creating the project. This was also a great way for the students to explore other people's thoughts and gain more understanding of the topic. One suggestion that I would like to make is providing a range of topics. This math fair was on whether a game was fair or not, about probabilities. Many of the students were creating very similar games that I do

Linear Relationship

           We chose to do a project on Christopher's artwork was because it looked interesting: could be seen as both a 2D object and a 3D object. We tried to find the math concepts or theories behind the artwork, but we did not find anything useful and Christopher did not reply our email. Then we looked into his artwork and description in detail and found that he was trying to explore dimensions with repetition of shapes. By repeating the same 2D shape, a new 2D shape could be formed, and by tilting some of the 2D shapes, the new shape may appear 3D.             Instead of octahedron, we used tetrahedron instead, explored the differences between gaps and no gaps between shapes and created our artwork. We first thought that we could just generate an artwork from computer software, then we noticed that he mentioned about that inconsistency and error may be a seed of creativity. So we tried to draw the art by hand.             The computer-generated artwork is perfe

             If we have another chance, I would like to shorten the presentation part. The first lesson introducing arithmetic sequence should be more focusing on the understanding and application of the concept. It might not be the best idea to talk about special cases for tests and quizzes in the first lesson, because it may be too much information for students. It would also leave more time for students to do some activities and have a more concrete understanding.              If I were to teach the lesson again, I will keep the organization of the lesson: the review with examples, actual course content, and activities. The examples we used are really easy for students to understand, because there are comparisons and real-life examples. I like how “students” engaged when we introduced the concept, it was an active learning experience for them. The activities at the end would help us to assess their learning informally and discover any questi