One of the things I do at the middle of the term to have students reflect on the way that they talk about mathematics in class, is have them evaluate their work with my Student Self-Report on Class Contribution and I give them detailed feedback on their rankings of each type of question and what I think […]
James Henry Trotter: “When I had a problem, my mum and dad would tell me to look at it another way.” (Roald Dahl) I’ve always thought that PBL fostered creative problem solving as opposed to memorization of pneumonic devices. One of my students today proved me right when I gave a “quick quiz” on the […]
I’d like to think of myself as a master teacher. I’ve always thought of myself as very aware of student perspectives in my classroom, but today after a weekend of being in bed with a bad cold, all I wanted to do was get through the problems and get back home – I admit it. […]
In early January, I had the good fortune to go down to the NCSSM Teaching Contemporary Mathematics Conference in Durham, NC. There were many wonderful speakers there including Dan Teague, Maria Hernandez, Gloria Barrett and the Key Note Speaker on Saturday morning, Gail Burrill. Gail spoke about making up tasks and lessons that actually allowed […]
I just read a great blogpost by a business writer, Gwen Moran, entitled, “SIx Habits of Resilient People.” When I think of people that I admire in my life for their resilience there was usually some circumstance in their life that led them to learn the quality of resilience because they had to. Even the […]
Returning from vacation is always a tough time, but the other day in my honors geometry class, I decided to present them with a problem that had at its heart the Pythagorean Theorem – which we’ve been using since the beginning of the year – and I wanted to see what they would do with […]
So, I finally got this done and I’ll continue with the top three readings that I just found extremely useful in my teaching last year. 3. The Innovators’ DNA: by J. Dyer, H. Gregersen and C. Christensen I rarely recommend books that I have not read yet, but this one is actually on my list […]
Happy New Year! It’s been a busy end of 2013 for me. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and catching up with some writing. So, the New York Times came out with their top 75 Best-Selling Education Books of 2013 and some of them are really great reads and some are just books that […]