Miss Arguello's Classroom

If my blog title doesn't give you the hint, I am a FUTURE math teacher. That is, I am a current education student. That being said, I am still learning math teaching strategies as I go throughout my college career. So, as this semester has been going on, I have been taking a course called "Math Activities for Secondary Teachers." This class is designed to help us learn standards, such as Algebra, Trigonometry, Geometry, and Data and Probability. In addition to doing "dailies" to show our understanding, we do SBARs (Standards-Based Assessments), in which we exercise our standards-based knowledge. Finally, we have also been reading an excellent book called Mathematical Mindsets by Jo Boalar. I highly recommend this book to anyone who hasn't yet read it, it is fantastic and has completely changed my mindsets in regards to many things. So, now that I have summarized what my basis is for "what I learned," I will be doing something a little different. ...

Opening up the course page for our “Day 20” work, I found myself a bit at a loss with what I saw. On the page were some colorful, yet complicated, diagrams of geometric shapes. At first, reading about this Sangaku I was required to make, I thought, “It’s a circle inside of a triangle. What’s so hard about that?” Then I saw that the shapes were supposed to stay inside one another, growing and changing as another shape grew and changed. This is when I thought, “How am I supposed to make that ?” With our work time in class, I was still at a loss. Professor Golden had made a fairly valiant attempt at explaining what to do, but since I have a small issue called “impatience,” I sort of paid attention while trying to make headway on the Sangaku. This ended up being much more difficult than I expected. For one thing, the circle didn’t grow and change as my triangle grew and changed, and I wasn’t sure why. Asking Professor Golden, he directed me to the conics section, where I was to create...

This past Thursday, I had the great pleasure to observe a classroom in my community. (I won't specifically name the school or the teacher I was observing for confidentiality reasons, but let's call the teacher Mr. T. For Mr. Teacher.) I volunteer at this high school twice a week, and I happened to see Mr. T in his classroom on my way out one day. I saw that he had several statistical models of data pasted to his door, so I took a chance, walked in, and asked if he was a math teacher. This led to a conversation about me pursuing my math education degree at Grand Valley, and we set up a time for me to observe in his classroom for two hours one morning.  Flash forward to Thursday.  I arrived at the school a little before 8 and got my visitor's pass in the office. I wasn't sure how I was going to feel, because while I had volunteered at this school before, I was unfamiliar with how it would feel sitting in a classroom wondering, "How would it feel to teach this clas...

When I mentioned to my roommate one night that I hoped to eliminate testing as much as possible in my own classroom, instead of being met with support, I was met with a mixture of surprise and possibly a bit of horror. "How are you going to assess them on if they learned the material then? Where will their grades come from?" she asked.  "Well, I think you can assess student performance in other ways besides exams," I explained. "I don't want a student's entire grade riding on how they do on a test. I think every student is brilliant, every student has something they are good at. But for a lot of students, testing is not one of the things they are good at, and I think its unfair to simply cater to the students that are good at taking tests."  I understand why my roommate was a bit aghast at my statement. In high school, she had no trouble taking tests, and she is still that way even while taking difficult science courses that way beyond my und...

Courtesy of pixabay.com  In my Math Activities for Secondary Teachers course, we have had the pleasure of exploring Desmos, a math site that can function as a calculator, form graphs, and has many interactive activities students can use to learn. We tried some of these activities in class. Notable mentions were Polygraph and Marbleslides. Polygraph can be thought of as a math Guess Who type of game: students are matched with a classmate, one classmate picks a graph, and the other must use yes or no questions to find the graph that their fellow student picked. This is especially useful in helping students become familiar in terminology such as intercepts, turns, degrees, and increasing/decreasing. Marbleslides is a game in which students must construct graphs in order to get the marble to roll into all the stars. This game can be done with all different types of functions (our class used rational functions) and is useful in helping students learn the behaviors of function grap...

Think back to when you were in high school, maybe even middle school. You can maybe recall your teacher telling you how to graph a parabola given an equation. You can probably recall (ax)^2+bx+c , and perhaps you can even recall the quadratic formula. But do you even remember how to find the equation of a quadratic function using the vertex form? Yeah, me either. You may be thinking: "Yeah, so what? Why is the vertex form of an equation important? Can't I just use the form I already know? Why isn't that good enough to teach students?" I'm not saying that the standard form of a quadratic equation isn't important, and I completely agree that it is essential that students know how to use the standard form of an equation, since it will be extremely useful as they get to know more families of functions. However, I don't think that the vertex form of an equation really gets the special spotlight that it deserves, and here's why. First of all, there's a...