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...