Lifelong Learning
One of my hopes for this experience is personal and professional learning. I believe that one mark of a great teacher is one who never stops learning and growing. It’s only day three of the externship, but I have already learned so much–a new coding language and a refreshed advanced statistical knowledge–that I know will only continue with my time here at SAMSI. The more I develop knowledge of my content and the application of that content, the better I am then able to teach students. Statistics has always been one of my weaker fields in mathematics, and so I hope to solidify both the fundamentals as well as advanced knowledge of statistics. Working with AIG student populations, it is important that I am equipped with answers (or tools to find the answers) to the “why” questions I am so often asked. This knowledge is often rooted in both fundamental and advanced conceptual knowledge that I hope to gain during this experience. Hopefully, I won’t ever have to say to a student, “that’s just the way it is,” but rather will be able to explain why.
Additionally, showing students that learning is not a thing that only happens within the four walls of a classroom between the ages of 5 and 18 is very important to me. I hope that this will be an experience that I can share with students that models success as continual growth and learning.
Context
Perhaps the most important thing I hope to gain from this experience is context. Documentary film director Godfrey Reggio said, “all a good teacher can do is set a context, raise questions or enter into a kind of a dialogic relationship with their students.” This epitomizes what I have espoused as my pedagogical philosophy. Students in a math class shouldn’t have to ask, “when am I ever going to use this?” Shouldn’t we be creating math classrooms in which students just know the answer because the context is authentic and rich? I hope that this experience will help me transform my classroom into a place where math is learned because it is a needed tool to answer a genuine question–is the world around us predictable?
3 things I love here:
1) Your kids are so cute. I want to pinch their little science-loving cheeks.
2) The guiding question of this project. In English, we often go with the explanation that life is a series of meaningless circumstances beyond our control (this is the point of a LOT of great literature). I would like to think that there is order in all the chaos. Love it!
3) Context. I think that every teacher struggles with this. How do we make what we teach relevant to our kids? I look forward to seeing how you approach this issue.