Connecting My Externship to My Classroom

Career Relevance

So often in my classroom when I strive to make mathematics relevant, it’s a task of helping students see how various professionals apply math in their careers.  How does a designer or a naturalist or an architect apply math?  After the externship experience, I can share with students an actual career in the field of mathematics, not just how other fields apply it.  Statisticians look at and analyze data to answer important research questions.  Sometimes that data has already been collected by other entities, and the statistician must go out and find it, or put it together in a way that it has never been put together.  In other cases, statisticians collect the data themselves or with a team composed of other researchers and scientists.  Statisticians have to of course know statistics, but must also be problem-solvers, decision makers, have the ability to interpret and communicate, and more.  Statisticians also aren’t limited to a certain field, as data exists about everything!  My mentor, for example, has worked on projects ranging from Boston Marathon qualifying times to climate change.

Coding

In the last year, I have taken on the charge that kids should be learning about programming, at even the most basic level, as soon as we an start teaching them.  In our technology-centric and app-filled lives, there are people behind the shiny finished products that we see and use who are responsible for writing code and programming things to do what they’re supposed to do.  I have been doing so much programming in my externship!  Rather than relying on a calculator or software program that just requires certain inputs and generates the outputs I need, I have been writing the code that specifies what outputs, graphs, analyses ought to be done for a given input (data set).  I’m still debating about whether I will try to have students use R (the programming language I’ve been using), but it will surely give them a connection, a first-hand experience of how coding is used in a career.

Research & Seminar

In the Montessori school in which I work, Socratic seminars are a major part of the instructional framework.  I have struggled in my time there to find a meaningful way to conduct seminar in my math class.  While I have tried a few times, I have yet to select a context and seminar piece that really evokes the maieutic discussion and exchange of ideas.  I’ve been doing so much reading and research in my externship, and I was thinking of how I could include a research component into my curriculum.  Then I had the thought that I could begin the unit with a seminar.  I strive to give students context first, let them generate their own questions, and then help them learn the mathematical tools needed to answer those questions.  Once this idea came to me, I have been reading with an extra lens, searching for a rich seminar text that could be used as the “kick-off” of the curriculum.  One of the articles that was most helpful to me in understanding the big ideas behind my externship project was written by the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab, and with some support, I think would be a great seminar article to precede the lessons.  Additionally, at the end of the lessons, I’m sure there will be students asking, “Why is this important, why are we doing this?”  The News & Observer published an article on the local impact of climate change, rising sea levels, and hurricanes to NC coastal communities.  This would perhaps be a great article to use for a culminating seminar to bookend the curriculum with context.