Blog Reflection

Throughout this course I think I have engaged a lot with various methodologies that are radically different than the traditional curriculum (using art in the Math art project, integrating social justice in Stocker, environmental studies our visit to the orchard garden) but that are not a result of my own interests and my own research. It felt a bit like these topics were being forced on me, and that they don't align with how I would bring about non-traditional elements in the classroom. I imagine it would have been a lot nicer to have less focus EXCLUSIVELY on non-traditional ways of teaching mathematics, but rather have that as a SINGLE, OPEN-ENDED opportunity to bring in one's own interests in multi-disciplinary fields and to critically reflect on how these things ought to be integrated in the mathematics class-room. Instead, this topic took over the entire course and left very little room for us to actually develop and practice our OWN pedagogies and teaching styles. I also found that our investigation into the curriculum and textbooks was shallow at best, and there was not exposure on how one goes about using the curriculum to design lessons. Instead, those things we had to teach ourselves and we were taught in class how to "look" at a textbook. The course lacked any exercises that could bring about true growth as a mathematics teacher. It was an incredibly narrow scope and I honestly learned more about mathematics teaching in my inquiry class than this one (even though my inquiry class is not SUPPOSED to be exclusively for math....).