Reflection on the course

Looking back at my blog posts the thing that caught my eye first was my enthusiasm for learning. My first couple of blog posts come across almost as a bit timid, I was not sure of myself, I was not sure of what I was trying to say. As I got more experience in blog posts I found it easier to write what I was thinking. I think this came out in my blog posts, my enthusiasm for learning let me express my feelings easier.  For the last couple of blog posts the repetitiveness of the course along with having a hard time taking my mind off what will come next lead to my enthusiasm dropping. This came across in my blog posts as I became less interested in talking about these new ideas and was more to the point, not exploring the ideas as deep. One thing I have tried to do in the past week as I noticed this is to try to slow down.

Looking more at the blog posts themselves I think they represent a clear growth in my ability to express my thoughts about math. looking at how I first wrote my post about my math moment to when I rewrote it was a massive change in how I can express how math makes me feel. I think this is very important as I shift into teaching math. If I can express math in more then just number it will greatly benefit my students.  Looking at how I saw the activities ideas as more of a project then activities shows how I think through how students will learn. Over my practicum, I saw that sometimes you do not need to have a learning objective you can just have an activity be an activity without a clear learning objective but still have the activity relate to the topic you are covering.

I feel like in this course we did lots of blog posts on different ideas but we did not do a really deep dive into one idea. I think to have a second or third blog post on one idea would have been beneficial to me especially if we discussed the topic in class after the first. Having a second blog post after the first would have allowed me to see where I changed my mind and what I did not think about.

One thing I notice in the course is that we focus so much on activities that would maybe take up 10% of an average classroom's time in a semester and did not really focus much at all on the 90% teaching time. I was hoping to get more of a sense of how to best do the 90%. I know this is hard as everyone has different teaching styles but even if we looked at what works and what does not in a traditional lecture would have been great.


Patrick McManus