Hoping to Suck a Little Less

Creative Commons Licensed photo by Flickr user benjamin_scott_florin

After five months off I'm getting ready to start teaching again. Over the course of the past five months I've thought, read and learned a lot about teaching math. I've read a lot of blog posts by amazing math teacher. I took Jo Boaler's How to Teach Math course. The one thing that I kept noticing is that there are a ton of great teachers doing amazing things in their classrooms. Which led me to the questions: why am I not doing these great things? Why is my teaching sub-par? Although I didn't have any answers for these questions I've decided to step it up a little this year. I don't claim that I'm going to be amazing this year but if I can suck a little less that's a move in the right direction.

What do I want for my students?

Comfort: I want my classroom to be a place where students are comfortable making conjectures, thinking outloud and sharing their ideas, even especially if they are wrong. Learning from our mistakes will be very important

Number Sense: I want students to develop better number sense so that they can make sense of the world around them and check to see if their solutions make sense. I'm hoping to working on number sense by using estimation180.com and visualpatterns.org on a regular, if not daily basis.

Collaboration: I want my students to share their thinking and reasoning. I want them to help one another and to learn from each other.

Enjoy Math: My hope is that by doing the above students will enjoy math a little more, be actively involved and hopefully seek out mathematics in the world around them.

To all the great math teachers out their doing great thing: thanks for the inspiration.