Math Blog Year 2 Week 6

We have come a long way from thinking about Mathematics as just being about numbers. Math
teaches us how to:

• Make connections
• Think
• Problem solve
• Critically analyze info
• Discover patterns
• Work with others
• Learn from mistakes

This t-shirt is available through Amazon. The quote on it fits in perfectly with our learning through
this Math Course. Perhaps a perfect gift for a teacher.

         M istakes   A llow     hinking to   appen

This statement is so reflective of our learning in the last couple of months. Definitely, one of the big
ideas that will guide our teaching. Through our weekly mindset modules, we had the insight from Jo
Boaler, a mathematician at Stanford University who has built on Dweck’s work on Growth Mindset.
Jo Boaler has made math teaching/learning easily accessible to students and teachers around the world
through TED talks, you tube and youcubed. In Believe in Your Math, she states that: “students use their
own ideas and combine their own thinking to standard mathematical methods. So instead of being
taught certain methods to practice and reproduce, use the opportunity to take methods to adapt, apply
and solve real problems. And in that process the students tend to be able to be more creative and use
their own ideas which is more interesting.” As teachers, we do have the responsibility to change math
from meaningless boring questions to creative problem solving, that relies on using visuals to see
patterns and make connections. The interesting thing is that this in line with the Curriculum
Expectations. So it will be a matter of relying on good resources that actually will support this type of
math learning. Thank you Pat for providing us with many great resources that will help in our teaching
and learning.

I have often heard that teachers teach the way they were taught. Two particular Math teachers stand
out for me. One of them is an elementary school teacher who I had in both grades 6 and 8. She taught
math through problem solving and we were encouraged to be math thinkers. The other teacher made
me actually dislike math because of his focus on timed evaluations and focusing on the steps and
memorizing formulas. He also stressed that the students had to do the math his way, and that was the
only correct way of learning math. My learning in our Math classes at Brock, has reinforced that I
want to teach like the first teacher, so that students will have a good understanding of mathematics by
using their own way of thinking and by learning from their mistakes.

As I’m writing this Blog, I noticed that there are two books on the coffee table which were part of my
summer reading. I find myself making a connection to what we have learned in Math Class. The first
book is on DaVinci, who was an incredible genius. There is a chapter on “Math” in the book because
DaVinci was a keen observer of nature realized that these observations could only become theories
through understanding Mathematics. He described Math as “the language that nature used to write her
laws”. It was the visual representation of geometry and algebra and his interest in transformations that
led to many of his theories and incredible artwork. We saw in one of the Math in Life videoclips that
the “Mona Lisa” has Fibonacci’s spiral embedded in the drawing. This was probably created this way,
as DaVinci used his understanding of mathematical ideas to guide his learning and inventions.

The other book is Mathematics 1001 written by Dr. Elwes, in which he includes “absolutely everything

that matters in Mathematics in 1001 bite sized explanations”. It has very clear

explanations on all the key mathematical concepts. It isn’t a teaching reference book for educators but
rather the focus is higher level mathematics with some big problems that have and continue to puzzle
Mathematicians, such as, “squaring the circle, the law of large numbers, proof of Pythagoras theorem.”
When I first bought the book, I wasn’t in Teacher Education yet but was very interested in
Mathematics and the found the ideas intriguing. As a teacher, I plan to use some of these interesting
facts to use as prompts for further thinking and discussions.

Another successful math thinker and inventor is Sebastian Thrun, who was highlighted in one of the
videoclips from our week 5 class, Making Sense of Intuition. He is the VP of Google and developed
self-driving cars. He talks about the importance of thinking like a mathematician; that is, not relying
on just knowing the skills but to truly understand mathematics you need intuition. You need intuition
to internalize the math in order to make any progress. Math skills are used in daily life, not just in
Math class. He said that, “Mathematics is like a training course for being a citizen and how to
think in the world…..a world of numbers, people, space and time.” This comment really resonated
with me and made me think of the work we were doing in Literacy class that involved Social Justice
issues. Here is a connection between Literacy and Numeracy, where critical thinking and literacy is
more than just the text. It reinforces that math is more than just number work or solving equations. It’s
about providing rich tasks that gives students an opportunity to be creative and develop their intuitive
skills so that everyone believes that they can be math learners.