Week 3 reflection

          In todays class we opened with some presentations on addition and subtraction of whole numbers. Danielle, Sneha, and Daniel led the presentations, which were the first of the semester. Sneha led an activity that was called the broken calculator experiment in which we, playing students, were presented with a problem where we had to find the answer without using the number 8 on our calculators. Daniel led an adlib activity in which we were invited to create a fun adlib that was used to explain a simple division problem. He added some difficulty to the problem by making our final answer have to contain a two in some place value mandatory. Lastly Danielle led an exercise on addition and subtraction of whole numbers based around horse racing. I found her activity to be the most engaging and was able to keep everyone in the class interested for the whole presentation. Her activity involved a horse that had to run 2400 meters. We were given a number of cards with different values and we had to subtract these values from the 2400 to see how far our horse would run. After the presentations we looked at algorithms for the four main operations, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. As a class we were presented some basic questions and were challenged to use our known algorithms to solve the problems. I found it very interesting that so many different people in the class had so many different ways of solving the question. Even for a simple subtraction question there were multiple ways that people suggested that we solve the problem.
I thought that, for the most part, we were all taught the same way to subtract, but then Patricia showed us a completely foreign way to subtract in which she borrows from the bottom number rather than the top. This is interesting, and is beneficial to my pursuit to become a teacher because it enforces the fact that there are multiple different ways to do and make sense of mathematical problems and algorithms; there is no definite right or wrong way, and every person has their own perspective on how to reach this answer. This thought process was reinforced by our readings, the handout we were given and the video we had to watch by Jo Boaler. Specifically, in our handout, “How Students Should Be Taught Mathematics: Reflections from Research and Practice”, Jo says that the math classroom should be a place where can talk about differing ideas and should be encouraged to solve problems in different ways and with different solutions.
           Having a valid and reliable resource is integral in the process of building knowledge as it may force you to look at things from a different perspective, or it may reinforce your and strengthen your current beliefs. Also, these reliable resources are extremely useful in furthering your professional learning. The website www.Edugains.ca is extremely useful and their professional learning facilitator has a plethora of resources that can be used to help build knowledge. I can see myself accessing these resources later in my career to get lesson plan ideas and to help navigate through specific problems in the classroom and with the curriculum. There was also an interesting section in the textbook readings, (M. Small, Making Math Meaningful, 36) in which the different types of assessment were discussed, assessment FOR learning, assessment AS learning, and assessment OF learning. These different types of assessment relate to differentiated instruction and the different levels of learning that each student may be at; rather than comparing the students to each other each student is evaluated in their own way.

A. Teacher. (2007) Different solutions. [Online Image] http://bit.ly/1gSFWMh