I have just finished five weeks of teaching math for the first time—three periods of freshman Algebra 1 and three periods of sophomore Geometry. I got the notion of chronicling my teaching in blog form as a way to share my experience, seek input from others, and in hopes that the act of reflection would lead to improvements in my teaching. I almost immediately was discouraged by two things.
First, all the good names are taken! Mathematically Speaking, Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere, dy/dan, f(t), Math Mama, and so on and so on…
Second, these people all actually have useful information to impart based on years of experience. I, on the other hand, am a tour guide without a map who hasn’t memorized the script yet.
Naturally, I decided I had no excuse for imposing my ramblings on an unsuspecting public.
Having made that decision, my ego wouldn’t let it go.
It recently occurred to me that something that I haven’t seen is a blog focusing on reviewing and sharing information from all the great math books (NOT textbooks) out there. So that is my excuse for going ahead with this experiment.
The plan for this blog is to share a chronicle of my personal and probably idiosyncratic responses to the math books I have loved and enjoyed, as well as to the books I expect to discover and hope to have recommended to me by readers. Off the top of my head, I expect to revisit Marilyn Burns’ great Brown Paper Bag books (Math for Smarty Pants and The I Hate Mathematics! Book) and Kenn Amdahl’s Algebra Unplugged.
In the meantime, I can’t resist sharing a bit of my actual teaching experience, which at this point, has left me no time for reading anyway!
I am at the end of week 5 as a new math teacher. I’ve stumbled along in a fairly predictable way as a beginning math teacher for these first weeks—lesson planning by textbook section. For the students, it is like a quick compulsory trip through a strange country. “It’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium” style, only for them, “It’s Tuesday, it must be Vertical Angles” is more like it. It didn’t help that during the first chapter, I was called away for a family emergency for four days. At the end of five weeks, we have completed chapter 1 (scheduled to be finished in three weeks).
Worried about falling behind schedule and fearful of not “covering” all the landmarks, I went barreling straight through. The first test showed the result. The kids are lost in a strange land without a map.
Time for a deep breath and a “do over”. So, I’ve let the tour bus leave without us and we’re heading out on foot to revisit the best of the country-side, and this time we’ll be practicing the language!
