Reflection on Mathematical Power
In a thoughtful paragraph, summarize the key learning you are taking away from Mathematical Power?
I have definitely learned a lot of concepts, ideas, and more through reading Mathematical Power and hearing more about Ruth and Cathy’s journey through creating an interesting math class for Cathy’s students. I think one of the ideas I learned that really stood out for me was being willing to take risks and do things outside of my comfort zone. There were definitely some parts in this book where I was reading about what Ruth decided to do and thinking that she was a little insane and crazy. However, Ruth helped Cathy get out of her comfort zone and become more confident in teaching math. Cathy said that by the …show more content…
When deciding what concepts to teach to the students, Cathy and Ruth did their research with the NCTM standards in order to make sure they were preparing and teaching these students well (Parker 212). They also found that they needed to find a balance between exploration/challenge problems versus paper-and-pencil algorithms (Parker 213). Some students were better at one or the other, sometimes both. Therefore, they knew they needed to find a balance. One of the biggest differences that reflection about their work made was that Cathy and Ruth were consistently changing the instruction because it was an ongoing decision. Ruth mentions that they needed to be flexible in planning because it could always change depending on how well the lesson went before or where the students are at. Ruth gives an example of when they asked students to compare how much taller a 5th grader was compared to a 1st grader, and many of the children could answer the questions because they didn’t understand completely how measurement works and how it needs to be precise (Parker 213). Therefore, Ruth and Cathy decided to insert a lesson on drawing scale models of objects in order to get their students to better understand precision in mathematics and measurement. They continued to talk about what they could do differently even after the school year was over.
In a thoughtful paragraph, summarize the key learning you are taking away from Mathematical Power?
I have definitely learned a lot of concepts, ideas, and more through reading Mathematical Power and hearing more about Ruth and Cathy’s journey through creating an interesting math class for Cathy’s students. I think one of the ideas I learned that really stood out for me was being willing to take risks and do things outside of my comfort zone. There were definitely some parts in this book where I was reading about what Ruth decided to do and thinking that she was a little insane and crazy. However, Ruth helped Cathy get out of her comfort zone and become more confident in teaching math. Cathy said that by the …show more content…
When deciding what concepts to teach to the students, Cathy and Ruth did their research with the NCTM standards in order to make sure they were preparing and teaching these students well (Parker 212). They also found that they needed to find a balance between exploration/challenge problems versus paper-and-pencil algorithms (Parker 213). Some students were better at one or the other, sometimes both. Therefore, they knew they needed to find a balance. One of the biggest differences that reflection about their work made was that Cathy and Ruth were consistently changing the instruction because it was an ongoing decision. Ruth mentions that they needed to be flexible in planning because it could always change depending on how well the lesson went before or where the students are at. Ruth gives an example of when they asked students to compare how much taller a 5th grader was compared to a 1st grader, and many of the children could answer the questions because they didn’t understand completely how measurement works and how it needs to be precise (Parker 213). Therefore, Ruth and Cathy decided to insert a lesson on drawing scale models of objects in order to get their students to better understand precision in mathematics and measurement. They continued to talk about what they could do differently even after the school year was over.