Hugo teaches math

There were many things that I feel we could have improved on during our microteaching lesson on arithmetic sequences and series. The big problem we had was time management. A large part of the time was taken up by explaining and deriving formulas. This really opened my eyes about how much easier it is to understand a formula than it is to present it and teach others. I went in with the thought that, "Oh these formulas are easy, it should only take 3 or 4 minutes to derive them", but in reality it probably took around 6-7 minutes. This difference in time, especially in a 15 minute lesson, was a big reason why I felt our lesson did not go great. Because of this, we were not able to complete our activity which I felt was the most exciting part. Susan's advice to us was to switch our extension and presentation section. This advice was super helpful because I felt that the lesson had more impact, even if we did not finish what we wanted. I felt that our planning was good but t...

The first stop I had was about the reward system. When I first started tutoring, I found the reward system to be quite effective. We had punch cards and whenever students finished a page in their workbooks, they would get a punch. Students were eager to finish their pages so that they could spend these cards on rewards such as candy/toys. Now that I have been tutoring longer, I can also see the negative aspects. Some students only had the intentions of finishing their cards, they didn't care about the math. Sometimes it got to a point where they would ask to skip pages if they were too hard. It created this loop that if we let them skip some pages, they got into the habit of always wanting to skip pages, even if they were easy but just looked difficult. Reward systems have to be used sparingly and appropriately. Rewards should complement the lesson and not be the end goal for students. The goal for us is to teach students the process of learning, not the end reward. "Schools...

LESSON PLAN – INTRODUCTION TO SEQUENCES Lesson Overview This microteaching session is designed to introduce the concept of sequences in mathematics and its possible applications. Duration 15 minutes Materials and Equipment Needed for this Lesson  White board,  markers & TCs’ cell phone(s) Lesson Stages   Learning Activities Time Allotted 1. Warm-up Background In-real life examples: paychecks; as you work more hours, you get paid more. Brief Introduction Definitions and differences between set, sequence, and series Set is a collection of numbers Sequence is a set, but with order Series is the summation of all the terms in a sequence Today we are focused on arithmetic sequences/series Arithmetic sequence is a sequence where the difference between consecutive terms is constant Arithmetic series is the summation of a finite arithmetic sequence 2 minutes 2. Presentation General Form a n =a 1 +d(n-1) ...

The first thought that came to my mind when I saw this problem was circumference. Since the points are evenly spaced apart, I could divide the circumference by the total amount of points and figure out the distance between each point. Then I thought I could scale the problem down to less points, so I thought about a clock. A clock has 12 numbers that are all evenly spaced apart. So diametrically opposite of 12 is clearly 6, the diametrical opposite of 1 is clearly 7. The pattern would be just adding 6 to your number to find the diametrical number. This pattern comes from dividing the total number of points by 2. This makes sense because numbers that are diametrically opposite from each other on a circle, must be spaced half-way around the circumference. Since we have 30 points, to find numbers diametrically opposite, we have to add 30/2 = 15. So for 7, if we add 15 we get 22; diametrically opposite of 7 is 22. You could also imagine if you unwinded the circle into a straight l...

One of the things that made me stop and think was about how education and school are so inherently political. It can't be helped because education plays a big role in a country's future. Parents are also part of this political debate about education because it is their children who are being taught. Of course most (if not all), parents want their child's education to be relevant, and who can blame them? This big change in the way of progressive movement can be a very hard pill to swallow for parents who have experienced the traditional conservative method of learning math. Today I had a school visit and I went to see a grade 8 math class. The teacher was great and all the students clearly liked her. But her background was from a science and she told me that she would have much preferred to teach science, but she was offered a good contract to teach math. A reason why a lot of math teachers are being taught by non-math background teachers might be because of the curriculum...

"How many guests are there?" said the official. "I don't know.", said the cook, "but every 2 used a dish of rice, every 3 used a dish of broth, and every 4 used a dish of meat between them".  There were 65 dishes in all.  How many guests were there? The first thing I thought of was lowest common multiples(LCM). So the LCM between 2,3, and 4 is 12. That means if we had a group of 12 people, there would be a set number of dishes. So if we had 12 people, there would need to be 6 rice dishes, 4 broth, and 3 meat. 12 People => 6 Rice + 4 Broth + 3 Meat = 13 Dishes So for 12 people we have 13 dishes in total. Now we just think how many groups of 13 dishes are in 65 dishes, which is 5 groups. So we need to count 5 groups of 12 people, which is 60 people. I think it's interesting to pose these puzzles from different cultures because it's neat to see how different cultures utilize math. But despite these different cultures, the basis of math...

Overall I think my microteaching lesson went okay. I felt I didn't do as well as I expected because I felt I was stumbling and forgetting some rules to the game. Some things that I could have also worked on was time management. As with most games, the more we played the easier it was for people to start understanding the game. That being said, we still couldn't finish a game within the time I was expecting. This could be because I perceived the game as being short because I was used to playing with a group who already knew how to play. Some things that I felt went well was that everyone was engaged and I felt that I had everybody's attention when I was explaining the rules. 

I changed my topic to a different card game called Yaniv. Just to be sure I double checked everyone's blog so there would be no duplicates!