June 14 - My Student and Teaching Experiences in Mathematics

My experience in my mathematics has been very much along the traditional lines. While I was a student in middle school and high school, my math classes followed much of the same routine. The teacher went lesson by lesson from the textbook, we copied notes and were assigned nightly homework problems. The next day, we would discuss the homework from the previous night, then proceed to learn the next lesson. This was not very hard for me because generally it was memorization of a formula and plug-and-chug from there. When I did question the why (in geometry), I had a teacher that could not answer the “why” in terms that I could understand.
When I started teaching last year, I went into the classroom with the preconceived idea that teaching mathematics was just like I had learned it. I do not recall ever hearing the word manipulative before I started teaching and I certainly didn’t have a clear understanding of how to implement them in my lessons. When I was introduced to GPS, I loved it, but had a very hard time implementing it in my classroom. I felt like I still needed to teach the students the procedures/material first, then give the problem-solving task. In addition, I had late afternoon math classes and a lot of discipline problems. When I would try to do problem solving task they generally flopped.