Mathematics is used in everyday life and I am a teacher that demonstrates the importance of math in the world around us. During my five years of teaching, I incorporated real life problems throughout each unit. One example of this was an exit slip I used during our Pythagorean Theorem unit. The students were given a scenario where they were moving to New York City. Since property is so expensive in NYC, their only requirement for purchasing an apartment was that it had to be rectangular. The students were given the two wall lengths and the length of the diagonal across the apartment. They had to apply their knowledge of rectangles, the Pythagorean Theorem and right triangles in order to solve the problem. Another example would be from the area unit. When the students started to think about area, I wanted them to understand the idea of square units. So we took basketballs and covers of books and covered them with sticky notes, without having the sticky notes overlap. The sticky notes represented one square unit. I believe that this visual helped the students think about area and surface area in a new way and also helped them see that area is used in all objects, shapes, and locations. I think the more applicable I can make problems to students’ lives; the more students would become invested in my lessons. The students would then ask themselves “Is math everywhere around us?” I want my students to realize how math is used in everyday life and how useful math is.
By showing students that math is all around us, I think I can reach one of my other goals as a teacher: to change students’ negative opinions about mathematics. By creating tasks to show students how math is surrounding us, I believe I can help change students traditional ideas about math into new ideas that are exciting and useful in our lives. If students can view math as a useful tool, they will be more willing to try and motivated to learn.
I also believe that math teaches students how to form an argument. While I taught geometry, my students learned how to write proofs. A proof is a very organized argument that ends with proving a statement to be true. Students use logic to complete the proof, and this helps the students understand how to organize an argument logically. As I said before, I want students to be able to see how math is used in their everyday lives. Arguments are used very frequently throughout our lives and I believe teenagers find arguments important, since they rely on winning arguments to do many things their parents may originally not allow them to do. By relating arguments they have had and mathematical arguments, students will think more logically about their future arguments.
I also believe that students develop better problem solving skills when becoming more confident in mathematics. Being confident in mathematics is a huge issue for many students and I believe the confidence level highly affects a student’s ability in math. As a teacher, I think it is important to show students that having the correct solution is not what matters. The most important thing to show students is that we can learn and grow from our mistakes. I started using this activity from Teaching Channel called “My favorite no.” This activity shows students that even though the student got the wrong answer, they still had lots of good ideas. By having the class look at their classmate’s work, everyone gets a chance to learn from their peer’s mistakes by thinking about what the problem is really asking.