All this seemed a good idea at the beginning: writing to collect my thoughts about education, teaching, maths... But as time passes, my posts become fewer and fewer. Even not one in a week!
When I started the Writing In the Discipline project, I was not sure where I was heading. I conscientiously did the weekly readings in Bean and started to get some inspiration about (hopefully) critical thinking tasks. Then I got to the point where the readings became less inspiring as I saw them addressing more humanities or language classes than math. On the other hand, I was more and more interested in using projects in my classes. So I bought books, states googling... And here comes the squirrel: I have plenty of pages opened in my browser, an increase number of bookmarks on that or related subjects, a bunch of downloaded documents. And I now realize that in fact I didn't really get started. Yes, I have lots more of ideas: projects (with dozens of exemples), poems, webquests... But this is so far going nowhere. Or does it actually leads to one main idea: math journal? A bit of organizationI accumulate like squirrels and actually, like them, I am likely to not being able to find/use all my nuts. I just cumulate half read documents and bookmarks but soon forget what I have, where. So I started to make a table summarizing the projects I found, where. In this table I also indicate for what class it seems to be suitable and add some comments. I still have a lot to do there and often half bored, half excited, I catch myself browsing again for new ideas while I haven't sort out the others... Organization is also why I start this post. Still kind of a note to myself. Writing down ideas to not forget them, eventually introduce some organization, bringing them to a new life... And here is An unsorted list of ideas (with few references)
Math journal/diary: The key?This all starts with Writing in the Discipline's project at Dawson College. Reading our main reference book, Bean, "Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom", I tart to feel like I need a space to write down and organize my reflections. In fact, as I read and reflect upon the utility of writing for student learning, I stated to realize that I could also benefit from writing. Yes, but what kind of writing will be the simplest and more effective?
Yesterday, I started thinking about asking my students to write math haiku. So I started to googling for examples, ideas on how make it work etc... During my search, I came across great math educators blogs (see the links section). That's when I decided to use this form of writing. I see many advantages:
Now this blog does not aim to become a major math and education resource packed with new revolutionary ideas. But if readers can benefit from my quest, I will be more than happy to help! |