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 organization
I 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
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)
- I will definitely use Test correction in my future classes.
- Projects: I like the style of the "letter" projects given in "Writing Projects for Mathematics courses: crushed clowns, cars & coffee-to-go". But I still need to "make them mine" and decide on grading and implementation.
- Webquest: I love Sam Shah's Newton vs. Leibnitz webquest. I think it is a good way to make students aware of the history of calculus and hopefully make them look forward to know more about the topic (beginning of term project).
- Sam in a brainstorming post, Sam gives a list of other project ideas, some of which seems promising.
- Math journal/diary
Math journal/diary: The key?
The more I look around and reflect about writing in mathematics, the more the idea of math journaling becomes the obvious thing to do. And I can say that it was not at all at first. I only started thinking about this only first when a colleague pointed out an article about math journaling, showing me that this can be done - I often need to see things work before I can start making my owns. But it only started seriously thinking about using them when I reflected about pre-class readings and the flipped classroom. Now, it seems that every type of project I want to use can be, at least partially, embedded into a math diary/journal. So today I decided that I needed to first sort out what I want to do with this idea (hence this post) and then start writing a information documents for my future students.
My math diary: What I would like to do...
Before starting to write my information document, I need to reflect about different things: the form, the implementation and of course, the content.
- The form: Notebook? Binders? Free? The last one is appealing as it is not easy to impose on the type of school furnitures college students have to use. But I definitely need the journal to be separate from other class document and easy to collect. Therefor, I will probably ask my students to write their journal entries on 3 holes paper. They can keep all together at home in a special binder and I can collect just the paper I need without taking the whole journal.
- Implementation/grading: I feel like this journal idea being unfamiliar to the students, I need to, of course, show them the advantage on writing in mathematics, but also give them a reason to try that they quickly understand: grades. However, I intend to give grades based on effort more than on the content. I need also to ensure that they work regularly on it without increasing my workload to much. So I am planing on a weekly collecting that may be adapt to the task (see content below) and eventually allow them to hand in a scan of the journal instead of the paper itself.
- Pre-class Reading: As mentioned in a previous post, I would like to give my students pre-class readings. Instead of having them answer 3 reading questions as I used to, I will instead ask them to write a kind of reading log following reading advises that I put together in a document. I probably will give some guiding questions like "you can re-write this result in your own words", "make a list of the different properties of ___".... Now I need to see how I can smoothly take a look at this and grade it every week with enough time to adapt my classes to the misunderstanding or difficulties I could detect from the reading.
- Question/problem analysis : For each section, I would like my students to choose one problem from the homework to "analyze". The prompt will probably be in the spirit of "Why did you choose that particular problem? Use at least one of the following question as guideline for your analysis." Then follows a list of ideas like "How would you explain that problem to a student who missed the class?", "Could you have used an other method and got to the same result?" etc... I could collect those every week with the reading log or with the class tests.
- Test Corrections: I could consider the test corrections as part as the journal. This may emphasize the reflection par in them.
- Project journal: If I give a project like the Newton/Leibnitz webquest, I could ask them to write a project journal to hand in with the final result. That would decrease the risk of plagiarism and last minute work if I collect the journals during the project to ensure they are on the task
- Other prompts: I would like them having their journal starting with a reflection on "What do you prefer in math? What do you dislike the most?". And maybe have the year conclusion through a math poem project...
The Content: Here are the different type of task I intend on embedding in the math journal project:
A world of possibilities...
I feel like the journal potential is really huge and I look forward using it. I already know I will have to make some adjustments, fine tune it. One thing I really like with it is its flexibility. I could start using it just for the readings and later include the projects. A whole world of possibilities!