Henry Ho EDUC450

 1. Define your question Search Topic: What is the balance between "teaching for understanding" and "teaching for exams?" 2. Analyse your topic into concepts Concept A: Depth vs Performance Concept B: Procedural Fluency Concept C: Integrated Approaches I chose this inquiry question inspired by last week's reading about the pros and cons of numerical grading. I think it is one of the toughest challenges as well all want our students to do well in our classes and get high grades, but we also do not want them to do so from just memorizing everything. I will admit I am also guilty of this especially for electives in my undergrad, so I figured it would also be a good topic for myself as well, not just for my students. 

 Today we made Fibonacci style poems and apple cider. While poetry is quite the polar opposite of my teachable physics, I recall being decent at it back in high school, so I was not too lost. Not having to pay attention to grammar and just how the lines flow and mesh is a nice break from formal writing. In any case, this was the poem I came up with in my sit spot: I really wanted to start with the word arise because it fit the morning vibe and because I just finished watching Solo Leveling where the main characters signature ability is "Arise." From there, I was thinking of using the flowers or even the weeds on the ground until I heard some "chirps" and transitioned to birds. To be honest, I wish there were some crows because those are my real morning signal / alarm clock at my house. While I thought I did okay with getting up to 13 syllables, I was shocked to hear that some others went up to 34! Also, if I were to write another one or revise this, I would definite...

 As a student bird, grades are a currency, indicating your worth relative to your peers and serving the purpose of ranking students (hierarchy). As the article notes, students like Charlie admitted that grading allows them to "compare my marks with others." A high grade is a reward and a low grade is a punishment. They are arrived at a combination of memorization and complying as Lucy from the article mentions, trying to figure out what the teacher wants. While they provide motivating goals "try harder" and a way to measure progress, they also cause significant stress shifting the focus from understanding to performance. Given the choice, a student would almost always pick the easier problem for a higher grade rather than the more difficult one out of curiosity and as a challenge.  As a teacher bird, grades indicate a student's level of understanding, skill, and growth. Not how smart that student is but their ability to comply with specific tasks at a specific t...

It was raining today, so we had class indoors in the math education classroom—which, honestly, was a nice break from the bees. We explored conic sections through the idea of “verbing.” Circles and ellipses were relatively easy to find examples for like the hands on a clock and hoola hoops, but I struggled to think of ones for parabolas and hyperbolas. Others came up with very creative ideas though, such as the lines on a basketball representing circles and the arrangement of toothpicks as they were removed. We also watched a video on indigenizing mathematics by Dr. Doolittle. I was particularly intrigued when he demonstrated teaching sequence recognition without using algebra. His method of finding patterns by taking the difference between numbers twice was both intuitive and accessible. It’s definitely a strategy I’d like to use if I ever teach math, as not everyone comes into your class with the basic math foundations as he said.

It was raining today, so we had class indoors in the math education classroom—which, honestly, was a nice break from the bees. We explored conic sections through the idea of “verbing.” Circles and ellipses were relatively easy to find examples for like the hands on a clock or a hoola hoop, but I struggled to think of ones for parabolas and hyperbolas. Some classmates came up with very creative ideas, such as the lines on a basketball representing circles and the arrangement of toothpicks as they were removed forming a hyperbola.  We also watched a video on indigenizing mathematics by Dr. Doolittle. I was particularly intrigued when he demonstrated teaching sequence recognition without using algebra. His method of finding patterns by taking the difference between numbers twice was both intuitive and accessible. It’s definitely a strategy I’d like to use if I ever teach math, as not everyone comes into your class with the basic math foundations as he said.

 The two main things we did today were matching color swatches to natural things and various ways of rope making. For the color swatch activity, I picked a bright orange and purple color. At first, I thought orange was going to be the easy color, as I would just match to one of the fruits or dried out leaves. However, none of them actually had the bright orange color. They had a more tan, brownish orange. The only thing that matched my orange were the orange bags covering the sunflowers but obviously they are not natural... As for purple, I came across some a magenta-colored flower which is actually called "Red Clover" even though it does not really look red to me at all. Thus, I kept looking and stumbled upon a purple cascading flower that almost matched my purple swatch completely. Apparently, it is called "Tufted Vetch). Since I thought purple was such a rare color, I thought finding this flower was like finding a needle in a haystack but google search also says it is...