Exit Oct 2

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.

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