relearning math

Tonight was the first how-to-teach Math course of my credential program. I left the class floating on cloud 9 (or, in prime factors, cloud 3x3).

The professor was, honestly, a little scary at first...she made it very clear what her expectations were without ever spelling it out to us (never acknowledging someone speaking out, always asking for a quiet hand to answer a question, staring people down) but she quickly won the class over with her amazing flair...and all around math!

Math was always a subject I thought I really rocked in school (until Calculus II in college). But I'd come to realize that what I was really good at was memorizing tricks (carry the one, punch numbers in a T1 graphing calculator).

Conceptualization. That's what I've been missing. My professor started the class with the difficult concept of understanding magnitude. What does a million feel like, a billion, a trillion, 10 trillion (like our national deficit....it turns out, if we were to pay $1 ever second, it'd take us over 30,000 years to get out of debt).

I am completely psyched to relearn all this math. Nerd alert! But seriously....I am psyched.

Brainbuster: One activity we did (and stop reading if you're not that interested in math) that I still have trouble with had to do with fractions. The professor wrote (1/2) / (3/4). What does that look conceptually? (no clue). Here is my version of what she drew on the board:
So essentially, how many three-fourths can you get out of one-half? If you cut the whole piece into four, you can only get 2 pieces out of the 3 you'd want to make 3/4 (shown in blue), so the answer is 2/3. I have no idea if this will make sense to someone just reading it, but this whole thing blew my mind because I'd never seen this type of problem drawn out for me. I tried other harder fraction problems and my head hurt (plus I didn't activate my brain buttons beforehand).

I could go on and on, but it's now time for my post-dinner walk. If you're digging this math stuff as much as I am...


...call me!

pushing my buttons...my brain buttons!

Whoops! Haven't blogged much lately. I'm back in school and some good changes are at hand.

One change that we will be making to the classroom is to tweak the format. One thing I love about the class is that it is not a sit-silently-while-you-do-work kind of environment. Students are talking and socializing, which is a huge part of their education. But, especially with 27 students in one room, it's not surprising that it can get noisy. So we are changing the layout of the room so there will be more areas for quiet, focused work but still maintain a designated area for partner work/discussions.

This change coincidentally comes at the same time the school's learning specialist gave a presentation on accomodating varying degrees of mental alertness. And with that was the concept of Educational Kinesiology (Edu-K), which is basically physical movements that enhances whole-brain learning.

One that I thought was pretty fun was what Brain Gym calls Brain Buttons. The name alone lends itself to winning people over.

SO! Follow along as you read this:
* Place thumb and fingers under clavicle to the left and right of the sternum where there is meaty flesh. These are your Brain Buttons.
*Activate Brain Buttons by massaging them.
*Simultaneously, massage belly button with opposite hand.
*Stimulate these points for 20-30 seconds, or until tenderness is released.
*Switch hands and repeat.
(here's a sketch I did after the meeting while on BART)


Doing this supposedly (I'm still looking into it) increases oxygen, works on right and left brain communication, corrects number and letter reversals, and could help with Dyslexia.

If nothing else, it's soothing.