maths

I am in over my head.
I am taking this intense 800 level math class to improve my practice as a math teacher. Lots of teachers in my district are taking it, too. We all got subs for three consecutive days (which is a NIGHTMARE to plan for by the way) and have been immersed for 8 hours a day in math concepts, content, and the development of “sociomathematical norms.” Its exhilarating and exhausting in turns, with so much metacognition that it gives a person a headache! One example of this- we were given a problem to try to solve, first independently and then in our table group. The problem was 1 divided by 2/3. That’s right, division AND fractions! Hard! I felt totally stupid and stuck as I tried to brush the cobwebs off of my trusty ol’ algorithms, knowing of course that the point of the exercise was to look beyond algorithms to the true meaning of the numbers and their relationship to each other- just like we ask our students. When we got as far as we could in our own solving we were allowed to work collaboratively, and my table-mates (who teach middle school math) were able to handily solve the problem and succinctly explain their reasoning. It made total sense to me when they sketched it out on paper, and I found that I could apply their reasoning to other similar problems without resorting to the traditional algorithm. But man! That initial feeling of panic and lack of directionality made me so sympathetic to my little first graders who heave great sighs when I push their thinking in subtraction or whatever.
Basically this course is designed to give us teachers a paradigm shift in how we conduct our lessons, and the kind of environment and opportunity for discourse we create for our burgeoning mathematicians. It’s about raising expectations, allowing students to feel a sense of disequilibrium when they are presented with challenging problems and encouraging them to work through that feeling to find a solution. It’s also about enabling them to co-create knowledge with one another, rather than having everything be super teacher-driven. It’s exciting to think about, but still difficult to envision how it will play out at my grade level. It seems like in order to spark that deep thinking, I need to give the kids a vocabulary for metacognitive expression, and I don’t quite know how to do that in a useful (for them) way. They need the language to have a meaningful discourse, but they are little kids who do much better with concrete rather than abstract ideas. I hope that the rest of the course will offer some guidance here.
So… that’s what’s going on with me professionally. I’ve been wanting to blog for a while- I miss this avenue for keeping in touch with people I care about. So excuse my very dry and specific entry, I just needed to get back in it and math is what is on my mind. I promise next time to write about butts or TV or Barack Obama or something else fun.