Robinson Reflection

I sense that our thinking on math education is being directed slightly. I, for one, am desperate to learn how to teach math at a deeper and more enriched level (relationally if you will). I never learned mathematics in this fashion and so have no clear idea of how I would transfer the ideas of a discussion oriented class in to a mathematics classroom. I feel like the best way to learn something is to at least get the impression that you taught yourself. That is how I’ve felt in most of my arts courses. Through discussions and projects I was allowed to come to my own conclusions, which were usually in line with the course objectives. I have only had one math course where discourse was encouraged and a class project was part of the course work. I did my project on Knot Theory, a topic that is rarely covered in any undergraduate coursework but could be understood easily by secondary students. The learning advantages were clear, I learned more about Knot Theory in the two weeks I worked on the project than I did about non-Euclidean geometry throughout the course. It is ideas like this that I hope to be able to apply to my teaching. I don’t want to send a bunch of computers (in the old-timey sense) out of my classroom, I would rather send out a bunch of thinkers.