Assignment 1 Reflection

Assignment 1: Individual Reflection

I found this assignment to be quite interesting and useful to me. In particular, John Yamamoto’s input went a long way toward alleviating some of my concerns about specific aspects of teaching. Listening to the presentations of other groups was equally illuminating. Many groups asked their teachers intelligent and specific questions regarding how much homework to assign, or how to encourage discovery and discussion. These responses furnished me with some rough ideas which could help me during my first experiences in the classroom. Additionally, I noticed that there was a wide variety of different opinions represented among the surveyed teachers. Some seemed quite authoritarian, and they approached teaching in a very instrumental way; however, I got the impression that most teachers utilized a mixture of approaches, and they aimed to build rapport and appeal to different learning styles. On the other hand, I was slightly dismayed by the responses from the surveyed students. It seemed as though very few of them had any appreciation for mathematics beyond its use as a calculation tool. In general, I left with the feeling that most students would prefer a step by step method, or an algorithm that they could apply, so that they would be able to get an answer and move on. I hope that throughout my career as a teacher I will have the opportunity to force feed an appreciation for proper mathematics into at least a few of my students.