My Weekly Report & Reflection 1

     Hello everyone, I'd like to welcome you to my first blog post about the pre-service mathematics course within my second year of consecutive education at Brock University. The purpose of this post is to self-reflect on the many concepts I will be learning within this math class. Reflecting on these concepts will help myself become a more critical and reflective teacher. In our first class, we went through the discovery method when it came to the curriculum document and curriculum expectations.

      Within the first class our class was directed to sort printed squares with sections of the course curriculum on them. The strand that my group was in charge of was number sense and numeration. By the end of this class I still had a poor understanding of what this strand entails. "Number Sense and Numeration refers to a general understanding of numbers and operation as well as the ability to apply this understanding in a flexible way to make mathematical judgements and to develop useful strategies for problem solving" (The Ontario Curriculum - Mathematics, 2005). I had a general understanding of what this strand was, but the relevance of this compared to the class task was still unknown.

(Heartwell, 2016)

     After doing the gallery walk I found where our strand fit into the class task. I saw how each strand fit into the overall math curriculum. This task was extremely memorable for me as I reflect back on this first class. This class brought to life the different strands within the Math curriculum and made me see how everything fits together. It was an extremely useful task for pre-service teachers to manipulate the different strands according to the application of different cards. 

     The thing that I noticed this week that was useful was reflecting on not only the videos that we were assigned, but reflecting on the class activities as well. This made me realize the bigger picture of the course, because the assignments we had to do was extremely overwhelming. These forums and blog post were the most overwhelming part of the week. For the first class the amount of forums and reflections we needed to do was extremely taxing. 

     The forums were extremely useful to watch and reflect on, regarding math myths, brain growth, because I agreed with most of the things that were said. One math myth that I agreed with was that "there is no such thing as being a math person", because at times I do believe that there is a certain type of person that can answer math questions. I believed in this specifically when I was taking first year calculus. I tried my best to do the required documents and math questions, and I ended up with a terrible mark in the end. In the end I definitely believed that there are certain "math people" who are able to understand complex math problems. 

     In the end, as a math teacher I need to believe in a growth mindset so that my students will believe that they can achieve anything they set their mind to. Math is definitely a complex subject to understand, and requires the correct instruction and patience to understand it. At the end of the day as a teacher, I will learn from my students and they will learn from me.  

Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrgpKjiQbQw

Resources:

Ministry of Education. (n.d.). Retrieved September 14, 2016, from        http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/math18curr