Learning to Identify Allies

Several times in the past week I have perused the Math Forum at Drexel University website. On their homepage, they describe themselves to be "the leading online resource for improving math learning, teaching, and communication." This will be a helpful resource as I move into teaching for several reasons. First of all, it provides an authoritative resource for students to access outside of their textbook. Another instance when it might be helpful is if I am looking for additional problems to challenge more advanced students. There are also resources specifically for teachers in each age range. The section for high school math teachers includes lesson plans, interactive websites to use with your students, and advice from other high school math teachers.

On October 15, I subscribed to the Math Forum Internet News, which is an e-newsletter that is sent weekly. I have gotten two issues thus far and even though I'm not even teaching, I have already found relevant information. In the October 26th edition, there was a link to "Mathematical Moments," which are a series of flyers produced by the American Mathematical Society that describe how math is relevant in our daily lives. Examples that I chose to look at dealt with seeing how math aids the graphics in video games, that matrices help airplanes be boarded faster, and how music is stored on CDs using only the numbers 0 and 1. Even more relevant was a flyer on traffic, describing how mathematical models using partial differential equations and chaos theory are showing that building new roads may not help alleviate traffic. When I say that I am a math major, people often tell me that they don't like math because it seems like just a bunch of numbers and it doesn't impact their real life at all. Now I have a resource to help me refute those arguments.

On the Math Forum, there is also Teacher2Teacher and the Teachers' Lounge, which is are places for teachers and others who are interested in math education to discuss curriculum, specific teaching strategies, and other issues in education. One post that I read that was of particular interest to me was "factors that affect girls in math." Other helpful posts include "motivating secondary students" and "homework teams and classroom groups." I also looked for other teachers opinions on the CPM (College Preparatory Mathematics) curriculum, which was criticized in Teaching to Change the World by Jeannie Oakes and Martin Lipton. My school used the CPM curriculum from when I was in Algebra I to my Calculus course (grades 8-12). However, I was disappointed to not find any resources on this topic except as a link in the Internet Math Library to a short review of the curriculum on a website off of the Math Forum.


Another resource that I located within our very own Good Library is the book Tips for the Mathematics Teacher by Alfred Posamentier, Hope Hartman, and Constanze Kaiser. This text offers 89 tips for math teachers within the categories of instructional techniques, social aspects of the classroom, beyond the classroom, and developing positive attitudes about mathematics. Some tips are fairly obvious, but each tip includes research to support it, applications of the tip, and things to consider as you implement the tip in your classroom. Here is one tip that I found to be quite interesting: "Teachers should be tactical in their use of questions." (58) Then it went on to show that research has shown that it is helpful to address the whole class about half the time and to call on particular students the other half. I would imagine that I will be conscious of the manner in which I will call on students; however, I would not have realized that it actually might make a difference in how the students learn.