I am not exactly sure who will read this, but here it goes.
Today in my Math Methods course we finally met our instructor Dr. Shih and he gave a great introduction about himself and gave us all a good idea about his goals, expectations, and hopes for our class. I enjoyed his intro and I am looking forward to learning a lot about how kids learn math in this course. I feel like I already learned so much in our first day of "real" class. I am as overwhelmed as I am excited! I have always experienced academic success in math, but I never actually gave much thought or understanding to the process of learning math or why math is the way it is. When our instructor was talking about his passion for math he had mentioned that people know how to divide fractions, but that they don't know why we use the process we do to solve these problems. This made me curious as well as frustrated that I had never pondered this question. After our first official class meeting I am finding myself in anticipation of the next session. I am nervous about the first homework assignment that consists of assigning eleven problems to particular places in a flow chart in some order of easy to difficult. I am not sure I even know where to start classifying these math words problems. The more I analyze the individual problem; the more complex they seem to become. I think that I am starting to get into my own head about this challenge, but we will see what Monday brings! Hopefully success, but quite possibly some failure; either way I am going to attempt to figure it out!
; ) Trish
