I Am Coach Mathman
It was easy to move over to let the expert coach. I have coached 5 games and he has coached - well who knows. The important thing is that the team won and we're poised for a rematch on Saturday. The last regular season game is Friday against a team we could play in the Saturday's second game (either the championship or consolation).
Enough about basketball.
Believe it our not I am still teaching math. The sports stuff has been a welcome distraction from work and it is bringing in that marginal income. I am teaching another new course this semester. It also has an exciting title: Math 2. Consider me a Georgia Math 1 and Math 2 teacher.
To be candid, I am tired of all the complaining about the new Georgia Math Curriculum. People, keep saying that the students do not have a good Algebraic foundation when the reach Math 3. If you rewind to three years ago... wait. Walk across the hall to that room where the old curriculum is still being taught to those grandfathered kids and you'll find that those kids have weak skills, too. The reason a change had to be made.
I say, "stop your bitching about the curriculum and the students".
Now that I have that I have been teaching these courses for 18 months I have come to realize several things. First, there will always be kids who can and kids who can't because students are products of bad parents, good parents, good teachers, bad teachers, good schools and bad schools. Second, changing the math curriculum doesn't not change the math. Euclid, Newton, Pascal and Pythagoras are dead but their are ideas are alive and well living in math classrooms. Changing the curriculum has provided us, teachers, with new insight into ideas that seem staid and boring to children. The new order requires creativity and thought and collaboration.
I love the challenge of teaching math with this new presentation. Last week, I learned another way to factor quadratic polynomials. This method would have made my Algebra I experience better and now I can share that with my students so that I can make their Math 2 life more interesting than my Algebra I, II Geometry life was in the '80's.
4 variables:
When I was in high school, I had a math teacher that wasn't able to explain how math worked to me. It didn't help when I would ask how to work out a problem that was on a test or that we had studied, she would say we'll get to that at the end of the period if there is time. Guess what, almost evertime there was no time. Anywho, I gave up on math after almost flunking Algebra II. I gave up trying about the middle of the year and managed to coast out the rest of the year and get a D average. Up until then I had been good at math. I don't know if it was a case of I couldn't comprehend the formulas or the teacher couldn't teach?? Because it was the same teacher (small school, one math teacher) I didn't take advanced math (Trig, Calculas, Solid Geometry) the following year.
Congrats on the win. I am sorry to say I never got math. Maybe if I had a good teacher like you back then, maybe, I would have done better. Too much left brain, I think.
Happy Thursday.
Good going "coach" and "teach."
I wish my oldest had you for a math teacher. It seems she may be gifted in that area, scoring highest in her class on our state mandated exams... I hope her talents continue to grow in that area.... We don't have "Math" teachers at her school.... I expect she would benefit highly from one, such as yourself!
In my experience teaching adults to use software, and teaching professionals to teach adults to use software, several things became apparent.
First - there are many kinds of minds, and several quite distinct ways of learning. Some of these make math and logic easier - some make it a lot harder. It all seems to me to be about how people make connections; how they mentally connect things to other things. Some people can do long linear progressions and can follow, understand, and recall them. Others put things together more like the branches on trees, or like the many forks in a library card catelogue. Still others connect things by human relationships - a net of who knows whom reaching out in all directions infinitely. The first of these finds math easier. The middle tends to organize things like encyclopedias do, and the last is the best at remembering thousands of people's names and what they do and why they matter... There is lots overlap, of course; history uses some of all of these when it's done well; most science uses both one and two, etc.
So what I'm saying is that I believe there are certain mental or even brain structure issues that determine a person's starting point with math, based on how they make sense of their world - the method they chose early, or were destined to choose. How far they can reach from that genetic start can be aided or hampered by so many things, many of them in your post.
The second thing I noticed as an educator was that knowledge and skills get herded into collections and given names, and those names often keep people outside. So I like the idea that Algebra and Geometry and Trig might be broken down and regrouped into different sets, where they hopefully interconnect more, as Math 1 and Math 2. It makes me wonder if a further breakdown of barriers and labels would make things even more accessible. What if kids who thought they were bad at math ended up doing it as part of some other "subject" - like current events. Where false arguments were discussed, and then diagramed, and then converted to the sentential calculus used by logicians, and then set theory (but not by that name) got involved, etc. Real world illustrations using Venn diagrams and Gantt Charts... People doing math without noticing, starting with things they felt confident about, or interested in already...
I admire your enthusiasm for the continuous grapple with new ways to do and show these timeless and beautiful things that underly reality and knowing. Math is the bones of existence. And your tenacity and drive to help young minds climb on board and do it too. And the way you help and push the other teachers... You're a math champion, in the medieval sense of the word, leading the charge, bringing battle to the enemies: ignorance, laziness, sloppy thinking.
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