Now that I've said my peace about traditional math classes, I'll continue my story.
[BTW: When a blog post has "Story Time" in the title, you are safe to assume that it include some narrative about my life as a Math teacher. If you're looking for just resources that I'll be posting, just look for "Resource" in the title.]
With my first 2 1/2 years of college I thought I'd be the most ballin' Math teacher. I was going to explain things so well students couldn't possibly misunderstand. I was going to make my grading system so easy that students couldn't possibly fail and everyone can get an A. Homework would be short and to the point. Class time would be perfectly structured so students could have some free time to talk.
I even had an epiphany one night that school could be restructured so students wouldn't have semester/year long courses, but would go to one or two week long courses that taught a little bit of information. Students would attend what they needed to and get checked off by the teacher of the course. Kind of similar to how Boy Scout merit badges work. Students would pass of their full classes (i.e. Algebra 1, English 9) after they had been checked off the list of required mini courses. Then students can go at their own pace and finish as early as they wanted. Brilliant!
As you can see, I was already had anti-tradition thoughts, but I was deeply entrenched in the tradition. I just wanted to change a few things. I wanted students to just do their algorithmic skills just long enough to beat an evaluation and then they could promptly forget about it. No critical thinking or problem solving involved.
I didn't realize how engulfed I was in tradition until I started taking actual Math Education courses and Math courses that required proofs and analytic skills. This was a huge mind opener: Math isn't just computing stuff!?! I don't have to do things a certain way? There is actual logic involved? (These classes helped me find my love for logic and logic puzzles. Man, logic puzzles are as delicious as beacon wrapped sausage!) I learned what Pure Mathematics was.
Then I had a professor, Jim Cangelosi, who was hilarious and ragged on traditional math classes all the time. He had his own method of seeing Math education and how to go about it. Jim gave us tasks to do that required us to develop our own knowledge, to talk with others, and discuss math. This was my first introduction to something that was non-traditional... and it BLEW MY FREAKIN' MIND! I was like: Whoa! and then: Whoa!, and lastly: Whoa! Like the turtle from Finding Nemo.
After a few days of those lessons, I realized that my whole life was a lie... I started questioning whether my parents were really my parents. I wondered if life was really a dream in some Fish's mind on a far away island and Link might wake him at any time now. I started thinking that if I were to wake up, then my children would come back to life.
J/K. I know my parents are really mine.
Anyways, it was from those classes that I realized that my entire math education was a complete joke. Schools don't teach real mathematics. They teach a strange demented form of math where logic and reasoning aren't needed, let alone wanted. I decided that in my classroom we'd be learning math the way it should be: logically with axioms, undefined terms, and proofs. It was going to be awesome. Students would have such an understanding of Mathematics in its purest form as to surpass all previous generations!
[To Be Continued...]
How about you? When did you change from being a traditionalist to anything else? Were you never a traditionalist? Did you have that "Holy Cow, I've been messed up my whole life!" moment?
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