Weeks 2-3: An ending, new beginnings

joshg

Playing some honestly-I’m-behind catchup on my course journaling here, I’m going to sum up what I’ve got in mind so far and maybe add more later to actually properly finish the assignment. It’s 3:09pm after the first day of a new semester. Today went *great* but I feel like my tension levels are running too…

Week 1: New class, same old students

joshg

Hi, readers of sporadic blog! I’m starting the second course of a Master’s in Math Education, and this one involves weekly journaling (or, according to the dictionary, journalizing? ha ha Chrome spellcheck redlines both of them, as well as “redlines”). So I’m going to do my journal entries here for y’all to read. The course is…

my sister.

joshg

October 20, 2017. Thirty-seven years and a few months ago, I was three years old and she was a newborn. I remember my parents carrying her into the house for the first time.   Seven years ago, she ended her own life. Today’s the anniversary.   Yesterday, Dallas Yellowfly of 3 Crows Productions presented “Qwalena: The…

Flexible Strategies

joshg

Our draft 10-12 BC math curriculum has a phrase that I’m going to verbally process here, as part of thinking through something for a workshop I’m in today. What does it mean to assess if students can “Apply flexible strategies to solve problems”? My initial assumption was to make this about recognizing multiple ways to…

Assessment Overhaul

joshg

So one of my major challenges this year is attempting to overhaul my Big Picture on assessment to include our “curricular competencies”. For those outside of this province, the cc’s are a sort of orthogonal set of skills we want students to demonstrate that are, for the most part, content-independent. Here’s my summary version of…

A New Year

joshg

Time to play blog-post catchup now that my summer server migration woes are finally mostly resolved! This year I’m teaching full-time at an ‘Integrated Arts’ high school, covering Math classes from grades 10-12 as well as a Science 9 (later) and Photography 11 / 12. I GET TO MAKE MATH ARTSY ANY TIME I WANT…

A thought about the past

joshg

Those of us who care about math education and making it more engaging generally have strong opinions about “math drills” and the over-emphasis on standard algorithms (ie. doing pencil-and-paper arithmetic the way that one’s parents were taught to.) The progressive view is generally that while students *do* need to learn basic facts, they should also…

My Pedagogy

joshg

I needed to write up a statement of my teaching philosophy for a job application I’m submitting shortly, and it just seemed like the sort of thing worth sharing. So here you go. Constructive comments welcome.   My teaching philosophy centers on my core values. I highly value practicing compassion and empathy for students; I…

Inform: A brief note on encapsulation

joshg

I need to recap earlier chapters, but I’m currently reading the chapter on Advanced Actions and this bit just grabbed me in that “just blog this immediately” sort of way. 12.10. Action variables And we will want the photographing action to have the player use the best-quality camera which comes to hand. We will give…