Social Justice in Mathematics Education Resource

This resource gives a great activity for teachers to use to help students understand the amount of money people in poverty really have to live on.  Find the link here.

Pre-Internship

Pre-internship has been extremely exhausting, but an excellent learning experience for me as a teacher.  My co-op teacher has been really excellent to work with.  Whatever questions I have she always answers, no matter the time of day or what we have going on at the time.  I really could not have asked for a better pre-internship experience.  This is particularly true since my co-op teacher teaches both at Winston Knoll and at the newly designated Campus Regina Public.  Campus Regina Public is run out of Cochrane High School and offers primarily trade classes integrated with a core subject.  My coop was working with the electrical program, where students could recieve an Electrical credit along with their Workplace and Apprenticeship Math 20 or 30 credit.  Since it was such a unique place to teach in, I have made sure to spend the majority of my time teaching in CPR.  During my time their I had the additional challenge of designing mathematics lessons with an electrical focus.

One of the lessons that I felt went best occurred at CPR.  It was also one of the lessons I was concerned could go very far astray.  During my second week teaching linear relations to the WA30 class I decided to use Google Spreadsheets with them to graph scatterplots, instead of having them do it by hand.  I had noticed that graphing properly was not my students’ strong point in mathematics (they neglected to do things like use a ruler and make an appropriate scale), though they could understand what graphs meant.  For this reason, and because of my desire to incorporate some technology into my SMARTBoard-less classroom, I decided to try Google Spreadsheets, which I find to be easier to use than Excel.

I did make an assumption that caused some problems as we worked on our scatterplots.  Apparently, you would be very foolish to assume, even in a grade 12 classroom, that your students know both their email address, and the password to access their email.  More likely, they know their email, but not their password, or neither.  Since Google Spreadsheets requires you to create a login using an existing email address (which you must then verify by accessing the email) this posed a problem.  About half the class period was spent with me desperately trying to get people onto Google Spreadsheets.  While some whining and complaining about how irritating the program was, and that we should just do this by hand, ensued; once all the students were on the spreadsheet software and saw how fast it could be to create a scatterplot they seemed to enjoy the assignment.  At the end of the period I breathed a sigh of relief: things could have gone much, much worse!! Since I tried something new and went outside my comfort zone for this assignment, I consider this to be my best lesson from my pre-internship.