Blog 16

 Blog #16!

Observation: Benefits from using the textbook less and less to teach math.

Reflection: While I was at my placement, during math class, I noticed that the teacher was not really using the textbook to teach the lessons. This was odd to me because when I was in grade school, we relied heavily on the textbook and had very few handouts. All of the lessons that were taught were from there, and any homework or assignments also came from the textbook. Although I learned how to understand the concept the teacher was explaining, I remember thinking that there was no real application to the “real world” and that the majority of the questions had to be solved one way.

Reflection on Reflection: At my placement school, my associate teacher rarely used the textbook. Although some questions were taken from it, the students did not rely on it as their main source of learning. They completed many worksheets and the teacher even came up with activities that covered the curriculum, however were not dry lessons and activities straight from the textbook. This is similar to what we were taught in math class at the Faculty of Education. 

The students seemed to obtain a better grasp on the material, and were using it in practical situations. For example, in the data management unit, they were to create a question of their choice and obtain tallies about a topic that would assist them in a future job. (Ex. What is your favourite football team? This would be helpful if you were working in a retail store and needed to know how much product of each team you should order). They then had to graph that information in a bar graph and pie chart and come to some conclusion about the information they had gathered. Not only did this project cover the curriculum expectations for data management, but it also incorporated using angles, when creating the pie chart.

This was something the students really enjoyed doing, because each of them had their own individual question they were working on. It was something that was useful and still taught the lessons.

It made me realize how secondary the textbooks can be when you find alternative ways to teach curriculum. This is something I will most definitely try to incorporate into my lessons whenever I get the chance!