Mathematics is “beautiful” as Brea put it. I have to admit I have forgotten this. I used to love math puzzles and find math relaxing to work on. However, lately it has been stressful and meaningless. I lost my love for mathematics, my appreciation was over come by assignments and program expectations. I have been hammering my way through math course after math course thinking I need to know this so I can teach my future students how to use this in the real world. While mathematics is a valuable tool it is also a valuable form of art and thinking. I can not believe I missed the beauty in it, the beauty of triumph over confusion, the beauty of persistence over frustrations, the beauty of wonder and creativity. Mathematics has an amazing ability to be entirely concrete, abstract, or somewhere in between. I feel terrible that in general people don’t explore mathematics in todays society, they miss out on mathematics as the human endeavour.
The fact that Brea had been teaching with her previous methods for 18 years floors me. Not that she used them that long, but that she was able to make a change to how she taught after so long of using the same pedagogy. It goes to prove my fifth creed statement from my last post. “I can always improve as a mathematics teacher”. After 18 years of experience and thinking she had it all figured out she found a way to be better.
I feel that my I believe statements hit the nail on the head as far as content for this posts readings go. I would like to reword a few like the second one though. “I believe mathematics is fun and interesting”, I think that while fun and interesting are almost synonyms of beautiful, beautiful is a better word choice for it’s connotation. It makes the subject sound like it deserves more appreciation than fun and interesting do. I would also like to replace words like learning, being better at, and improving to growing or growth. The article makes a strong case for how our personalities, beliefs, values go into our teaching and if the are a part of teaching then they must also be a part of students learning. Growth and growing have connotations that suggest development beyond math sense. They suggest that math helps to develop people and help people discover who they are through their learning.
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