Saturday, April 28, 2012

Reflections on Year Two

I am working on the talk I will give at MCTM next week. Even though I am reusing a couple of slides, I think it is a lot different from last year's presentation and the talk I gave at the beginning of this year at the fall conference (only 3 attendees at that one).

My two major successes for this year have come up just recently. I gave the cumulative trimester 3 midterm on the first 30 concepts and one of my Algebra students said to me "I cannot believe that I know all this stuff!" My other success happened this week in both of my classes. I presented a couple of tough problems that had very little given information and the students had to use several different concepts/skills to solve them. When they got the problem (with or without help) some of them exclaimed "that was a great problem!" and I saw several students agreeing with them. It seems like many of them are appreciating tough problems now. I have not been assessing problem solving but I have definitely been working on it and now they seem to be enjoying it. I don't even care if they are good at it right now, if they like it and appreciate it and find it fun, they can eventually become great problem solvers.

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