Methods of Math Teaching and Learning

  Math Campus Trail II: The Quad Continuing the math campus trail for one more week was necessary. AAMU has many things to offer mathematically, and PST needed another example to reference for their assignment. Preservice teachers (PST) were presented this time with the task of seeing relevance in mathematics with the Quad. The Quad was chosen because AAMU used this area to have weekly activities such as Every Sunny Wednesday. There are diverse activities during Every Sunny Wednesdays based on student services decisions. However, for this math campus trail, Every Sunny Wednesday is not the focus of this activity. The focus for this activity will be the Quad itself. Figure 1 is a picture of the Quad on campus. This is the picture I presented to PST. Figure 2 is a picture of PST responses to finding math representations on the Quad. Figure 1 Picture of the Quad at AAMU Figure 2 PST Math Findings on Quad Findings: The mathematics domain that PST came up with includes the following:

  Campus Math Trail! Finding the Math Across Campus   Mathematics is everywhere! It’s in the places we go and the things we do. We should seek mathematics in our everyday lives, as in reading. Mathematic understanding is just not the select few people with what we call the math gene. Looking for the relevancy in mathematics should encompass our daily lives as we seek to make meaning with mathematics. One of my goals as a mathematics teacher educator is to pull out the real-life instances for using mathematics daily at the early childhood and elementary levels. For my preservice teachers (PST), this could be an awesome challenge especially when they may feel the connections are real connections.   For this reason and because it is Homecoming on campus, I challenged them to look across campus to determine how mathematics is used across the domains. The domains include numbers and operation-base ten, numbers and operations-fractions, counting and cardinality, geometry, and measureme

  Number Talks with Preservice Teachers Fall 2021 Fall is my favorite time of year. The weather is getting cooler and the trees are changing colors. Football- marching band season is upon us! None of those are the reasons why I like the fall. I love fall because it’s the first semester of the academic year. The fall semester is my favorite time because I teach math methods at my favorite HBCU, Alabama A&M University. It’s time to blog about my adventures in math methods. Teacher candidates are special to me and their mathematical thinking matters significantly. Therefore, I take copious amounts of pictures, blogs, and anecdotal notes about the happenings in the math methods class. The most difficult part of the semester is getting them interested in thinking about mathematics in multiple ways. That is where Number Talks come in. Number Talks (NT) is a 5 to 15-minute ritual in mathematics that supports students’ procedural fluency with conceptual understanding. During NT, th