Methods of Math Teaching and Learning

  The following problem is a type of problem my preservice teachers encounter on the Praxis II Multiple Mathematics assessment:  If the price of a computer, including a 9% tax, is $3,545.00, what is the cost of the computer before the tax is added? Traditionally, students are asked to find the cost of an item after adding tax to the original cost. Moreover, students are asked to find the total cost of an item after applying some sort of discount. The above problem is like a reverse operation or is it.  Let's review how to compute sale tax and the cost of something after adding the sale tax. Let's say a computer costs $1575 without the tax included. There is an 8% tax to add to the cost of the computer. $1575 X .08= $126. Then, add the $126 to the cost of the $1575 + $126=$1701. The computer will cost $1701. This does not include the warranty or service plan.  The math is straightforward computation, and the situation is real world. What Praxis wants to know is if you...

  Jamming on the Jamboard: Using Jamboard as a Tool for Recognizing Differences in Teacher Education   Every semester I involved my elementary education preservice teacher in discussion on topics concerning demographics in education. Usually, I ask my students to chart their elementary teacher demographics, and we usually do this mentally. Of course, we discover that we have far more female than male teachers and white than other races as elementary school teachers. Then we read public data that confirms our lived experience with elementary school teachers. However, this year I did something different. We used a visual tool to chart our teaching demographics. I utilized Google’s Jamboard to create a visual representation of our elementary school teacher demographics. The picture at the bottom of this blog post is a display of our data. We disaggregated our elementary teachers by gender and race. From the visual representation, PST were able to quickly determine that ou...

  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 followi...

  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,...

  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...

  Teaching Fractions online to Preservice Teachers Late in the semester, I usually teach fractions to my preservice teachers.  For the first week, I teach my students how to recognize fractions with various models and how to model fractions without using conventional methods. For week two, I teach ordering fractions with like and unlike denominators. For the third and fourth week, I teach students how to estimate the operation of fractions and how to operationalize fractions using models and reasoning skills. This year is different. The COVID challenged me to teach fractions online!!!  This year I taught fractions online. The concept of Fractions is very hard to learn even for preservice teachers.  It is hard to teach factions face to face. Well, it is even harder online.  First, the nature of how I teach fraction challenges how they learn the concept in elementary school. They are used to procedural knowledge like converting to common decimals and common denomi...

 Number Talks 10.19.2020 The Power of Persuasion    A couple of weeks ago, half of my students attended AMSTI training. I have a very big class this semester and with COVID only half could come. We have been doing NT since the beginning of the semester with my entire class online. However, things did not click until AMSTI training. My PST used to acknowledge my getting too deep in math during class. I use to correct their thinking when it came to regrouping. " THAT IS NOT A ONE!!!! " They did this until AMSTI training.      During training, my PST engaged in different NT with the AMSTI facilitator. She taught them different strategies like compensation, composing and decomposing numbers, adding with place value, and so forth. She also talked to PST about saying the correct value of the digit when regrouping. This was the same concept that my PST voiced their disdain for my in- depths.  When my PST returned from AMSTI training they used those strategies...