Carolina Ruiz's Blog

To begin, I watched this amazing TED talk twice because it was filled with so much useful information that I agree with 100%. This TED talk has to do with teaching mathematics because math is one of those subjects that is ‘it’s either right or wrong’ and never ‘interesting view’ or ‘how did you come up with that?’. We need to evolve from right or wrong answers and teach a student to think above, beyond, and creativity. The Common Core Standards fit with what Sir Ken Robinson was talking about because they are outdated and tend to only help those students who are ‘intelligent’. There are other ways for students to achieve success without the use of rules and outdated forms of learning. The TED talk mentions that this is not the teachers’ fault, but rather this just goes way back in time when the rules were set into place. Teachers can change the paradigm by being more diverse with their students. As I stated before, there should not be a correct or incorrect answer because we all learn in different ways. We as educators need to reform the system to think creatively. Students should be working in groups and exploring other ways of thinking/learning. What stood out to me the most from this speech was that there are unnecessary rules in education. I wonder why we generalize and group students? Don’t we want to help them become creative and civil individuals for our future?

What are the benefits of your school having a Makerspace?

There are tons of benefits if my school had a Makerspace. Makerspaces helps students learn while working hands-on. As a hands on learning, I would have loved if Makerspace was a thing when I was still in k-12 years. Students get to learn on their own because they are learning from what they are creating. This will help students who have not mastered a way that best suits their learning style since they will be creating and exploring. I like Makerspace because it benefits students and will help them becoming better learns — which will help their future classes and careers.

To start on a personal note, I am afraid of COVID, not because of me (I have a pretty strong immune system/lungs), but because my father is diabetic and I would feel guilty if I brought it home. I work at a restaurant who is doing outdoor dinning and lots of people do not listen, which makes me frustrated, but I follow all the guidelines. As for school, school this semester in specific has been a huge challenge for me. I feel like I am not learning as well as I would hope, I’m not motivated, and I constantly procrastinate now. It has nothing to do with my professors — it’s just me and the groovy I’m in. I’m incredibly sad because I want to feel interested in my classes, but somehow I cannot. It’s unfortunate that the education system is just looking our for money and not educating students instead. I live across the street from an elementary school and I see teacher cars, but no students. I am happy that young students are not back to school because we are in some pretty hectic times for students to be doing school face-to-face. The positive outcome I see from COVID and still being in school is that we are all going to be great with technology now.

When I think of the best math lesson that I have ever experienced, I think about my high school — junior year math teacher — Mr. Martinez. As I stated on your first blog, I have my ups and down with math, but with Mr. Martinez, math was always easy. He was patient and had different ways to teach students that did not understand the material well. I felt comfortable in his classroom because he was always patient and never put students in the spotlight for not understanding math. He was a very one-on-one instructor which helps me a lot because I can ask all the questions I have. I remember the week we learned about parabolas, circles, ellipses, and hyperbolas were so easy because we started off looking at the formulas and understanding their “why’s”, we then drew out what the shape looks like. After we practiced together he waited until all of us felt confident enough to work on the problems alone. The lesson was good because Mr. Martinez helped the class define everything and create a comfortable environment where “it just takes practice to master this”. I would use the elements of positive reinforcement, eye contact, creating a comfortable environment, and avoiding saying “no” in my classroom.

My philosophy about math is never giving up. I want my students to understand that math is not always going to be easy and simple — which can make us upset, but if they keep trying, they will get better — the more practice a student gets, the more familiar they become with the subject. According to our PowerPoint, “Ability to accept frustrations that come from not knowing” (Barnett 2). Math will not always be as simple as 1 + 1 = 2, so students need to be prepared to face the hardships math throws at all of us. There are dozens of young students who simply give up on math because they do not understand since they are often brought down by ‘wrong answers’, but I do not wish to do this with my students as I have learned in this course that we should never tell our students ‘no’ — even when it’s literally incorrect, but we have to ask about their ideology and how it is that they got there. Simply saying, “No. That’s wrong” can bring a student confidence down and they will end up frowning upon math for their whole educational career. As common core progresses and the words develop, more math is going to be incorporated in our daily tasks/jobs. In other words, children need to become comfortable with math from an early age to keep advancing and going deeper into the spectrum we call math. Being patient with students is key because not all your students are going to understand the topic in an instance — plus some students learn differently than others. Again citing from the same PowerPoint, “Understand the difference between not knowing the answer and not having found it yet” (Barnett 2) this sticks out to me so much because all students need is time and patience to feel comfortable enough to keep trying. That’s why I plan to be open in my teaching. By giving all my students top tier resources to learn and patience, I will participate in the Equity Principle for young math learners.

The major difference I see in formative and summative assessments is that formative is more flexible while summative assessments are more structured. Formative also provides ways for students to improve. I see formative as less stressful for students because this just points out what needs to be improved. Does the teacher need to re-teach? How well are students doing? Who understands and who doesn’t? These are questions that strick formative assessments. Summative (as most students are used to) are final exams, midterms, projects, etc. These are high stake assessments. This form of assessment assesses the student and not how the student is learning. Summative is left for the end to evaluate students. I am not the best test-taker, so I side with formative more than summative. What these both have in common that they look out for the best interest for students. These are meaning to assess and improve anything a student is having trouble with.

The big takeaway I took from Jean Piaget’s quote is that people should use their brains more to explore as many options that they can. There is not only one right answer to life — we should all be more creative and think of personalized ways to learn different concepts. Of all my the subjects I have taken in school, math has been the most concrete way of learning. Most teachers will teach you every step and once students become more comfortable with the steps, they will provide examples. Though I see no problem with that, some students have different ways of thinking that make math more interesting or easier for them and do not follow the same steps, but end up with the right answer. This is abstract thinking. I personally see math more of a concrete learning experience, but I think teachers should be more open to the idea that there are different steps to get the same solution. I remember that some of my teachers would take points off a test if the student did the problem another way — they wanted students to learn in a concrete (factual/strict) way, but I think students should learn to take math as a form of abstract thinking. I have found that when I find shortcuts to math problems, I enjoy math a little bit more than the day before.

Though I’ll be honest, I’m not the best at Math, it’s not something I hate. I have a love and hate relationship with math. To me, math is super fun when I understand what to do (it’s like a puzzle). When I don’t understand, however, I get frustrated and sassy. As long as I have a kind and patient teacher I’ll have to say I am pretty good at math. I always manage to receive A’s in my math classes, so that is something I am proud of. What makes me happy about myself is that when a classmate needs help, I will be patient enough to help them through any problem they have. I do this because I know the feeling of not understanding. I have a niece that is 5 now and has to do math. She gets frustrated like any other 5-year-old when they don’t understand, but I try to be as imaginative as possible to better help her understand. I hope to be able to do this in a third-grade setting with I’m finished with school. Children need so much patience and I’m willing to find different ways to teach different children if that’s what makes them understand. Just because one student knows how to count one way, doesn’t mean it applies the same to another.

Over the course of this period, I have learned more than I could imagine. I am happy to say that I truly enjoyed this class because of the cool technology I have learned. The first takeaway of this course is to always be interactive with technology. I feel like I have learned first hand by creating my own projects and adding my own perspective to them. Creating these tech advanced projects was interesting because I could do it on my own interests which will just make me remember the content better (as the textbook describes).

The second takeaway was learning how to apply technology in the classroom. For instance, I started to think about ways to use the technology we were using in class, in my future classrooms. I want to teach third grade, so at times it was rough because some of platforms we were using were somewhat harder to comprehend (me being a college student), but I always found a way around it to apply it to a classroom full of children.

Not only did I learn more about using technology applying it in the classroom, I also learned to apply technology in the real world. This course has made me realized that the world is changing drastically — changing into a world full of technology. Most of the platforms we used for this course, I have never even heard of. I always used the applications Apple provides, but I can comfortably say that I will be trying new things. This course was all about getting your hands on technology, and that is exactly what I did.

As I progress in this course, I am constantly learning something new. Though the main theme of this course is technology in the classroom, I still learn new ways to enhance the technology experience. I hope to apply all of the things I have learned and apply them to my future classroom. Since I want to teach elementary children, I want to introduce them to technology in the simplest way possible so they can at least get an idea. This week I have completed the PBL project and learned a ton just from the authors discussions. I’m super excited for what comes next!