My Journey through Education

Textbook Reading What are the advantages of having students conduct experiments even before they attempt to figure out a theoretical probability? The advantages of having students conduct experiments before they attempt to figure out theoretical probability is they are able to make their own predictions. They then use their predictions to try and make connections about what might happen. Go to the Illuminations website and explore one of the virtual experiments. List the title and describe the experiment that you explored and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of virtual experiments. (http://illuminations.nctm.org/ and use the search site: probability and check interactives)  The title of the virtual experiment I explored was Adjustable Spinner. The virtual spinner was actually really cool. It allowed you to pick how big you wanted each part of the spinner. You got to choose how many times you spun the spinner. Each time you spun the spinner it changed both th...

Box Plots I would want to teach a lesson to Class B because most of the class seems to understand the topic. There are just a few students who don't understand the topic well. I feel like you couldnt just teach a follow-up lesson to Class A, with class A you need to really reteach pretty much the whole lesson because it seems like none of the class really understood anything that was taught. I mean the highest test score was a 60% which is pretty low and a D in most schools.  Do you think it would be easier to teach Class A or Class B? Why? Three Questions to ask students: 1. Which class on average do you think collected more trash? - I think the US class collected more data based on looking at the two box plots. This is because the average amount from the German class was a little  over 50 lbs and the average for the US class was about 80 lbs. 2. How does the amount of students in each class effect the data? - I don't think that the amount of students has tha...

Generating Meaning This article addresses how students need to understand the real meaning of range, mean, median, and mode before they are really able to understand how to find the average. It talks about how students need to understand the concept of how to find the average and not just know the procedure. The article then goes on to explain how they need to look, determine, develop, recognize, and understand  to fully get how to understand the average. The article then goes to talk about different activities to do with the students to get them to be able to really understand the concept. I really don't remember that much about my elementary school math but I do remember that when my teacher would talk about mean she would just talk about how it was the average amount of a data set. I remember the teacher asking us questions like "how many siblings do you have?" or "how many pets do you have?" and then using that data we needed to calculate what the mean or...

Lost Teeth Video Many people don't usually lose a lot of teeth before the age of 5 (kindergarten) most of the time but the older they get the more teeth they have probably lost. They are realizing this so the teacher wants her students to make predictions on what they think their data will tell them about each grade.  Do you remember losing your first tooth?  The insight I get about the children's thinking about why the ranges would be different is the students thought that the range would be lower in the lower grades but the higher grades actually had the lower range of number of teeth lost. This is because some peoples teeth like to stay longer than others but once they get to a certain age they will have lost multiple teeth because we need to grow our adult teeth.  I think it is important that the students are able to state the highest and lowest numbers in their data. I also think its important that they are taking into account the students who don't kn...