Becoming a Teacher

In my dreams of becoming a teacher, never did I think I would want to spend my days working on math. I have never been opposed to math, I've just felt more comfortable working with students to become strong readers and haven't spent near the amount of time working on math skills. I was also never a "math kid" so I guess that might be why I have always thought that I was just not a math person until reading an article posted by my instructor. More likely, it was a self-fulfilling prophesy which allowed me to avoid taking time to educate others. I wish I could take all that time back so I could balance the time and effort that I put in to educating children equally. In my research for math websites, manipulatives, activities, methods, etc. I've found so many opportunities that I would have loved to use in past scenarios. When I complete my schooling and have my own classroom, I will be well-prepared for a variety of tasks, skills and other online activities for my students.

One area that I have feared is the process of setting up a curriculum based on the Common Core Standards. In my concern for this, I asked some teachers I work with to give suggestions on how they set up their curriculum and this was a site that was recommended Common Core Curriculum and I'm so glad it was. The site is called TenMarks and even the "free" version is very workable and easy to use. I was able to pick a grade and standard and then find practice problems, assessment tools and strategies to help build the necessary skills to meet the benchmarks. I encourage everyone to watch the demo on the attached link as it gives a great breakdown of how the site can benefit all teachers.

It has taken me a while to reacquaint myself with some of the strategies that I have been learning over the last few months and it makes me wonder how I can coach my students to be the best they can be. One example of this is working with fractions. It has been a really long time since I have had to add, subtract, multiply or divide fractions. Now that I have had to take the time to relearn these skills, I am reminded of some of the gimmicks my own math teacher used when I was in school. For instance, whenever we multiplied fractions (meaning crossing out like terms), she referred to it as "playing Zorro" by crossing out any terms that were similar and reducing fractions so they were easier to work with. We always laughed at her gimmicks but it obviously worked because here I am, 20 years later, remembering how to "play Zorro." I can only hope that when I am teaching my students, that I can be as impressionable as she was to me. In the following example, I am attempting to display how to "play Zorro," as you can see the initial numbers we are working with are two eights, and eight twelfths. Since there are like terms within these fractions, we can play Zorro by crossing out 2 and 12 and reducing them to 1 and 6. The second step is to reduce the 8s to 1s because they cancel each other out. this makes multiplying this fraction much simpler.


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