Affective Dimensions of Writing

I have always been passably good at writing and I haven't hated it. I loved reading when I was little (and I still do) and I think that influenced me a lot as a writer. For one thing, I was able to pick up on the structure of writing very easily and it wasn't very hard for me to learn to write grammatically. I also understood very early that writing was a way to communicate and express yourself.

I think I am a pretty good writer and I occasionally enjoy writing just to write, but it isn't something I make time for very often. I think it is something I would like to do more when I have more time. I see writing as a way to make your thoughts permanent or at least long-lasting and I think would like to write a book some day because of this. I guess to do that I will need to make sure I have thoughts worth saving :).

Even though I don't do a lot of recreational writing right now, I do enjoy expressing my mathematical ideas in writing. I think one of the reasons I really like my upper division math classes is because we get to write math in sentences that flow into each other like sentences in an essay. I remember telling my friends that my favorite part of my Algebraic Structures was learning how to write mathematics in mathematical symbols because it made math so much easier to think about and discuss. I think that writing math has helped me to see math as much more than a bunch of steps to work through.

When I am a teacher I want to help my students learn how to WRITE math instead of just doing it. I never wrote math in any of my high school math classes and I don't think I started writing math until my third year of college and I think that is a shame. I don't know exactly how I will structure the writing of mathematics in my classroom, but I want to figure out a way.

I think I will need to be careful how I integrate writing in my math class because the students will not be used to it. I think I might help them get used to writing math by having them record themselves talking through a problem and then have them transcribe their recordings into writing. This will help them keep their train of thought as they work through a problem. I think it will also implicitly teach them how writing has many advantages over speaking because it is much more clear and concise.

I think that writing is an important component of mathematics education and I am excited to figure out ways to integrate it in my classroom.

Final Project - Math Website Page

For my final project, I decided to make a website page on how to multiply negative numbers. I included two videos where I modeled two ways of visualizing the multiplication of negative numbers. I also included an algebraic proof of why a negative number times a negative number equals a positive number. You can access the website here.

I really enjoyed making this website and I think many of my students would also enjoy making a website. However, I think it could be very frustrating for some of them, especially if it was a take-home project and their parents weren't very technology savvy. The most frustrating part of this project for me was getting the videos' volume to be loud enough and that problem was not math related at all.

If I were to require my students to make a website page, the purpose of the project would be for them to learn to express mathematics in a clear and interesting way. My main intent would not be for them to learn to make a website, although that is a fun side benefit. Because learning to create a website is not one of my main objectives and for some students the technology frustrations could subsume the math objectives, I wouldn't REQUIRE them to make a website. Rather, I would let the students choose between making a website and a couple of other options.

I do think that creating a video would be a great activity for students to participate in if my school had video cameras/webcams available for student use. Even if there were only a few available, it would not be difficult to schedule students to take turns going to a small study room and record their videos. I think it would be fun to assign each student (or maybe pairs of students) a math topic for the unit and have them create a 5 minute video on that topic. Then I would merge all the videos together and have a class period where they watched their own videos.

I think this would be good learning activity because the students would be verbalizing their math, which is very important. They would also be practicing how to present mathematical ideas in a clear and concise way. They would be actively thinking about how they could make math interesting and how they could apply it to the real world. And finally, they would be enjoying the expression of other mathematical ideas presented by their peers.

When I require my students to make a digital text, I think I will award 20% of the points based on how polished their project is, (appearance, clearness of speech, etc) and 80% of the points based on the presentation of the mathematical content (accuracy, clarity and conciseness of explanations, etc). This would put most of the focus on the mathematical content but also ensure that the projects were of good quality.