Summer is a great time for swimming, reading, and math! While I love summer break as a chance to refresh, I also love it as a chance to reflect, learn, and grow in my practice. Since I will be teaching math in my classroom next year, I have been given the wonderful opportunity to attend a Mathodology workshop to learn how to incorporate the "Singapore math" style into my curriculum.
Just one day into a three day conference and I am already seeing my brain working in a way that pushes my critical thinking and evolves my number sense. When shown the "classic" way of operations with borrowing and stacking numbers with multi-step processes, it becomes immediately clear that there has to be a simpler way. Those of us who grew up learning that classic style and memorizing math facts and completing pages of problems that were all asking us to show the same skill over and over again may, at first, think this "new math" is complicated or confusing, but I caught on after one day, and I'm a Language Arts teacher! ;)
There will be many takeaways from this awesome week of learning, but a huge one that I know I can use not only in my math classroom but also in all parts of life is the repeated phrase, "We agree to listen to our friends; we don't have to agree with them." Since there are so many ways to solve math problems, this phrase is an important part of sharing and learning in the math classroom, bit, of course, this phrase is a good one to remember for all aspects of life. It may be the most important lesson that all educators, parents, and people bring to the world.
Thank you to the Mathodology team led by Sarah Shaeffer and Dr. Yeap Ban Har. Also, a big thank you to the Kentucky Country Day School admin team for allowing me this learning opportunity.
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