“It’s Complicated”

In Math 371 we continued to discuss a book that we decided to read called “It’s Complicated” and we also continued to play around with Excel.

            In the book discussion we talked about two chapters of the book. These chapters were about bullying and online predators. We did not focus on the chapter about online predators as much as the bullying chapter. As future educators all we can do is teach our students about Internet safety and how they shouldn’t talk to strangers online. We focused mainly on the bullying because as teachers, that is something we know we are all going to have to deal with. The definition of bullying stated in the book, which came from Swedish psychologist Dan Olweus, is constructed with three components aggression, repetition, and imbalance of power. In this book they interview teenagers about different social issues and uses in technology. Something that stuck with me was the fact that many of the people they interviewed mentioned how when they interacted with their peers they rarely used the word bullied. They would use words such as “prank” and “drama” etc. to describe their different acts. It was said that the adults use the word bullied much more loosely then the children/teenagers. As future educators or even as current educators I believe this is something we need to keep in mind when we see students giving each other a hard time, or what we might see as “bullying” might just be a way that they interact with their peers. We have to insure that we make our classroom as comfortable as possible so that if students are actually getting bullied that they will be able to come and talk to you about it.

            Now to mention what we did on the technology side of things for our classroom we continued to work with Excel. We practice with the graphing some more and how to switch different axis. We also tried to a couple other programs to see if they were compatible with the SMARTboard. It turns out that not all sites are very SMARTboard friendly so as future teachers, that is something that we are all going to have to be aware of when it comes to us planning our classes. Also one of my fellow classmates was telling us about how he was playing around on Geogebra and learned how to do some other things with it, that just goes to show that as you become more comfortable using programs and certain technologies you can learn more things about them and use them in an even better way. When a teacher knows how to effectively use the technology they have it makes it an even better experience for the students. 

By Lindsey Jarman