Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

Once upon a time, there were no public schools. Once upon a time, it was not the job of the government to teach our young people. Once upon a time, it was the parents’ job to teach and train their children not only life skills (which many public schools insist on teaching) but career skills. The blacksmith would give his child on the job training in the art of blacksmithing. The baker the same to his child. The merchant the same to his. But then man invented the factory. Before the human race decided to sophisticate itself, there were only experts. Professional degree training began at age six and ended whenever they decided it was over. Now, I by no means disapprove of the good fruit the industrial revolution granted humanity, but some of the bad fruit is still laying around. Our current public schools system is designed to produce a factory worker, but society no longer is in need of factory workers. Many of the people who manage to escape the factory mindset of school are hard...

In today’s day in age, it is so common for students to walk into their math classroom and expect nothing more than a lecture with a homework assignment to go along with it. I, along with many others, have experienced this in my life. Day in and day out, we take notes on a PowerPoint the teacher has made and do an assignment straight from the textbook. Everyone can agree that this can get boring and repetitive, no matter how much you love math. This can create a very black and white environment for your students that is not promoting any creativity. Educators of Mathematics can have a powerful influence by making math FUN and may even give some students a newfound love for math. There are many ways that educators can make your classroom setting more enjoyable for students. One important way is to share their passion. If you aren’t excited about what you are teaching, why should your students be? We can change the way our students talk about math just by setting an example. I have s...

Proof:   First and foremost, I absolutely demise doing proofs. I look at them, I think, I go to a different problem, I come back, think, go to another problem, then finally muster up an answe r to the proof, and to be blunt, the success rate has been dismal of late. But, although I wish I would do better when being tested on it, it is extremely important  in a math class to learn proofs and  learn  how to do proofs for a variety of reasons.     The main reason is glaringly obvious; it shows the student has an overall understanding of the subject at hand.  This understanding is on a different level than just computing numbers. When a student is given the Pythagorean Theorem and is asked to find the hypotenuse of the right triangle, do they really understand where everything is com ing from, or are they just simply taking the example the teacher gave and applying it to their situation. When I was a high school student, I did the latter. My teac...

              Today I went to the SD STEM Conference in Huron, SD. There were many great sessions, but the ones that interested me the most were the ones with the idea of standards based grading (SBG) or target based grading (TBG). I have never really been exposed to this kind of grading, since none of my teachers have used it. If you’re not familiar with SBG or TBG, standard based learning has to do with grading based on the standards and not as much on necessarily getting the right answer. Target based learning is very similar to standard based grading, but it mostly breaks down the standards into smaller “targets”. These two grading systems are also usually out of a 4-point grading scale.               The TBG session was given by Mr. Kreie. He has just started using this system this school year. He says that this kind of grading focuses on “I can…” an...