What Came Next?

Well it is now February and I am still learning, and thankfully, so are my students. After the requirements of my course was complete, I decided that blogging my trials and tribulations was a great way to get this out to my fellow collegues. However, there was a part of me that needed to bring all of my findings together into one place and really get my head wrapped around where I was professionally. So, I wrote a paper. It is way too big to post in one posting, so I will do it in several.

After I had my paper wrote and read it, that is when I came up with a title, and i think it kind of says it all:

Providing Access For All Through Problem Solving

So here is how it begins;

It is a fact that most American and Canadian math classrooms rid students of a natural tendency to be curious, to make sense of things and to understand them. Are you paying attention? According to Boaler (2008) before children enter school they are natural problem solvers. She goes on to state “many studies have shown that students are better at solving problems before they attend math class.” (p.43) Even at a young age, children reason through problems, using different methods in creative ways. Boaler (2008) suggests that after spending countless hours in a classroom where students are learning math in a passive way, their problem solving abilities are drained out of them. They think they need to memorize how to do math and forget about trying to make sense of it in order to follow these procedures.