Lesson Plan: Compound Interest (12 Foundations)

Reflections on Elliot W. Eisner's "Three Curricula that Schools Teach"

Eisner sets out to explain the three curricula taught by schools, including the 1. Explicit curriculum - what is made public through course announcements 2. Implicit curriculum - the socialization through physical and behavioural structures of the school and classroom 3. Null curriculum - what is left out from our explicit curriculum Through his theory of implicit education, Eisner makes his case that is it usually more important for a student to study the teacher, rather than the course content, in an attempt to achieve a good grade. The students reads the environment created by the teacher to establish to determine how much effort they should put into a class, particularly in systems that use behaviour modification techniques. How is it that we should go about cultivating student initiative and to develop intrinsic motivation so that students find the joy of learning for themselves, rather than to please their community - teachers, parents, and peers - through their achievements...

Microteaching reflection

Yesterday, in small groups, we taught each other micro-lessons around a topic that was non-math/non-curricula. I decided to teach a lesson on a figure skating: waltz jump (on the ground) - Lesson plan in previous post. Reflecting upon the experience, I was a little nervous throughout the process, teaching a skill that I had done over and over again, but had not thought much about the learning of the process in over ten years. Although a clear lesson plan was drawn out, I did not review it as much as I should have, and smaller details were omitted. (Waltz jump along the arc of a circle and connects to the edges used.) My peers seemed to enjoy the task of learning about the skating boot, knee health, and performing the jump, and all written comments were positive. I ran out of material at the end, and as this was as far as I had done in figure skating, I wasn't entirely sure how to proceed from there. (This shows in two feed back forms that indicated that my area of improvement was...

Letters from the Northern Front

As I read through Gerofsky's " Battleground schools: Mathematics education", it struck me to recall my mathematics education in New Zealand, and how much it pointed towards elements of the conservative and progressive approaches. I quite enjoyed mathematics up until the senior years of high school. However, at the university level, lectures and tutorials seemed to point to a conservative view. As I scanned down the table comparing the different elements of mathematics education (2008, p. 392-393), I found myself ticking off the assumptions belonging to the conservative column, although as Gerofsky mentions, this dichotomy is not always the healthiest ways to understand approaches to math education. However, it does reveal how much of my pre-conceived notions of mathematic education derive from my background as a mathematics learner, and how I now face a paradigm shift in the way I orient myself as a mathematics educator. In a bullet point that described who conservative...

Fig. 342a

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