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Tara's Goal and Progress Log
As a ‘non-math’ math teacher (I am a Music/English/Drama qualified teacher teaching math), I’m looking for ways to approach math topics that do not focus on memorizing the algorithm and using it in multiple ways. I recognize the importance of visual math and seeing patterns, but I have very little pedagogy to support this. My learning happened as ‘memorize the algorigthm’, so I don’t have that exceptional background of understanding concepts in a deeper way, which makes it hard to teach!
So, my goal is to find ways to demonstrate topics (specifically, trigonometry and quadratics) in a visual way. I’m looking for more than graphing, but ways to recognize patterns (such as the ones on visualpatterns.org) as being linear or quadratic, and what that means. I’m just beginning to teach quadratics at this point in my course, so I want to focus on that first. I’ve done some graphing, and we’ve used linking cubes to explore quadratic relationships, but I feel like it’s still surface stuff, and we haven’t been able to identify the deeper pattern. Maybe I’m overthinking?
Help!