My name is Joanna. I earned my B.S. in Mathematics from Indiana University and am not working toward my M.A.T. Why do you ask am I spending 3 years of my life to obtain certification to teach? Well, the answer is simple. The math department will fund me to take classes and the School of Education will not. Therefore, I will still be attending Indiana University until my student teaching in 2009. The good news is that I'll have 5 semesters of experience teaching beginning math classes at the college level. Currently I instruct X018 MTWF from 12:20-1:10.
For the M.A.T. program, I take half of my classes in the Department of Mathematics and half in the School of Education. My math classes are quite standard. I am not forced to take as difficult math classes as those students working toward a masters or a PhD so the requirements are not horrible. My other classes are in the School of Education. That is where F500 comes into play. I took some education classes (working toward certification) as an undergrad and therefore was able to take the "old" requirements for certification. The School of Education seems to always be changing their requirements. My old requirement requires a computer class and F500 happens to be the only class left that fulfills the computer requirement. I am the only student in F500 but it meets with W210 in which 5 students are enrolled.
W210 is a computing class focusing on techniques to integrate technology into the classroom. This blog was built with the intention of recording my experiences in the classroom along with my weekly trips to an after school program at a local elementary school. How will volunteering at a local elementary school help me - someone who intends to teach high school math? Well, hopefully I will discover that soon enough.
1 comment:
Hi Joanna,
Wow, this is an interesting circumstance. We definitely want to try to make this course as relevant as possible for you, so we try to pair you up with an acutal field experience (even thought it's not at the correct level for you) so that you can test out your ideas concerning integration with actual students. I think you'll be suprised at how many strategies apply to younger students that applies to older students. For instance, I am constantly suprised at how many of my strategies work with my undergraduate students developed from my first grade classroom days.
~Anne
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