Connecting With Maths

My inspiration for this post and this upcoming project comes from "The Wrong Way to Teach Math," an article from The New York Times by Andrew Hacker.  Hacker discusses a course he teaches which challenges students to develop quantitative literacy.  He found that a number of students, even when taking advanced courses, struggled with understanding graphs and connecting to the mathematics they were learning in class.

I'm currently in the process of marking my first set of explorations for my IB Maths SL course.  My students have struggled to apply the maths we have been using in class and they have struggled to write about what they see, reflect on what they understand and connect with the mathematics they are using.  As educators, we learn from our mistakes and I feel that I have not prepared my students for this project because I have rarely asked them to actually write in maths!  I know that maths journaling is an important concept in helping students consolidate their understanding.  But I think this is different to simply reflecting and its our responsibility to scaffold the process so that students are ready to tackle a topic on their own.

So I want my students to know where the maths they are studying came from.  To explore our knowledge of mathematics and to start to explore topics which require them to do more than just calculate or solve, but to actually discuss and reflect on.  Almost all of these topics are taken from the HL syllabus.  Thank you IB for providing these great links!

Here is what I will be giving my students.  They will be required to choose one topic from each column to write about.  Lets see how it goes!