How do you find the parents of your students? Are they helping their children to learn, or are they more of a hindrance? Some parents can be incredibly difficult to cope with, of course. And sometimes an assertive manner and explaining the boundaries between their opinions and your professional work is called for.
Are you getting a little tired of other people interfering in how you teach in your classroom? I see around the world teachers being put under greater and greater pressure to perform, as if they were mere employees or servants of the state. And I'm over it!
Do you use technology as much as you'd like to help your K-6 students understand math? How do students respond to tech? Would they actually prefer old school resources? Have you started using Snapchat yet? Would you like daily K-6 math videos to start conversations? Follow me: petes_classroom
Do you wonder about the wisdom of sending math homework home? Have you ever had a sneaky suspicion that parents may actually not be helping their kids learn math?
From today onward, I will not apologize for expecting students to memorize the times tables. And nor should you.
Infants as young as six months recognize interesting shapes. And babies who show higher spatial reasoning skills do better in math at age four. This is good news for parents and carers who purposefully try to help their children understand the world around them in explicitly mathematical ways...
Indigenous students in Australia typically lag two years behind other kids in math. How can teachers connect indigenous kids with classroom math? A new approach proposed by Dr Chris Matthews incorporates story telling and dance as ways to connect students' interests and culture with math.
Rote learning of math was abandoned in western nations as early as the 1960s. So why is the UK government spending £41m to train teachers in 8000 English primary schools in so-called "mastery maths", based on the approach in Shanghai, China? More importantly, is rote learning somehow the "missing ingredient" in English kids' learning of maths?
Are there kids in your class that you just don't "get"? Do you teach students who you feel will never amount to much? The video that prompted this week's blog is an interview between Larry King and Gary Vaynerchuk. Chances are, you're not much like Gary Vee. And nor am I. If you're like most teachers, you were good at school, you were good at following the rules, and you worked hard to figure out the educational system and succeeded at it. The system is designed to reward such behaviour, with academic awards, good grades and ultimately a pathway to a good job.
