Woohoo - my first blog post (as a math blogger)! I have been intending to start this blog for years, with the idea that it would be a place to record all of the aha moments from my teaching. This year, my school has focused on WONDER, and it has been making me think a lot about how questions are greater than answers, yet so often are not the focus of a math class. But when students wonder, they come up with some truly amazing questions. This year I have been focusing on truly listening to them, without an agenda of steering their thinking toward my desire end goal. True, we sometimes get derailed and end up talking about infinity when we "should" be talking about fractions, solving equations when we "should" be adding polynomials, or the meaning of e when we "should" be simplifying expressions with exponents. But I often find that when I follow the students' train of thought, we end up accomplishing more because of their buy in and understanding! (By the way, these are all examples of things that came up in the last week!)
So here's to this blog - may I actually update and maintain it!
