Last night's NDM class was more like a seminar, and on a subject that I try to stretch my horizons in...math! The professor said that the topics in the PreCalculus book would be the upper limits for an elementary school teacher as well as a possible topic for advanced middle schoolers.
Well, I definitely did not feel like one of the smarter students in the room ;). The majority of these math-oriented teachers already took the "teaching math" course together that immediately precedes this one in the sequence.
I ordered the book immediately when I got home, so it will arrive as early as the Friday. I still need to get onto the new Blackboard platform known as Joule. And, check out the suggested math problems from the handout the teacher gave us in class.
What makes this class seminar-style, at least in my mind, is the ongoing fostered discussion that checks if we are getting it (an informal formative assessment) and the way that the topics (which seemed more like brain-teasers today, as we discussed qualitative graphs) were springboards for abstraction. However, I must always keep in mind--how would I present these topics to middle schoolers? (Title of NDM course, Middle School Mathematics-Algebra)
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