Within one of my classes, we decided to all watch, read, listen to, or participate in General Conference in some way and specifically focus on how the teachings of the Gospel of Jesus Christ apply to our future math classrooms. This was a very interesting focus, and I feel like the principles that we pulled are applicable to all math teachers, not just those who may be members of our faith.
There is a problem, though. Conference was a total of 10 hours, and full of connections to education and technology. I'm going to spend the next few months going over all the talks again and again, and picking a single talk to focus on is quite difficult to do. This is part of the reason why this reflection is so late, I had a difficult time narrowing my focus to something that would fit in a single blog post.
I chose to focus on one single talk, Elder Bednar's talk Preparing to Obtain Every Needful Thing. Elder David A Bednar is actually an educator by profession, and acted as a professor, an associate dean, and as president of Rick's College. It's not surprising, then that there are many, many connections to education to be found in his talks. This talk is no exception. In this post, I will go through some of my favorite quotes that I found and relate them directly to our math classrooms.
"We should not expect the Church as an organization to teach or tell us everything we need to know and do.... Rather, our personal responsibility is to learn what we should learn..."
This directly relates to teaching our students. If our students expect us to teach and tell them everything that they need to know and do, they will never actually engage in mathematics. We have to instead help them to engage in the mathematics and take personal responsibility to learn. We will still help and guide and direct our students in their learning process, but if we can help them take responsibility they will be much more successful.
As a similar note, students can't just learn from a single source. If they learn all their mathematics from their teachers they will lose the ability to do math as soon as they forget the teacher. If they learn all their mathematics from a textbook they will lose the math once they set down their book. If a student learns all their mathematics from exploration alone they won't get very far (it's taken us thousands of years to get where we are mathematically, we can't expect our students to get there in a few years by themselves). If students rely too heavily on technology, they will lose the ability to do math when their phones are taken away. Students need to have many sources and internalize mathematics from all the rich opportunities they have available to them.
"If all you or I know about Jesus Christ and His restored gospel is what other people teach or tell us, then the foundation of our testimony of Him and His glorious latter-day work is built upon sand. We cannot rely exclusively upon or borrow gospel light and knowledge from other people—even those whom we love and trust."
This is in continuation of the previous idea, if our students only know what we tell them about mathematics, they will be on extremely shaky ground. It is important that we teach and help our students build their own understanding rather than relying completely on ours. It is important that our students can trust that we know the mathematics, but if that is all that they will ever have they are going to fall and their knowledge will erode away over time (just as a building built on sand would do). Students who build their own ideas of mathematics and can prove or justify them by themselves will keep these foundational experiences and truly engage in mathematical processes.
"A rich reservoir of resources exists in print, audio, video, and other formats to help us learn about [temple ordinances]..."
While this quote was specifically about the temple, this is very true for our math students. They have a huge variety of resources to learn from, including all the dynamic software and other technology we talk so much about. If we are familiar with these resources, we can point our students in the right direction so they can also have a taste of all the technology available for mathematical exploration.
Well, that's about enough for my perspective. If it wasn't the end of the semester and finals coming up, I might have explored a few more talks, but hopefully that is sufficient for now. And maybe you, my fine reader, can explore and dive into some other talks.
Anyway, a little about the discussion that I had with my fellow educators about General Conference: We focused a little more on the technological aspect of the conference. Something that Elder Cook said is that we should make technology "a servant instead of a distraction or, even worse, a master." This definitely applies to our classrooms. If technology is a distraction or a master of our mathematics we have failed as a teacher. This is true whether the technology is a distraction to us or to our students. We must use the technology to our benefit, not as a deterrent to learning.
There is a paper by Vince Geiger that discusses the use of technology in a math classroom that is very similar in the wording. Basically, Geiger describes a series of levels of using technology in the math classroom, beginning from the least useful to most: Technology as Master, Technology as Servant, Technology as Partner, Technology as an Extension of Self. We discussed this article and tried to determine where we were with various technologies. As a whole, we came to the conclusion that with most technologies, we are definitely to the point of servant, and hopefully to partner and as an extension of self. As teachers, we need to be familiar enough with the technology to be at a place where we can help our students not be servants to the technology but be able to use it to explore and further understanding.
We then furthered our discussion a little bit about how to get technologies in our classroom. We had the perspective of a professor who taught for many years in public schools before transitioning to teaching in college, and that was very interesting. He talked about the many types of grants that we as teachers can apply for, how we could get new technology gradually, how to help parents and administration be on our side, and how to show the benefits of new technology. Overall this was very interesting, and very useful. If in our future classrooms we have no technology we are actually slaves to that lack of technology, which is almost as bad as being slaves to the technology.
I chose to focus on one single talk, Elder Bednar's talk Preparing to Obtain Every Needful Thing. Elder David A Bednar is actually an educator by profession, and acted as a professor, an associate dean, and as president of Rick's College. It's not surprising, then that there are many, many connections to education to be found in his talks. This talk is no exception. In this post, I will go through some of my favorite quotes that I found and relate them directly to our math classrooms.
"We should not expect the Church as an organization to teach or tell us everything we need to know and do.... Rather, our personal responsibility is to learn what we should learn..."
This directly relates to teaching our students. If our students expect us to teach and tell them everything that they need to know and do, they will never actually engage in mathematics. We have to instead help them to engage in the mathematics and take personal responsibility to learn. We will still help and guide and direct our students in their learning process, but if we can help them take responsibility they will be much more successful.
As a similar note, students can't just learn from a single source. If they learn all their mathematics from their teachers they will lose the ability to do math as soon as they forget the teacher. If they learn all their mathematics from a textbook they will lose the math once they set down their book. If a student learns all their mathematics from exploration alone they won't get very far (it's taken us thousands of years to get where we are mathematically, we can't expect our students to get there in a few years by themselves). If students rely too heavily on technology, they will lose the ability to do math when their phones are taken away. Students need to have many sources and internalize mathematics from all the rich opportunities they have available to them.
"If all you or I know about Jesus Christ and His restored gospel is what other people teach or tell us, then the foundation of our testimony of Him and His glorious latter-day work is built upon sand. We cannot rely exclusively upon or borrow gospel light and knowledge from other people—even those whom we love and trust."
This is in continuation of the previous idea, if our students only know what we tell them about mathematics, they will be on extremely shaky ground. It is important that we teach and help our students build their own understanding rather than relying completely on ours. It is important that our students can trust that we know the mathematics, but if that is all that they will ever have they are going to fall and their knowledge will erode away over time (just as a building built on sand would do). Students who build their own ideas of mathematics and can prove or justify them by themselves will keep these foundational experiences and truly engage in mathematical processes.
"A rich reservoir of resources exists in print, audio, video, and other formats to help us learn about [temple ordinances]..."
While this quote was specifically about the temple, this is very true for our math students. They have a huge variety of resources to learn from, including all the dynamic software and other technology we talk so much about. If we are familiar with these resources, we can point our students in the right direction so they can also have a taste of all the technology available for mathematical exploration.
Well, that's about enough for my perspective. If it wasn't the end of the semester and finals coming up, I might have explored a few more talks, but hopefully that is sufficient for now. And maybe you, my fine reader, can explore and dive into some other talks.
Anyway, a little about the discussion that I had with my fellow educators about General Conference: We focused a little more on the technological aspect of the conference. Something that Elder Cook said is that we should make technology "a servant instead of a distraction or, even worse, a master." This definitely applies to our classrooms. If technology is a distraction or a master of our mathematics we have failed as a teacher. This is true whether the technology is a distraction to us or to our students. We must use the technology to our benefit, not as a deterrent to learning.
There is a paper by Vince Geiger that discusses the use of technology in a math classroom that is very similar in the wording. Basically, Geiger describes a series of levels of using technology in the math classroom, beginning from the least useful to most: Technology as Master, Technology as Servant, Technology as Partner, Technology as an Extension of Self. We discussed this article and tried to determine where we were with various technologies. As a whole, we came to the conclusion that with most technologies, we are definitely to the point of servant, and hopefully to partner and as an extension of self. As teachers, we need to be familiar enough with the technology to be at a place where we can help our students not be servants to the technology but be able to use it to explore and further understanding.
We then furthered our discussion a little bit about how to get technologies in our classroom. We had the perspective of a professor who taught for many years in public schools before transitioning to teaching in college, and that was very interesting. He talked about the many types of grants that we as teachers can apply for, how we could get new technology gradually, how to help parents and administration be on our side, and how to show the benefits of new technology. Overall this was very interesting, and very useful. If in our future classrooms we have no technology we are actually slaves to that lack of technology, which is almost as bad as being slaves to the technology.
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