Snow Day + The Teaching Gap = New Ideas

Today was another snow day, the fourth one this semester. The good thing about it was that I was able to get a lot of homework done before my Geology Seminar class this evening. During class today, we had mock interviews with a professor in the department. During the interview, the topic of enthusiasm came up. The professor I interviewed with is a hydrologist, not a science educator, and was excited to hear about my enthusiasm for the profession. After my answer, he asked, “How will you keep that enthusiasm through decades of teaching?” That is a GREAT question and I do not have an answer for it. Right now, my passion and enthusiasm for teaching comes from the desire to help students and in researching more effective ways to teach mathematics and science. I could see his question as a possible interview question, so I plan to ask my CT and other teachers and professors for their thoughts in an attempt to formulate my own.

This week I also read chapter three of The Teaching Gap by Stigler and Hiebert. This chapter gave a picture of a typical lesson in each country (Germany, Japan, and the U.S.). Two main differences I noticed were (1) the role of the teacher, and (2) the level of mathematics taught. In Germany, the teacher is a demonstrator and keeper of the knowledge. Class time is spent reviewing work from previous day and demonstrating proofs of important, higher level theorems. In Japan, the teacher is a guide and helps the students discover the knowledge in a structured environment. To do this they spend a lot of time on a few difficult problems and multiple methods for solving them are discussed. In the U.S., the teacher is a dictionary and reference book who plows through many easy problems and continuously moves through material at a superficial level. I think if we raise the bar and spend more time on a few difficult problems and guide our students through the thinking processes involved (a mix between Germany’s and Japan’s methods) our students will be better equipped to tackle the easy problems found on standardized tests. Not that I believe standardized tests is the way to asses student knowledge and comprehension, but it is currently the way the state and federal government analyze our students performance. This week I am beginning to plan lessons for the geometry lesson I will be teaching starting in two weeks and I plan to find a way to guide my students to higher level thinking strategies and engage in the content at a deeper level.