Introductory Blog Post

Hi everyone in 8P29! This is my introductory blog post so I figured I would share a little bit about myself and then start discussing the two blogs I read from http://www.learningscientists.org/archive/ and why I chose them! To start with some background, I am 22 years old and am from Aurora, Ontario which is about an hour north of Toronto. I am an only child, so I grew up there with just my parents as immediate family. I was in French Immersion for elementary and high school which led me to choose French as my teachable here at Brock. I am in the concurrent education program in the junior/intermediate stream, so this is my 5^th year at Brock. I live off campus in a house with 5 of my friends and they are all in the teacher education program as well. In addition to teaching, I am most passionate about sports especially tennis, basketball, football, and soccer. I taught at a tennis camp in Aurora for 6 summers and was on Brock’s tennis team for some time during my undergrad. My favourite professional tennis player is Fabio Fognini. I coached basketball for 2 years while I was in high school and I love catching Raptors games on tv. I am a very very very passionate supporter of the LA Rams (NFL) and AS Roma (soccer, Serie A) so my Sunday’s are usually full of me watching their matches. I also referee soccer during the summer which keeps me very involved in the sport. This is my first experience with writing or even reading blogs, so I hope to learn much more about it all as this course goes on!

Marcello Leone. Passion Cloud. WordArt. Accessed September 10, 2019. https://wordart.com/ 

The first blog I chose to read for this week was titled “Manipulatives – Why They Can Hinder Learning and What You Can Do About It” by Sara Fulmer. It can be found at the following link: https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2017/4/4-1 . This blog post really intrigued me because teachers often turn to manipulatives as a learning tool to help students in math and I also often used manipulatives when I was tutoring students in math at the Brock Learning Lab. In many of my experiences though, I found that the manipulatives did not serve their intended purpose and only helped distract students. These experiences are what influenced me to read this blog and I found the content very interesting. Some of the main points from the post were that manipulatives that are too visually interesting can increase off-task behaviour and that constantly using manipulatives in class can make students too reliant on them. I still believe manipulatives can be useful, but I will try to use them sparingly and give real thought to the type of manipulative I use.

The second blog post I read is “Rethinking Teacher Training – How Mathematics and Education Departments Can Help” by Bryan Penfound at https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2016/4/19-1 . This blog post caught my eye because we, of course, are in a teacher education program! Bryan suggests that teacher candidates take a course that covers the grade specific curriculum content they will be teaching and another course on the pedagogy of math such as how to sequence mathematical ideas etc. While Bryan’s suggestions seem a little different to how we are learning Math at Brock, I am sure they both have strengths and that they would both produce very strong teacher candidates!

Thanks for reading!