Sunday, September 27, 2015

All I've got is my journal, my blog, and Horrorthon.

This blog hasn't gotten any love for some time, and I've been doing some soul-searching to revive this page to explore its potential.

With October just around the corner, Horrorthon looms its pumpkin-head once again and beckons I write reviews. I write them voluntarily, whether out of a childhood obsession with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert's job or out of my feeling of obligatory show of love for my informal fiancee/live-in boyfriend. I write them, publish them, and sometimes I like my work. If I ever don't like my work it's only due to my lack of writing a combined subjective-objective piece for others to understand and perhaps garner a few laughs. I put more pressure on myself than you might think: my family's well-read, my sister has written stories for almost two decades, dear friends have either been published or had to write numerous research papers themselves before college graduation.

Four weeks ago, I began the next chapter in my educational journey as I submitted my first graduate school online discussion post and journal entry. Now I've got to create a research project and formulate a problem statement, and in processing this all I thought, what if my writing sucks? I'm a math teacher, and all I've got is my personal journal, my public blog, and Horrorthon.

Research topic: Number sense
Focus: how foundational number sense can establish critical thinking skills for Algebra
Subjects: middle school suburban California kids
Subgroups: grade, sex, 2014 SBAC scores

I want to measure the number sense strategies middle school students use in various types of problems and compare their results to previously conducted research; more ambitiously, I want to measure how it shapes their thinking towards more abstract concepts in Algebra that involves unknown quantities and generalization of numerical sequences as bivariate equations (y = mx + b). Most of me is nervous but all of me knows that I've just got to quit overthinking and just start doing (but not overdoing) it.

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