Math 512, Blog Post #1

My name is Mike Hergenhan, and of the three Michaels in the class, I suppose I'll specify myself as the blonde one. I finished undergrad in 2007 with a degree in chemistry. Halfway through my senior year, I realized I'd made an egregious error in switching away from math in the first place. Two years and five undergrad math courses later, here I am pursuing my grad degree in math education.

I believe that I'm the only person in the course without any classroom teaching experience, either past or present. While I do currently work in the basic skills lab at Montclair, that's really more of a tutoring gig than teaching. I do, however, have some knowledge of the technology implemented in math classrooms -- I worked for five years as an IT technician in the Linden school district. Many of the programs and websites brought up in the first class, such as Geometer Sketchpad and Study Island, are staples of Linden's curriculum.

I will admit that my opinion towards technology in the math classroom is that of reservation. My high school calculus teacher, who is my inspiration for wanting to teach, taught his lesson plan straight out of handwritten notebooks. The most technology we ever used in the class was a graphing calculator. He was universally praised by my classmates as being a wonderful teacher and presenting the material more clearly than anyone we'd had previously or we've had since. If a standard lecture methodology (when planned properly) can accomplish its task so easily, I see no need to add extraneous technologies to the mix.

And, admittedly, my opinion of technologies as "extraneous" comes from my experiences with them. From what I saw in my home district, a technology-based curriculum was rarely implemented because of the opinion that it would a better job than the lecture-based alternative. Mostly, adding technology was done for the sake of having it.

I'm hoping that this course breaks me of my aspersions towards technology in the math classroom. Seeing technology used effectively in a math curriculum could go a long way towards helping me determine how much I would use advanced technologies in an actual lesson plan.

Until then, though, I intend to continue to swear by the notebook and the occasional TI-83+.

Return from hiatus

Has it really been a month? No wonder my previous attempts at keeping an online journal (of sorts) have gone so poorly -- I truly had no idea it had been that long since my last update. For those of you who are interested, I'll bring you up to speed fairly quickly.

• The cottage thing didn't work out. Most of that could have to do with the fact that I never received a call back from the landlord (or any other landlords I contacted through my rental service). I suppose that's fine; I didn't want to inquire about extra cottage insurance anyway.
• In my search through the areas surrounding Montclair, I managed to come across a diamond in the rough. Well, if you can call this area rough at all. I'm now living in Cedar Grove, NJ, three miles west of campus, in a one-bedroom apartment with so much space that I don't know what to do with it all.
• Work and classes have both started, and I'm thus on a very grown-up schedule of going to bed by 11:30 PM and waking up before 7 AM. I'm loving all of it so far (except parking at Montclair, which can get to be a bit of a zoo during peak hours), even though it's meant I've had limited time and energy to finish unpacking all of my things.

Sadly, that short list does pretty much bring you completely up to speed on my life. The move and start of classes have pretty well taken over the past month. As things slow down as I get comfortable with my schedule, I hope to begin posting more of those tangents that I spoke of, topics I'd like to share with everyone. Actually, that segues nicely into an announcement about some additional blog content from here on out.

One of the requirements of my first graduate course, Technology in the Middle Grades Mathematics Curriculum, is to create or maintain a blog. The blog posts I'll be making with the label "tech curriculum" will be examples of this -- comments regarding certain questions in the field of technology in math education. While they do serve mostly as a discussion for other students in the course, I would quite truly be interested in hearing what the rest of you have to say on the subject, either in response to my outlook on the topic or to any of the comments left on the posts. (All I ask is that we avoid flame wars should people disagree heavily on a subject. We're all friends here.)

And if nothing else, needing to maintain the blog for the purposes of the class will help me maintain the blog for purposes of entertaining the rest of you.