I hate math!

If I had a child that constantly said, "I hate math, Im not good at it, and I never will be." I think what this child has went through in life is a lot of negativity towards math obviously. They have never been taught to enjoy it. It has alway been forced upon them to do it, but never in a fun manner. It is hard to make something fun when someone is completely shut down to the idea of it, but this child needs to learn to open his/her mind to math. They probably make bad grade in all of their math courses and struggle in the classroom. I am sure they never had a lot of motivation towards math and getting good grades in it. They probably have constantly been in trouble because of their math class and it just has never been rewarding to them. They think they can't do it therefore they can't. If this child would just open up and try in math, they could learn it. Everyone gets a bad teacher or two. Maybe if they weren't shut down to the whole idea a good teacher would come along and they would actually learn a lot.

Flashlight Experiment

In my experience, I used a small flashlight much like the one used in class. I went outside where it was almost completely dark, it's hard to find complete darkness where I live, and I observed my flashlight outside. What I saw was much of what I expected but then again it wasn't. There wasn't neccessarily a "beam". There was a concentrated light though. It isn't what I would call a beam. More of a lighted path that only shown on the ground. However, I was facing the flashlight towards the ground. If I held it straight towards the darkness, it appeared that it was brealy showing on the ground, just a little in the almost foggy air. It was 10:30 at night and fairly foggy, but not much at all. I expected there to be a beam in the fog, but it really wasn't as foggy as I would have wanted it to be for my assumption to be accurate. I tried the same thing in my hallways at my house, which happens to be stairs so it was hard to get accuracy there, but what I saw was the hallways was fairly lighted even down most of the stairs, and it actually did "bounce" off of the wall across from the flashlight source. It was a short hallways, which made it hard to be so accurate. I would really like to try this in a larger area, maybe like the hallway outside of our classroom. I didn't have a large enough room to really be accurate on the size thing.

The Virtues of Not Knowing

In today's classroom, knowing the right answer to a question is all that teachers look for. If the student passes, that means the teacher is doing their job. This isn't necessarily correct. The teachers teach by a certain set of standards and preach the answers to these students. How many times do you hear a student as why an answer is correct? Or does the teacher ever say why? Growing up, I would never speak up in a classroom and ask why something was the way it was.. It just is. Learning comes from knowing why things happen. I can give you the right answer to a question all day long, but do I really know why that is the answer? Can I really explain it to someone? That answer is no. As the text says, standardized tests doesn't really measure intelligence. Every teacher like the reading, should encourage their students to gain knowledge of the answer. This is what truly teaches them lessons, not that 1 plus 1 is two. But why? "It would make a significant difference to the cause of intelligent thought in general, and to the number of right answers that are ultimately known, if teachers were encouraged to focus on the virtues involved in not knowing, so that those virtues would get as much attention in classrooms from day to day as the virtue of knowing the right answer." Sometimes, not knowing the correct answer ultimately means more.