Good Morning Blog

I often get the sense that much of what people have come to understand about teaching and learning Mathematics is based on a decades old mentality that students will need to be able to do mathematical calculations with computer-like speed and precision once they enter the workforce. And in order to meet this need, mathematics instruction should look like drilling procedures over and over again so that students become proficient and ready to join the workforce. Here's the problem with that approach; it sounds an awful lot like the goal is to program students to behave just like little math computers. Which shouldn't come as a big surprise. Decades ago, people were already being told about the wonderful world that access to computers would usher in...once they became more readily available, that is. In the meantime, we'll need employees to function in much the same way. That sounds a bit dehumanizing. But here we are, 2018, and computers are everywhere . I'm writing...

This year I have made it a priority to stand outside my classroom door and personally greet each of my students with a "Good morning, Hope" or a "Good afternoon, Nick" as they walk in. The greeting helps each student know that they are welcome in my classroom and that I will do my best to provide them with a safe learning environment. A few weeks after starting this, I started to think about how often I was uttering the words "Good morning" or "Good afternoon" in a given day. It was dozens. And then I started thinking about how many times I would say it over the course of a year. Thousands . Potentially up to 10,000 times in a single academic year. That's a lot. I can't imagine that it is a bad thing for students to hear their teachers personally greet them almost 200 times per year. I also can't imagine that it is a bad thing for students to hear their teachers simply say the word "good" that many times. It just s...