3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

during the school year to what I think students need to know and try to come up with
a reasonable compromise of what to teach. I am going to create a month-long (appx.)
unit to review/teach for the first time the use of the number line. I am going to rethink
the structure of how I ask kids to show the work on their problems specifically how I ask
them to justify what they do.
5. Are you planning to work with colleagues in your school who have not
attended the institute? What are your specific plans to implement this?
Yes. I plan to share a “recommendations” presentation that I will create. I hope
to outline the major changes needed and give realistic suggestions on how to go about
change. I hope to have a concrete list of things that it will be possible to change. I already
have support from some people in administration and I hope to exploit that.
6. Do you have to report to an administrator/district/school personnel
employee with a summary of what you did during the institute? If you, whom
will you report to and how?
Yes. I will report to our director of instruction. I plan to create a list of recommendations
along with justification for those items. I also plan to create a proposal in a
hierarchical order of the things that we need to change. I plan to practice everything with
the fact that it will be difficult and that many people will not like it.
7. Additional Comments (use back if necessary):
I can barely begin to say how appreciative I am that I got to attend this institute. I
have known for my whole life that the teaching and learning of math had some fundamental
flaw because everything has always been presented as an article of faith. I always
felt like saying that would have fall on deaf ear because no one seems to want to change.
There are so many people who shall think that everything is fine. That is so crazy! Now I
feel like at least have some justification for being a proponent for such change even though
most people will be very uncomfortable with it. In our most recent text book adoption
we were continually told that the teachers should be the ones making the decisions about
books we teach from because the teachers are the ones who are the “experts” in teaching
math. I was disheartened when our district chose to continue on the same road we have
been on. But then I thought why would I expect anything different? Why would teachers
ever want to choose to radically change the way they teach? Clearly most don’t. I hope
that through logical argument for why teachers (in general) are not the math experts and
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