My name is Andrew Elmer and I have done a little bit of blogging in the past. In the future I will be teaching math or stats. I haven't had too many opportunities to teach many subjects lower than math 1010 and so I am excited for when those opportunities do come.
I love to play sports! Volleyball, ultimate frisbee and racquetball are among my favorites but I enjoy other sports also. I love camping and hiking and generally being in nature. I also consider myself a reader. It is kind of complicated though. There are times when I can really get into a book and read it a lot. But there have also been times where I haven't touched a book for months. I also enjoy making things with boondoggle. Now these aren't the lame ones that you make when you start to do boondoggle. These are legit.
My interesting fact to share is that I speak Russian. I served a 2 year mission for my church in and around Yekaterinburg, Russia. That was part in Siberia and part in the area called the Ural Mountains. Then I also spent 3 1/2 months teaching English in St Petersburg. While I was there I spent 3 1/2 days in Moscow. I digress.
There are many things that mathematics mean to me. But foremost it provides opportunities to do some really good thinking. I, personally, love brain puzzles and that is what I get when I think about mathematics. Math also provides explanations for how a lot of things work in nature. Biology and physics help understand those explanations but without the math these other disciplines have no basis.
I decided that I wanted to become a teacher because I worked up at a scout camp as a merit badge teacher. I started out teaching in nature where it was really easy because there weren't many scouts to teach. But then I realized that I liked teaching and that I was pretty good. So then I taught a more popular merit badge. I was still teaching a nature merit badge but it didn't matter. Scouts really enjoyed what I was teaching them and so even though I was talking about soil, the water cycle and endangered species the scouts still loved it. Most recently I have taught scouts about shooting bows and firearms such as .22 rifles and 12 gauge shotguns. From those experiences and my experiences tutoring I have really enjoyed teaching and discovered that I am a pretty good teacher.
When I was thinking about how this could work, how I could turn teaching into a career, I had to choose a discipline to teach in. My first thought: English. But then I thought about that more. I don't really have an opinion on that many things and also I don't really want to read a bunch of students' essays. I am not going to teach English. Next, I thought about math. Hey, I am pretty good at math and I enjoy doing math problems. I could be a pretty good math teacher. Then I thought about teaching some sort of science. Meh, I like science but not that much. I thought most about teaching physics but as I thought about it more it is the math behind the physics that I really like. Physics just has more math than biology or astronomy. Then the last discipline I thought about was history. I ended up deciding that I wanted to be a math teacher.
Literacy. Literacy to me means a number of things. It means being able to read a book and comprehend what was just read. Literacy also includes being able to follow instructions, whatever those instructions may be. Literacy definitely relates to mathematics. Someone that is math literate is someone that can understand directions that are given. For example: a literate student would know what to do if asked to "simply", "evaluate", or "integrate" the function.
I love to play sports! Volleyball, ultimate frisbee and racquetball are among my favorites but I enjoy other sports also. I love camping and hiking and generally being in nature. I also consider myself a reader. It is kind of complicated though. There are times when I can really get into a book and read it a lot. But there have also been times where I haven't touched a book for months. I also enjoy making things with boondoggle. Now these aren't the lame ones that you make when you start to do boondoggle. These are legit.
My interesting fact to share is that I speak Russian. I served a 2 year mission for my church in and around Yekaterinburg, Russia. That was part in Siberia and part in the area called the Ural Mountains. Then I also spent 3 1/2 months teaching English in St Petersburg. While I was there I spent 3 1/2 days in Moscow. I digress.
There are many things that mathematics mean to me. But foremost it provides opportunities to do some really good thinking. I, personally, love brain puzzles and that is what I get when I think about mathematics. Math also provides explanations for how a lot of things work in nature. Biology and physics help understand those explanations but without the math these other disciplines have no basis.
I decided that I wanted to become a teacher because I worked up at a scout camp as a merit badge teacher. I started out teaching in nature where it was really easy because there weren't many scouts to teach. But then I realized that I liked teaching and that I was pretty good. So then I taught a more popular merit badge. I was still teaching a nature merit badge but it didn't matter. Scouts really enjoyed what I was teaching them and so even though I was talking about soil, the water cycle and endangered species the scouts still loved it. Most recently I have taught scouts about shooting bows and firearms such as .22 rifles and 12 gauge shotguns. From those experiences and my experiences tutoring I have really enjoyed teaching and discovered that I am a pretty good teacher.
When I was thinking about how this could work, how I could turn teaching into a career, I had to choose a discipline to teach in. My first thought: English. But then I thought about that more. I don't really have an opinion on that many things and also I don't really want to read a bunch of students' essays. I am not going to teach English. Next, I thought about math. Hey, I am pretty good at math and I enjoy doing math problems. I could be a pretty good math teacher. Then I thought about teaching some sort of science. Meh, I like science but not that much. I thought most about teaching physics but as I thought about it more it is the math behind the physics that I really like. Physics just has more math than biology or astronomy. Then the last discipline I thought about was history. I ended up deciding that I wanted to be a math teacher.
Literacy. Literacy to me means a number of things. It means being able to read a book and comprehend what was just read. Literacy also includes being able to follow instructions, whatever those instructions may be. Literacy definitely relates to mathematics. Someone that is math literate is someone that can understand directions that are given. For example: a literate student would know what to do if asked to "simply", "evaluate", or "integrate" the function.
