Day 3: Diversity

In the first three days I have observed a number of different lessons with Erland.  Today, I want to comment on that variety.  I really like the idea of having a teacher teach both math and gym.  At the end of today he took a class on a hike.  I loved it!  It was such a chill environment to talk with the students.  That way you are not some mysterious person that only teaches math but also in interested in the student as a person.  This group of students was also a different set of students than the normal class that Erland teaches. So I am not sure that that would actually help with the relationship with the class that you teach but I still like the idea.  The variety is also included in the fact that Erland helps teach a couple different subjects.  It was interesting to try and understand what Magnar was teaching about how the Norwegian government works and what is provided because of the taxes are collected.  I didn’t understand very much and that lesson is the reason that I needed to prepare a lesson about the education system in America.  I love to learn and that would provide me with the opportunity to learn about other subjects which would make it easier to incorporate what the students are learning in my math class with what other students are learning in their other classes like science, social studies and English courses.

Before school today I was sitting at my desk and then one of the administrators came up to me with a laptop.  I was super excited because I had heard that we were going to be given laptops but it was going to be something that I was going to be excited about once I actually got it.  They are pretty nice though.  It is one of those two-in-ones where it is a laptop but it has a removable keyboard and base so that is really cool.  My surface is a tablet first and then a laptop.  This new laptop is the opposite.  It is a laptop but then can lose the base.  That way I have a computer to work on while I am at school and don’t have to carry my laptop every day.  I just have to either use a thumb drive or use cloud storage.  Both will work. 

Success story for today.  I was introduced to the math program Geogebra last semester.  This is a free program that allows the creator to model mathematical problems.  Erland had this question that he wanted me to look at since we were looking at functions and how they would need to graph them using Geogebra.  We did that.  I showed Erland the apps that I had already created and he was impressed with my work.  He then showed me an exercise that he wasn’t sure how to use Geogebra to solve.  So I took a look at it.  The idea is that Pythagoras concluded that given any right triangle then you could use each side as the side to a square and the area of the largest square was equal to the area of the other two squares together.  The exercise was to do the same thing but with half circles.  Replace each of the squares with a half circle and it still should be true.  Erland said that we needed the midpoint of the sides and then we used the vertices of the triangle to know the diameter and radius.  Then there is a tool that will create the area of a section of a circle given a center, radius and desired angle.  I didn’t know about that tool before today.  But we used that tool to make three half circles and computed the areas of those circles.  Then we used the dynamic text to show that the area of the two smaller semi-circles was equal to the area of the largest semi-circle.  Now he is excited for me to show him other things if he has questions or problems to work out.  #WIN

Last thing for today, dinner.  Sarah was telling us that if we boiled water from the Fjord it would make the potatoes really good.  So that is what we did.  We boiled some potatoes in water from the fjord and then also had some beans in chili sauce that we added to that.  It was pretty good.  I am really grateful for the other people in my cottage and their willingness to cook.  I appreciate it.