Category Archives: 3.4 Prof. Reflection & Commitment

Oh No! Not Maths!

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Throughout my whole school career, I never had a strong relationship with mathematics. I went through school, moving up and down different maths sets and being taught by a number of different teachers who all caused me to have different attitudes towards the subject. Over the years, my dislike towards the subject steadily increased until it became my least favourite subject! As a result, I would be lying to say I wasn’t a little anxious about the introductory mathematics inputs that we had last week. However, I feel they helped change my attitude towards maths as well as building up my confidence in teaching it later on.

My experience with maths was what triggered my dislike towards the subject. One of the main influencing factors was my teacher, who took me for my standard grades and highers. Unfortuently, I did not find him particularly inspiring. In fact, he told me on a regular basis that I had little chance of succeeding in the subject. This combined with the fact I didn’t particularly enjoy maths meant that I found it difficult to motivate myself and I adopted the attitude of ” I can’t do it” which wasn’t necessarily true! It also didn’t help that my brother was the “maths genius” of the family. Compared to him, I felt inferior and didn’t see the point in even trying to compete with him as it was obvious who would get the better grades!

However, I plan to take my experience and use it to improve my own teaching! Firstly, I now understand how important it is to motivate your children and excite them about maths, even if you don’t feel that way about the subject. I remember in my maths lesson that I was always too nervous to put my hand up or ask for help as I was scared I would feel embarrassed about asking a “stupid question”. So I know how important it is as a teacher, to be friendly and approachable so that the children will not be scared to ask me for help. But most importantly, I know that I need to keep my attitude towards maths positive in order to teach it to my best capability and provide lessons that stimulate the children, hopefully encouraging them to enjoy maths as well.

 

Reflecting on Reflection

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Reflection is a process in which you look back at a certain event or piece of work and examine it in a critical way. By reflecting on such things you are able process your thoughts and feelings about the incident or piece of work and use these thoughts to learn how to do better in the future.

Reflecting on a past experience can be very beneficial as it allows you to look back at the event and identify the errors that occurred. You can reflect on how they affected you, how it changed you as a person and how it could have affected other people. But it also allows you to learn from the previous experience and use that knowledge in the future to avoid making the same mistakes. Reflection can also be used to evaluate a piece of writing. You are able to identify the weaknesses in your work and what you need to improve on. Using this knowledge you are able to improve your writing skills and avoid making the same mistakes in a future piece.

Reflection does not just need to be used to point out the negatives. It can also be used to highlight the positives in your work or event. It enables you to see your strengths and what parts of your work you did well. Just like the negatives, you can remember what you did well and use it again in the future.

Reflecting on feedback is also an important part of learning and has many benefits. It allows you to identify what you need to work on and how you can improve your work.  Having an outside opinion on your work enables you to see a different perspective that you may not have thought of before and gives you ideas of how you could integrate this new information into your future work. It is important to reflect on the positive feedback that you receive as well as it highlights what other people think you do successfully and give you a confidence boost.

In my opinion, reflecting is crucial to your learning. Not only does it allow you to see what you have done well in but what you can improve on and therefore you are constantly improving you skills.