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Reflection on Examples

I put my hands up and admit that over the assignment and Christmas break period I started lagging behind on posting in my ePortfolio. However, we were encouraged to read and reflect on our fellow students posts. I feel like this really gave me the push of encouragement I needed to get back into the swing of posting, commenting and reflecting. After reading my peers’ posts I noticed that each post was written in a way which provided a great amount of depth on the topic of the post. In many cases the posts were written in such a detailed way that even as a reader you could get a vast amount of knowledge and information out of it. On the more visual aspect, I noticed that a variety of media such as images, videos and hyperlinks had been used which I feel made the posts even more intriguing and interesting as it provided a visual aspect. I feel that the hyperlinks were particularly helpful as they gave me the opportunity to read up further on the issues raised within the posts.

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After reading everyone’s posts it as given me a lot of information on how I can improve my own posts and what I can add in to increase the interest of my posts. I also noticed that a lot of the posts I read were on topics which the writer found interesting and relevant and were not necessarily TDT posts. This has inspired me to put forward my own opinions on topical issues in my own blogposts.

Maths and Me

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I recently attended my first couple of maths inputs and I would be completely lying if I said that the thought of them previously did not make me feel nervous, anxious and quite frankly down right scared. My relationship with maths for as long as I can remember has never been great. I just scraped by in maths and done what I had to do. Without a doubt I was one of many that suffered with the notorious – maths anxiety.

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I can trace my fear of maths all the way back to primary school and from then it has just continued to grow stronger, taking my confidence in maths and numeracy with it. During my primary school days I can specifically remember never putting my hand up to answer a question, never getting involved in maths tasks and whenever I heard the words “we are playing around the world” I could instantly feel the lump in my throat. My dislike of maths continued well into high school where I remained completely uninvolved and just done the bare minimum that was required. As a result my attitude towards maths was always either “I don’t like it!” or “I cant do it!”. However, looking back on this I now know that that wasn’t the case it wasn’t that I couldn’t do it, it was that I didn’t want to try because I didn’t believe I was capable.

Despite this, throughout the years of trying to overcome my case of maths anxiety, I cannot say I am completely over it. However, I feel that the introductory maths input has really helped me to change my attitude as well as slightly boosted my confidence in teaching maths. I think this is because it presented maths in a way in which I had never previously thought about. A prime example of this is a quote by Ollerton (2003) mentions that “Mathematics is beautiful, intriguing, elegant, logical, amazing and mind-blowing; a language and a set of systems and structures used to make sense of and describe the physical and natural world”. Originally I was completely shocked by this statement as I would never have personally described mathematics as intriguing, never mind beautiful or elegant. However, after the input with Tara and after witnessing her enthusiasm for her subject I can quite happily say that my opinion of maths is slowly changing for the better and I can only hope that it will continue to do so until I feel a sense of complete confidence in my own ability and my teaching of mathematics!

Reflection on the process of feedback

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The thought of giving feedback at first really intimidated me. I believe I am the type of person who doesn’t like to say anything that could possibly offend someone and therefore, was very nervous of what to say at first. Also I feel that as soon as I heard the word feedback my head went straight to the idea of ‘judgement’ which frankly make me a little anxious. However, now looking back on this experience I see it in a much more positive and beneficial way. I am also now aware of the fact that it is not judgement at all, but picking out the areas in which you could improve in order to grow and progress further.

I feel that the feedback I have received has been very beneficial to me as well as increasing my confidence in my work, it has also reassured me that I am on the right track, which was something I was a little worried about. I feel that the constructive criticism I received in some of the comments have been very helpful as they have given me ideas of where I can take my blog next, what I can include and have also made me question many things I had never even thought about previously.

I believe that by being given the opportunity of commenting on others’ work and providing constructive feedback where appropriate has been a very positive experience for me. Even though I still find it difficult to pick out areas of improvement in someone’s work and question points that are made, I feel like if I continue to provide feedback I will continue to get more confident with it.

Overall, I feel that this experience was very beneficial and feel that it has given me a good insight into the intentions behind feedback, such as the benefits you can get out of it. I also feel that the lessons I have learned throughout the processes of giving and receiving feedback are ones that I can take with me throughout my years at university and also when I progress into the role of a teacher.

How did my gender affect me as a child?

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To answer this question simply, I don’t believe that my gender did have too much of an affect on me as a child. I can never remember being treated any differently because I was a girl and to be honest I cannot remember ever thinking to myself “I cant do this because I’m a girl!” I believe this was mainly down to the facts that both my family, friends and school were quite accepting and were not too bothered about people sticking to their gender stereotypes. I was always the type to be having races and playing football in the playground and I cannot ever remember receiving any prejudice or judgement for this. However, I do feel that my school were more accepting of behaviour from girls compared to boys and as awful as it sounds girls in my classes always got away with more than the boys did. Therefore, personally my gender did not affect me in such a negative way as a child but saying that, I did witness many others be treated differently purely as a result of their gender.