Courses

First of all, I love all mathematics related courses because I enjoy the work of using pencil and paper to solve different problems. Later on, I am getting interested in technology that makes mathematics easier for us. Also, I got a chance to apply the use of technology at my work by putting information together as a cohesive and collective view of what I know. In this page, I will list the courses that I took this semester related to my major and they are my favorite as well.

MEDU 3011 – Methods of Teaching Middle School Mathematics

From this course tile, you can learn that we focused on techniques that we can apply in teaching middle grades. I learned many pedagogical ways of instructions we can use in the classrooms. We did a lot of group work and discussions along with feedbacks for your presentations throughout the semester. In addition to that, we worked with hands-on activities like Geoboard and some other tools that I cannot recall the names. It was a great class that we learned a lot of useful things. In this class, we were assigned to different middle schools for field work that allows us to see how real classrooms look that. We will be able to learn from the role model teachers by observing their classes and asked them for advice. As a whole, this will be an interesting class for all who want to be in Mathematics Education major.

MEDU 2010 – Technology in Mathematics Teaching

This is a class that requires a lot of work and effort to learn, but it is going to be a good experience when people want to encounter the journey of learning. As we all know that, a class that requires little time of studying will be useless. When we don’t spend time on certain things, we are not going to learn anything because every piece of knowledge comes in a hard way. If we use time as an investment in learning, we are going to learn a lot by trying and exploring. In this class, we learned several useful mathematics software: Maple, Desmos, Geogebra, Latex, and so on. In learning of each, we did presentations on how we use of the software as part of our lessons. Besides that, we get feedback from each other based on the rubric that Prof. Poirier provided. With feedback, we can make some revises for our projects. In short, our class is like a team that we work together by providing academic suggestions and giving supports to each other. I love this class very much as it is a small class that we all know each other very well.

MAT 4050 – Advanced Geometry

This is an advanced geometry class that is challenging to me. We did a lot of proofs and learned many theorems that existed long time ago. During the class time, you will have no free time of checking your phones because Prof. Tradler will keep you busy by just copying the notes. He writes so fast that if you concentrate on your phone for a few minutes, you will get lost and end by taking pictures of the notes. You will find it hard to follow if you don’t listen and take notes. However, you can always stop him by asking questions. He loves answering questions that are interesting to him and related to the course. You will be enjoy the class a lot by listening carefully when Prof. Tradler explains the work he wrote on the board.

MAT 2630 – Numerical Method

This is a challenging class that I suffered a lot. At the beginning, it has a lot of connections to computer programing. I could not understand the material until the topic moved to the concentration of mathematics related sections. Most of the time, we used Mathlab for your computer assignments. Even though we did not do them at some point, we had to work on a project that requires the work of Mathlab. Therefore, we had to read some documents about Mathlab for the topic that we chose for the presentation. I found that Mathlab is a very useful tool that we can save a lot of time in computations. Before I learned how to use Mathlab for my project, I worked a lot on the textbook in order to understand the content first. Then, I read the PDF of all possible commands that we can use in Mathlab. Finally, I had my presentation done with the M-script file. I was very excited about it because my time was well used.

EDU 2610 – Child Adolescents Development

In this class, we learned facts that we neglected and took for granted. We learned how children developed into a well-developed adults under certain environments. Students will grow at different pace with parental support and academic guidance from their teachers. There are many issues associated with students when they grow up, and as future educators or parents, we need to be aware of what is normal and abnormal for them to experience at different ages. The test format in this class changes from essay to multiple-choice questions, so it is important to change the habit of studying when we prepare for the exams. Also, we have presentations. I suggest that we should take advantage of the presentations as a study guide for the mid-term or final exams because our topics for presentations are mostly coming from the textbook.