Exit Slip (Oct 12) - Role Models and Alternatives in Education

After today's class I was really intrigued by Vanessa Vakharia's story. I definitely think she is a role model for students. Although her marketing focuses on girls and learning math in an engaging and "girly" way, her story of failing math and never understanding math in school is a relatable experience that many students can remember enduring at some point in their education, whether its mathematics or any other subject for that matter. By exposing her vulnerability and personal struggles, I feel students could establish more of a connection and feel that as a teacher she understood their struggles. It is also an inspiring example of someone who struggled but was able to rise above those struggles and reach a high achievement in mathematics. Seeing this example can give students hope and provide a role model which they can aspire towards. Overall Vanessa seemed to be a very relatable teacher, one who tried to be at the same level as her students and understand their struggles as well as interests in order to reach them in a subject that they might not enjoy or feel comfortable in. The fact that she tried to relate pop culture and "girly" themes to mathematics in order to reach her female clientele is an example of how she made content relatable to her students using alternative methods. I really appreciated that she used different avenues opposed to the traditional methods in order to help engage students, however I disagreed with it in some ways as well. I felt decorating calculators and "glamming" them up was a useless task. I hate being so harsh about it, but I just felt that the decoration would be nothing but a distraction and a pointless task that added no true value to mathematics, unless perhaps you were developing some sort of decorative pattern that could be mathematically inclined. I just felt that the decoration itself had nothing to do with math and did not strengthen math learning in any concrete way. I love math and I love art and being girly, however maybe part of my bias shows through in my perspective. I tend to compartmentalise those things probably because I have little exposure to mixing my mathematics with other subjects, so the idea of "glamming" a calculator seems pointless to me, however I do see the value of engagement in an activity such as this for students who don't necessarily enjoy math. I see value in this activity independently from mathematics. I think it is a great motivation tool that helps build excitement and pride in doing mathematics, it can also help students feel welcome in a very logistic realm of mathematics. I do think it might be fun to do a project like this at the beginning of a school year in order to get students engaged and excited about mathematics. Maybe I need to morph my own biases to better accommodate my students one day. I hope I can reach a balance in my own teaching one day.

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