Blog 7

I am not yet teaching, but I plan on becoming a high school math teacher.  Mathematica is a readily available mathematical software.  I would love to be able to use this program in my classroom.  One problem with traditional math classes is that teachers do not use enough technology.  In high school, I had a wonderful math teacher, but other than using our calculators, we were unaware of any other educational math software for upper level math.  In college, I was overwhelmed with the amount of computer based homework I received in my math classes.  The math department had a license for Mathematica. Every semester, I had at least six computer assignments in one of my math classes and I took four classes that were completely Mathematica.  In those four classes, I did not pick up a pencil or piece of paper. 

An instructional goal that I will meet when I use Mathematica in my classroom is that my students will be able see the graphs that they are integrating.  One of the hardest topics that I faced in Calculus was visualizing the graphs and/or drawing them out.  With Mathematica, my students will be able to see the graphs and interact with them.  Mathematica allows you to grab onto the graphs and move them around until you see exactly how the graph looks like.  This is something that graphing calculators will probably never be able to accomplish. 

Since I am not able to use this software with students, I can write about the challenges I faced when my professors first implemented Mathematica to my class.  The biggest problem was that no one explained exactly what Mathematica was and how useful it could be.  When my teacher first showed us our Mathematica assignment, we were given a piece of paper that showed us Mathematica commands.  My classmates and I were completely confused.  We had no idea why we were expected to complete an assignment on a computer that we could do in a few hours on paper.  Our first few assignments took us hours to solve just a couple of questions.  Our little sheet of Mathematica commands did not offer any type of advice when we would have three pages of error notices.  My professor had taken the sink or swim approach when teaching us Mathematica.  I spent many hours playing around with this software before I became comfortable with using it.  After I became familiar with Mathematica, I checked most of my homework on it.  When I start teaching, I plan on using Mathematica, but I will actually teach my students how to use it and why we are using it.  I will spend a few days just going over the basics of Mathematica in a computer lab where they will be able to follow along with me.  I believe that if my professor had taken our class to a computer lab and worked with us, more students would have become proficient in the software instead of dropping the class.