10/22/08

I just bought a new book titled The Geography of Thought by Richard E. Nisbett. It was recommended to me by my professor at Chaminade. He said that if I wanted to do my dissertation on comparing the U.S. curriculum with the Japan curriculum, then I'd need to read this book. However, I have chapters after chapters to read for school, therefore I will need to make an extreme effort in making time to read this.

I substituted again today. It was for another fourth grade class. The teacher made it so easy for me to substitute. Most of it was basically supervising the students. It wasn't as stressful as my first substituting job. In fact, I'd love to substitute for her anytime. Her students worked diligently and were honest in what the procedures were for the classroom. Except for one student. He needed my attention 24/7. Crazy kid.

One of the tasks was to proctor a math test. As I was walking around I noticed that many students didn't have labels for their answers. So I told them that they should make sure that they have labels for their answers. It's amazing because some students didn't know what a label was. So I had to give them an example. 12, what? 12 monkeys? 12 bananas? 12 dollars? What is it? I think some of the students caught on, but some were still clueless as to what they were suppose to do.

Today in my EDCS 653D class a student did a project on the Mobius Strip, an object with one surface and one edge. I was totally amazed at the presentation. Do you know what you'd get if you cut the Mobius Strip in half down the middle the long way? You should try it out. You'd be amazed, too. Another presentation was about the Fibonacci sequence represented through geometry. I knew of the Fibonacci sequence, but I didn't know that it could be represented as the Golden Rectangle. Pretty interesting things.