A Hack, Doing What I Love Best

This post is interwoven with irony. My father was student teaching short of being a high school math teacher, my brother is an engineer. I, on the other hand, got very little in the way of math genetics. My BS is in music ed, but my passion (and my master's degree) is in educational technology, hence my blog and current teaching job.

And now the irony... while I teach a variety of computer applications-I believe in teaching students how to use the computer as tool, a research tool, a planning tool, an escape (games) tool, a life tool, I will be spending my second semester teaching mostly computer science & engineering. Hence the irony. Math and I do not get a long. I always choose the long way to a solution, high level problems make no sense to me, and I was in calculus for three days before I dropped it my senior year and haven't looked back sense.   I think what makes this so fun is the fact that through being crappy at math I am able to take a more rudimentary approach to problems and, as a result, come with various ways to solve them and to lead kids through them. Which leads me to second semester.

I will be teaching coding, engineering, and CAD to a lot of my kids. While they will be working on a much simpler level than high school, many are advanced enough in their mathematical thinking to work on a middle school/junior high level. This will keep me on my toes, but it will also teach me a lot. I used to think that being lousy at math was a curse; I will never get a computer science endorsement, for example. But it also presents me with a challenge to stay ahead of the learning curve my students present, and to creatively challenge them in my computer classes.

With that I present my current project, CAD Christmas ornament design by my 6th graders. They did a bit of research on a European country, came up with something that symbolizes the holiday season for their country, and then CAD designed an ornament on TInkerCad that we are printing on our MakerBot Mini printer.

I love my job.