Blog Number One: A Little About Me, A Lot About Math

            My name is Hailey Larson.  I am in my fourth year at Utah State University majoring in Mathematics/Statistics Education.  I currently live in Logan, Utah with my husband Zach.  We are both originally from the Marsh Valley area in Idaho.  My life is very busy because I am juggling working,being a full-time student, and spending time with my husband, but all the craziness keeps life interesting.  When I do find spare time, I love to scrapbook, watch movies, go for walks, play the wii, and read.  A funny fact about me is that my favorite animal is the goat.  I look forward to the day I own a house so I can raise a few goats!

           

          Math usually came easily to me in high school, but I didn’t particularly enjoy it.  My teachers didn’t really try to make math interesting to us; they simply lectured about formulas, math jargon, and other stuff that was irrelevant to my life.  It wasn’t until my senior year of high school when I took calculus with Mr. Libberton, who was a new teacher to our school, that I started to enjoy math.  It wasn’t all fun and games, however, because we were working really hard to prepare for the AP test.  Mr. Libberton tried to make math relevant to us.  He tried different strategies to help us learn: breaking us into groups to collaboratively solve a difficult problem, using problems with subjects that were actually appealing to high school students, and doing projects.  Although math was now something that interested me, I was very excited when I received my AP score of 5 in the mail because it mean that I didn’t have to take any math in college!  I came up to Utah State and completed my first semester math free.  Then, I realized I missed math, so I enrolled in a math class.  During this class, I realized that I really liked learning math and helping other people understand math.  I declared my major as Mathematics/Statistics Education and have been studying math for the past three years. 

           

           Math is such a great subject because it is very concrete.  For example, in English class the quality of somebody’s writing is very subjective, but in math 2+2 will always equal 4 (assuming of course that you are talking about the real number system).  Another terrific thing about math is how applicable it is to every person’s life.  I use math every day (and that is besides doing math for school).  I work in a deli and use fractions to weigh people’s food, use math to figure out how much food to cook, and use math to figure out how much to mark food to when it is placed on a sale.  At home I use math in my finances, in cooking, and in time management.  Students use math in things they love to do such as playing sports, timing musical instruments, and using technology.  The possibilities for math are endless!

            Every student deserves a good experience with math.  Our world is full of technologies that require the inventors to be very comfortable with math.  If students are not learning the basics of math or are having negative experiences with high school algebra, they are limiting themselves.  It is the obligation of math teachers to make math relevant and exciting to students.  After all, a teacher may very well be currently teaching the future inventor of something big! 

-“In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built, and what one has established, another undoes.  In Mathematics alone each generation adds a new story to the old structure.”

 –Hermann Hankel (1839-1873)

Math Quotes: http://www.math.okstate.edu/~wli/teach/fmq.html