Hala Ibrahim Al -Jowder
We went out of the class to the school arenas, measure the shadows and corners … Mathematics are walking with us, we talk to us and their conversation. Perhaps one of the most beautiful experiences was our exit from the class to the school garden, where the activity papers were brushed on the grass and assigned each group of realistic task: measuring the vicinity of the agricultural basin? The ratio between the length of the shade and the tree? The types of flowers are classified according to color and length, then representing data in tables, graphs, and other activity about the skills of multiplication, division and lineage if each plant needs 25 cm between the other how many plants that can be cultivated in a row of 2 meters … then I realized that mathematics are not taught … but discovered under the sun and dialogue with life.
But the biggest challenge was not only in breaking the routine, but also to persuade the students that they have a voice … I hesitated at the beginning, but I designed activities to awaken the higher thinking skills, criticism of the solution, the opposite of the given, innovation of issues, linking the concept to life, made the questions grow from the depths, not from the pages of repetition.
I designed a pillars pronounced life: the logical trial corner, where solutions are discussed and defended, and the corner of “mathematics in life” in which we analyze the corners, we notice the forms, and we discover that mathematics is a lens in which we see the world asking them to ask open questions and convert each issue into an opportunity for creativity, and duties are no longer copies, but a mirror of the level of each student.
When I transformed the lesson and proportion to the project of buying and selling, the students started to reckon the profit, describe the paintings, and analyze the equations as the mystery of life solved, and my joy was great when I whispered to a student: “Today I understood as I did not understand before!”
I encountered the questions of colleagues and frequency students, but I believed that every idea needs time, and that the passion alone is not enough … but rather it should be translated into an act.
Today, I do not start my share with “open the book”, but rather “Imagine if …” or “if you were an engineer, what would you do?” The class has become a living scene and mathematics is its heroine.
Fatima concluded her speech with words that are a curriculum for teachers, “When education exceeds the limits of the walls and connects to the reality of life, it becomes more sincere and deeper, and when the student turns from his recipients into a partner in thinking, the class is beating in life and the class becomes a workshop of creativity and meaning.”
As for me, I was listening and I did not boycott her … in her voice a maturity story and in her experience a lesson … and when she finished I was proud … not only in it but in the spirit of the teacher that inhabits those that believe that education is not a job but rather an effect, and that mathematics are not numbers but a life of livelihood and discovery.
The meeting ended, and I have deep gratitude that in the field is teachers who make the difference, they return to the knowledge of its pulse, for the student to seek its voice, and to classify a life.
