Math Aunty

It was the first day of my first year of teaching math to teenage students. I had no experience teaching High School and no education degree behind me. The class blocks were shortened and stacked to allow students to get eyes on all their teachers on the first day of school. My first class had more students than seats and they were all precocious juniors, or should I say “walking encyclopedias”. Before 8:30AM, I heard “Journaling?! In a math class?!” from the early birds who started reading over the syllabus on their desks at least 3 times already.

That energy carried through to department meetings, back to school parent meetings, faculty meetings, and more… I’ve responded to the incredulous “Journaling?! In a math class?!” more times than they send out reminder emails for virtual safety trainings in the beginning of the year! I will still never forget justifying it in front of that group of juniors. They thought I was ridiculous, but they were willing to do my experiment of journaling for the first two months of class. If they liked it, they could continue for extra credit… if not, they were released from this biweekly burden.

1. A math journal with prompts laid out by the teacher can help students develop a mathematical identity. Or rather, can help students realize that they have a mathematical identity! Having students reflect on their learning shows that they may have a responsibility to themselves, for example, if a student finds that they learn best with visualizations, they now know that they should ask you to draw a picture. For students in individually paced learning situations like homeschool environments or working on asynchronous assignments, they know to look for visual resources for extra support with their curriculum.

2. A math journal with regular intervals can help students connect several small topics and develop their big picture thinking skills. Many topics in math are cumulative- to understand linear functions, students must understand coordinate graphing, slope, and intercepts. All of these topics are connected and students should be prompted to think about these connections to help them with multi-step word problems. For students in homeschool or independent environments, this is especially important as many of the independent curriculums, similar to Saxon Math, build proficiency in math in a nonlinear way.

3. A math journal activity assigned 2-3 classes before a test can serve as a guide for the student on what to study, helping them build their study skills and create a study plan. Teachers could make this more useful by attaching a vocabulary list or formula list to get students started, or for differentiation purposes. The last question allows students to shout themselves out – when learning similar triangles in Geometry, a student may get excited when they start remembering more multiplication facts, without the calculator.

Was my journal prompt that first year put together so beautifully? No. Did students stick with journaling after their 2 month trial? Surprisingly, many of them did! One of my sophomores that year even continued her math journaling in her later classes as well. She ended up accelerating and took Calculus in her senior year.

Overall, students should keep a math journal because when you learn things, you should reflect on them. Reflection is where the mind is stretched from practice to theory. These assignments are wins for students who understand big picture ideas when missing small details repeatedly hurts their grade. Overall, the practice of journaling is important in developing note taking skills, which is incredibly important in STEM fields and essentially all careers.

Comment below how journaling in a math class has helped you – or your students!