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After listening to Hammond's presentation I began to think, why don't we teach students about how a brain learns at the beginning of a school year? The past 2 years I was a math and science teacher for 6th grade. It was so frustrating to see how much the students fought me on my teaching strategies because they were "boring". I used to say, "I'm a teacher, one who teaches, not an entertainer, one who entertains. We are doing these different exercises because they help your brain to learn." I didn't go into the specifics of what the different exercises did for the brain, I just told them that this is the reason and that should be enough. Math was the most difficult subject to get students to push themselves in. By 6th grade they came to me with a predisposition about their personal feelings towards math. For the majority of students, they really didn't like math. As much as I tried to make the math interesting, there are just some things that needed to be done that can be boring. What if we taught how the brain learns, so that students can see the value in different exercises that are done in class? Like note-taking; there is a benefit for the brain to actually put pen to paper to write and think about the math. If students understood this, would they be so unwilling to write down a few notes for the day? Would they take more ownership for what they are doing in class because they understand the importance of experiencing the math? This was my big "I Wonder". If I end up back in the classroom, this will be the first thing that I will try. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but at least when I say it is a good activity for your brain to learn, the students will understand what I mean.
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