This blog will mainly be contributions to my Education 355 class, but hopefully I can find other interesting things along the way and will post when I find them. As you can see by my blog title and my quote that I have, I think the little things in life are so important and they are often overlooked by people in their busy day-to-day routines. As a future teacher, I think paying attention and appreciating the little things; things like helping a student finally understand a concept they have been struggling with or being able to have a laugh with your students because you made a silly mistake instead of being scared to always be perfect will make for a much more rewording experience as a teacher.

As for my readings for class, Chapter 1 for both Content-Area Reading and Content-Area Writing were very informative and made me realize that even though I am going to primarily teach math, there is reading involved in every area of learning, including math. It made me think back to last semester when I was writing my first lesson plans and was told that I should explain vocabulary words like "theorem" and "right triangle" because some students may not comprehend what they actually are just from my lesson or from reading their text book. At first I was assuming that these words would be self-explanatory, but I know now that they are actually very important to explain because they will build on these words when they continue on their math journey.

I feel like math is a particular subject that many students struggle with and this could be for a variety of reasons, but the Content-Area Reading text made me think that maybe they are struggling because they are not comprehending the fundamental topics when they are reading the textbook. They may be reading a theorem over and over again, but can not understand what it means because the language is too difficult or they don't understand a few complicated words. Now that I know this may be an issue I hope that I can plan my curriculum around reading AND UNDERSTANDING what a theorem or proof is really saying by breaking it down into smaller parts.

I was also interested in the Content-Area Writing book when they talked about the issue of going deeper into subject matter or staying on the surface and addressing a wider array of ideas. On one hand, I think that going deeper into certain areas in math would be so helpful for students; normally in a classroom you spend one day on an idea and move on the next day and build on that. If you could have a few more days to expand on that idea to make sure the students could really understand it, that would be extremely beneficial. On the other hand, math contains so many fundamental ideas, and it would be hard to choose what is the most important because students may need many of the ideas later on in their upper level math courses. I though it was an interesting question and I want to do more research on whether or not math teachers are taking on this idea.

I am excited to learn about different strategies to help students in their reading and writing in my own classroom. I was flipping through the book and was looking at the pictures and examples and I was already thinking of ways I could incorporate ideas into my classroom!