As I begin my journey as a teacher, I really want to prioritize equity in my classroom and social justice not only in the curriculum but also within the actual experience of teaching itself. I want to acknowledge my students' ethnic backgrounds as well as their communities and their families. I want to be the teacher that was lesson plans both in English and Spanish but also in other languages as I am able to translate. I want to be the teacher that in every special holiday from different cultures I am able to celebrate it in my classroom and acknowledge it not just those "American" holidays. I want to prioritize my students as a complex being that is composed of their traditions, their culture, their communities, and essentially their essence of who they truly are.
I would like to find ways to support the students' use of mathematical knowledge and thinking to create positive change and experiences in their own lives and within their own environment. I'd like to eventually have students that are able to use interest formulas to help their parents make the best decision of where to deposit their money or use the pythagorean theorem or the distance formula to help their mom or grandma decide how far they should place the flowers in the garden to make them look evenly distributed and more beautiful, or those students how have parents who work in construction help them with some equations or other math ideas. I'd love to be able to help shape critical thinkers and mathematicians that don't only see math as a class they they need to pass to graduate but rather as a class where they learn new techniques and ideas that they can bring back to their homes and help their family or even just us these concepts for them to be able to apply them in their personal lives somehow.
How specifically will I do this in the class? I am not sure. I know that I will be using all of the knowledge as I go through these courses. For instance, I will implement the lesson planning templates and ideas in my own lesson planning to guide me through the process of acknowledging my students' needs and demands while still keeping the rigor and expectations high enough to challenge them and help them learn.