Share with me what you think a good piece of mathematics is - something you really like.
Every creative math teacher has certain tricks of the trade. It could be as simple as a multiplication trick or as complicated as a calculus formula. The interviewer is interested in hearing your favorite trick and how it benefits your students to determine if you will be an asset to the current teaching staff at their school. How you respond will let the interviewer see if you are a creative thinker and if engaging your students is essential for you. Remember, this is an entirely open-response question with no right or wrong answer. Share something your students have benefited from.
"When I was teaching middle school math, we had a lesson on adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers, and my students had difficulty remembering which result was positive and negative. So, I devised a cute mnemonic for my students to memorize: positive means love, and negative means hate. So if we love to love, then it's positive. If we love to hate, then it's negative. If we hate to love, it's still negative, but if we hate to hate, it's positive. I've been using that for years!"
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Anonymous Answer
Creative thinking. And you are probably thinking, "Creative Thinking in Math, but there's typically just one right answer." This is true, but there are multiple ways to get there"”for example, 13 x 25. One student may do the standard multiplication algorithm. Another student may say, "25 cents is a quarter. Well, I know 12 quarters is 3 dollars. One more quarter would give me 3.25. I moved the decimal place and got 3.
Rachelle's Feedback
It's important to teach kids to think this way to come to the right conclusion in a variety of (creative) ways. Good approach!
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