just come in. Yeah, it's time to
be quiet blah blah blah. Did you start the
audio recording? Yeah. Okay. This thing has described
stuff. You don't want the little kids put the
little like you like your field experience, right?
Yeah. Is that part of the education? Yeah,
so as undergrads, we do only one true
like field experience. So we do we do field
experience that we do math tutoring. So the math
tutoring course is one credit and you're required to get a
job for it. So you don't have to get
a job necessarily, but you're supposed to either volunteer
in a school or you actually go out and get
a job. So a lot of people will work
at our math emporium or for instance, I got
a job working at SAASS which is the student athlete
academic support service. So that allows you to actually,
that's like your first intro to getting into the
classrooms and interacting with students and kind of getting your
your hand or your drive at just explaining stuff to
students and breaking things down to the level that they
might understand. So from there that you can usually
people take that like sophomore year, so then people
either take their spring of their junior or their senior
year to take early field experience. And so essentially
you meet this class either on Tuesday or Thursday and
then the opposite day you're in the classroom for like
4-5 hours. And so you're given a mentor teacher
and so you just basically sit there and you
watch the teacher teach and you do all of these
projects in the process. So you're actually kind of
becoming a little bit of a researcher and so you're
given um there's five of them and they're
N.C.T.M. Standards, so like
for instance, one of them is equity. And
so in class you'll talk about what equity is and
then you go into the classroom and you observe and
you try to figure out, okay, well in
the classroom, what what does equity have to do
with in the classroom? And so then you try
to kind of apply what you're learning in the classroom
and see how that extends to what you're actually seeing
your teacher do or how the students are behaving.
And then you also have to do a research project,
say about equity. And so you would say
for instance, record how often the student, the
teacher calls on females as opposed to males. And
then you would write a paper, you would look
at research and you would compare all of it and
write up a nice little paper and turned it into
your classroom. And so that's really the first exposure
that you get as an undergrad to field experience.
And then if you choose to stay here for the
grad program, then you do your internship in the
fall. And so it's basically like round two of
early field experience. And then in the spring You
actually do your student teaching where for about 10-12 weeks
you actually take over the classroom and you're the
full time teacher four those 10-12 weeks and you have
a mentor teacher who's there like observing you and helping
you, but you're pretty much doing all of the
lesson planning everything. So that's kind of the culminating,
can you do this point of the program. Did
you always want to be in math education? No,
so I started out in engineering, a lot
of people actually in our major do that. So
we so I started out there, it didn't take
very long for me to decide that I didn't want
to be there anymore. Um I found out that
I really like the math part and I didn't really
like the science part of engineering. So then I
just switched to regular math and then from there I
was trying to decide okay, what am I gonna
do with a math degree. And I decided,
well I don't I don't want to just work in
a cubicle or crunch numbers all day. And then
I decided while I really enjoy working with people.
So I decided well the only way to really combine
math and people is to teach people math. So
that's kind of where I got started with it.
And then I also just happened that a professor,
I had her office was right next to Dr Norton's
and so I went in and talked with him and
he mentioned this internship that they had called the Noyce
internship. So I basically stayed for my spring break
of my sophomore year, I stayed in Blacksburg and
I actually was an intern at a middle school nearby.
And so from that is where I really saw
that I really liked working with kids and I really
enjoyed trying to figure out what they were thinking and
the best way to explain to them what, you
know, what the mathematics means in terms that they
would understand. And so from that then I decided
to completely switch into Math Ed. Tell us about your scholarship in a way
that other people might get excited. okay, it's like
the office with theirs, all of those. Okay,
so I'm part of the Noyce scholarship, which
basically the point of it is that through noises,
we're trying to create a community of mathematics educators that
kind of can depend on each other and collaborate with
one another once they're actually in the school. So
when we're students, we are very collaborative and we
work on homework a lot together and we bounce ideas
off of each other. But once you're actually out
in the schools, you know, a lot of
that community falls away. And so the Noyce program
is trying to build up that community once you actually
leave school. And so with that you for their
they will pay for up to two years of
your schooling, so they'll pay for your senior and
your grad year because we have a five year masters
to here at Tech. And so for every year
that they pay for, you work two years in
high need schools. And actually the internship that I
had was in high need schools in this area.
And so that's where I really saw that basically what
high needs means is so it's based on the number
of kids that have free and reduced lunch at a
school, but any school in an entire district can
make that district Guyanese. And so basically you can
work anywhere in Virginia once you have it. And
the thing is for every year they pay for your
two years in high need schools. And the way
that I view the high needs schools is it's students
who don't necessarily have the support financially or maybe even
emotionally home that they really need to succeed in school.
And so by working in a high needs school,
you really become not only their teacher but also
a counselor and an aid and many more things for
them and you just become a tool for them and
a person for them to go to if they need
help or on if they're afraid of something or really
anything. And so that's, that's what I really
wanted to be as a teacher anyway. So it
was a great way for me to combine math education
and wanting to be that role in the student's life,
can you say your name here and mind games
legally I am a senior and math education and I
will be here for grad school next. What made
you decide to come to Virginia tech? Well,
it's funny. So my dad set up tuition thing
and it was basically okay to use this. You're
gonna need to go in state. Sorry. I've
always loved math ever since I was little and I
liked science as well. So I figured, well
the best technical science school that we have in state
is Virginia tech. So that was initially where I
started looking at it. And then once I came
to campus, I just really fell in love with
the architecture and just the feeling of campus. I
just really felt like at home here and I felt
like I would be comfortable with my parents, you
know, kicking me out of the car and just
leaving me here for four years and I would be
completely okay and see joe no, still living.
You can always come back to mm do anything else
you want to say? I'm, what would you
say if you could be in the sure like a
perhaps it was that what would and I want you
to see? Well I think one thing about our
Math Ed department is that it's a very close knit community
. So when you're just doing your under red math
, you meet people like Sue and Andy and the
reason that we call them Sue and Andy is because
they really view you as a pre service teacher,
so they really view you as almost like a colleague
. So although they're teaching you and there you know
obviously above you, they still talk to you like
they're on your level. And so that's one of
the reasons that we don't really refer to them as
dr Norton or Miss Hagen or anything like that,
we call them soon. Andy because you know,
you're kind of like on a first name basis because
you're on the same level as them, which is
you know, it's a very nice feeling to feel
that your professors view you as no as more or
less than equal. So that's you know, that's
really nice and then there's just there's they're always doing
stuff, there's always opportunities whether it's you know jay
is doing research which actually j is in the school
of education, but his focus is math. Um
And then there's also Betty Betty's in the school of
education but she works very closely with the Math department
. So you know, there's just all these different
people and they're always doing stuff. So like Andy's
doing Candy factory steve is now on board with ipod
apps and doing Candy Factory also you've got Dave who's
doing like probability and things with how kids think about
cards and then you have jay who's also doing fractional
stuff, but he's more so doing you know,
what are the different levels of cognition that allow them
to actually, you know, view fractions as this
. So he's kind of bringing in the education side
of the fraction stuff to kind of go with Stephen
Andy with their mathematical perspective. And I think that's
really the collaboration between the School of Education and the
Math department, I think that the School of Education
helps put a little more psychology and cognitive reasoning into
our mathematics and how we need to teach this in
order for kids to really understand it. So I
think that they really help the math people understand,
you know, that we really need to think about
student thinking, and I think that's really where like
math education is all tied together, is thinking about
student thinking and thinking about how they're thinking about math
. That made any sense, ask me