Healthy Competition as a Motivator

As the quarter is moving forward, I am finding myself becoming more comfortable and excited about teaching upper level math. After class, I found myself thinking a lot about making math fun for upper level math students. Although I have a lot of passion for teaching and learning math, I am also aware that many students do not share my enthusiasm. Finding ways to get students excited about math is essential to their appreciation and overall success. Something that we did this week, that proved to be a good motivator for me this week was adding a little competition aspect. When we were asked to make the giraffe out of the tiles. When our teacher made the comment "lets see who can figure it out first" I became completely engaged in the activity and was excited and eager to complete the task.

 With the inclusion of competition, my question becomes how does a teacher include competition into the class but does not do so at the cost of any lower level students. For me, the competition aspect helped me become more engaged, but was this only because I knew I was capable of “winning”? I would hate to include an element into my teaching of math that could cause some students to retract more than they may already.

Including competition into my teaching will be something I am going to think about and explore more. While I can see so many benefits, I am also aware of the costs. One other thing that I took away from this weeks math lesson was the idea of uniting reading, writing, and math into one interdisciplinary lesson. This is another sticky situation where students can get a boost in their confidence in math from their strengths in reading and writing, or their math can be negatively affected due to difficulties in reading and writing. It is obvious that there are way to many things for one new teacher to know, I am going to have to rely on my peers for ideas about both including competition and teaching math in conjunction with reading and writing.