Minding My P's & Q's: Pedagogical Philosophy & Quintessential Quotations

My Pedagogical Philosophy

As a teacher I have the following seven core values... you might say I've come to "GRIPSSS" with how important each one is to a student's success:

  • Growth Mindset

  • Rapport Development

  • Interest Connectivity

  • Pattern Recognition

  • Student Initiation

  • Socratic Questioning

  • Student Discovery

For more on these values, click here.

My Quintessential Quotations

  1. Nature is written in mathematical language. - Galileo Galilei

  2. If I rush to an answer, then I rob you of an opportunity to learn. - Dan Finkel

  3. The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal themselves in all their beauty only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it. - Carl Friedrich Gauss

  4. Mathematics is the queen of the sciences. - Carl Friedrich Gauss

  5. Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. - Albert Einstein

More Great Quotations about Teaching and Math

  1. The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. - Henri Poincare (I believe the same holds true for mathematicians - myself AND my students - and our subject of numbers.)

  2. In a TED talk watched by over a million people, Wolfram (2010) proposes that working on mathematics has four stages: (1) Posing a question, (2) Going from the real world to a mathematical model, (3) Performing a calculation, and (4) Going from the model back to the real world to see if the original question was answered. The first stage involves asking a good question of some data or a situation—the first mathematical act that is needed in the workplace. - Jo Boaler

  3. The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics. - Paul Halmos

  4. Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace. - Confucius

  5. We hate what we don't understand. - Mark Anderson (read more here)