YouTube? No, YouCubed!! An awesome resource for math teachers

Have you ever heard of the website YouCubed? Well, if you will ever have to teach math in a classroom or have to help a child with their math homework, this site will be of great help. YouCubed is a nonprofit organization and is a free resource for K-12 that offers free and low priced resources for everything mathematical. Even the name is appealing for me because if I was going to research how to figure out something on Google, I usually look for the first link that brings me to YouTube if possible so that I can see it explained or demonstrated by someone. It only makes sense to find videos that will help teachers teach math. I think this is a wonderful resource for all teachers, a few of the videos that I have watched so far really stress the importance of getting our students' minds active and thinking, these videos show examples and give suggestions on how we can practice this approach in our own classrooms. Personally I find that videos are more effective to explain things because I am a visual learner and I need to see how problems are solved visually rather than just verbally explained or written in words. This website has a lot of very helpful videos for people who are visual learners, like me and for everyone really. I found this website to be user friendly and easy to navigate through in order to sift through the content to find what you are looking for. While browsing through some of the videos I found one that talked about a six year old boy which really surprised me. this boy came home from school and told his mother that he did not enjoy his math class that day and when she asked why he said:

 "math is too much answer time and not enough learning time." 

This is a very true statement and it was very surprising to me that it came from a six year old child. This statement alone underlines the problem we have with math in our schools today, the problems given are mainly about finding the 'right' answer and making sure it matches the one that everyone else has but less attention is paid to the process the person took to solve the problem. There are many ways to solving a problem and if we all come to the same answer in the end, who's to say which on is the 'right' answer? 

I believe that math should be more about exploring the problems we are given, not to find the correct answer but to find many answers and we must then convince ourselves which one is the correct answer. We learn from our failures and mistakes so that we can do better next time and math should be about taking risks and trying many ways to solve a problem. 

It is important to see the many different ways that your students think in order to solve a particular problem. Number talks are a great way to see how students reach solutions to problems and you could then represent each students solution visually on the board to illustrate how many different ways there are to solve even a conventional problem because everyone's brain works differently. One of the videos talks about how she would start each math class with a number talk and she would always be surprised with the number of different ways that students solved the problem. This is a great idea that I would definitely bring into my own classroom; it is interactive, fun and engaging for students and together we further see and understand how there are many solutions to a problem. 

I remember being very frustrated and overwhelmed during math classes. I always though that I was no good at math and even the thought of it having to teach it to a class scared me to my very core. I am still not a confident person when it comes to math and I think most of this fear and intimidation stems from some very bad experiences with math at a young age. Over the years there have been teachers that have impacted me and helped me feel more confident about teaching math someday but it is helpful to know that there are so many great resources out there, such as this one, to fall back on if I am not feeling confident and need a little help. 

"...Throughout my schooling years, I had enough "bad" experiences with math that I was left feeling stupid and incapable of doing it...

I cannot tell you the relief I know have that I can learn math myself,and I can teach students that they can too..."

Middle School Teacher  

(taken from YouCubed)

I hope that someday I can be a confident math teacher and that I will no longer feel intimidated by mathematics.