Lesson
8th Grade Math – Coordinate Geometry, Logical Reasoning, Justification and Proof
Clip 8/11: Coordinate Geometry Debrief Part 1
Overview
After her lesson on coordinate geometry with her eighth-grade students concludes, Antoinette Villarin reflects in a conversation with colleague and mathematics coach/leader Cecilio Dimas of Silicon Valley Mathematics Initiative (whose teaching is also documented on Inside Mathematics).
Cecilio asks Antoinette to set the context for the lesson by having her describe her students and what they had engaged in prior to this lesson. Antoinette describes the students’ experience with geometric content and mathematical practices and her goals for them during the lesson.
Teacher Commentary
Teacher Commentary
I feel like I honestly didn't appreciate justification as a student, when I was in school. I really didn't appreciate it until I got to college and became a math major, and you really take those, like, really deep classes where you're proving things and explaining why something works.
It was like, here's a theorem; okay, now you have to figure out how to prove it. And I was really, really excited about that. I left college thinking “Wow, this is really what math is! It's really to convince other people that this theorem is true, or why we know that the angles of a triangle are 180”’ Like, why that makes sense really became more meaningful for me.