Becoming the math teacher you wish you'd had : [electronic resource] ideas and strategies from vibrant classrooms / Tracy Zager. --

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Acknowledgements -- Breaking the cycle -- What do mathematicians do? -- Mathematicians take risks -- Mathematicians make mistakes -- Mathematicians are precise -- Mathematicians rise to a challenge -- Mathematicians ask questions -- Mathematicians connect ideas -- Mathematicians use intuition -- Mathematicians reason -- Mathematicians prove -- Mathematicians work together and alone -- "Favorable conditions" for all math students.

While mathematicians describe mathematics as playful, beautiful, creative, and captivating, many students describe math class as boring, stressful, useless, and humiliating. In Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You'd Had, Tracy Zager helps teachers close this gap by making math class more like mathematics. Tracy spent years with highly skilled math teachers in a diverse range of settings and grades. You'll find this book jam-packed with new thinking from these vibrant classrooms. You'll grapple with big ideas: How is taking risks inherent to mathematics? How do mathematicians balance intuition and proof? How can teachers value both productive mistakes and precision? You'll also find dozens of practical teaching techniques you can try in your classroom right away--strategies to stimulate students to connect ideas; rich tasks that encourage students to wonder, generalize, conjecture, and persevere; routines to teach students how to collaborate. All teachers can move toward increasingly authentic, delightful, robust mathematics teaching and learning for themselves and their students. This important book helps us develop instructional techniques that will make the math classes we teach so much better than the math classes we took. -- Provided by publisher.