Hey folks, here goes blog post number 1! For this I shall give you an intro of sorts and tell you a bit about myself and why I'm doing what I'm doing!
My name is Julia and I am currently attending Utah State University, majoring in Mathematics Education and minoring in Speech Communications Teaching. I enjoy reading a good book (one of my top favorites: The Alliance, by Gerald N. Lund) , finding adorable clothing on a ridiculously good sale, drinking hot chocolate, and dancing in my apartment with the music on and the curtains closed. I have also recently developed a special affinity for Peanut Butter M&M's -- strange since as a general rule I dislike peanut butter. I love spending time with my family, and they are a large part of what defines me. I have five brothers and two sisters--yes, eight kids in my family!--and a mom and dad. I LOVE being a big sister, I LOVE having older brothers, and I LOVE having two sisters with which to share clothes and thoughts. My family is simply my favorite thing!! My fondest memories, for the most part, involve my siblings and I all in the kitchen, singing songs at the top of our lungs that we are composing on the spot, as my mother tries to tell us that we need to keep it down. :)
I love math, and I love to talk to people, so even though my two subjects of study (Mathematics and Speech Communication) do not seem to be the usual combination, they are what I love! I was very shy as a child, so the communication interest of mine is not one I was necessarily born with, rather it is one I have become interested in as I have forced myself to overcome the shy side of me. My intrigue with numbers, however, is something I think I've always had. I can still tell you the phone number of the first cellular phone my oldest brother had and I was only about 6 or 7 years old when he had it. I have always liked to find patterns in number sequences or experiment with the them in other ways. For instance, my childhood home phone number ended in "5862." --In my head I would play with these numbers in ways like the following: The difference between 5 and 8 is 3, which is 6/2. 5+8=13, and 6+2=8, and 13+6=19, and 1+9=10, and 1+0=1. 58+62=120, and 1+2+0=3.
When I tell people that I plan to be a math teacher, I generally see the same look of "Why-on-earth-would-anyone-in-their-right-mind-want-to-do-any-more-math-than-they-absolutely-have-to????" on their faces. I generally laugh in response to this, but this particular look is one of my main reasons for pursuing this major, and eventual career. So many people unfortunately think that math is their enemy--something to be feared, shunned, detested, and shied away from. They do not realize that math is the key to understanding the world they live in! We use math in all kinds of situations, from a mother shopping at the store and trying to get the most amount of groceries for the least amount of money, to the engineer designing bridges, to the physician who must spend time thinking logically and analyze problems, to the gambler in Vegas who needs to understand probabilities---and everywhere in between!
Math can be so much fun, so useful, and so empowering--my goal is to share this!
