"There should be no such thing as boring mathematics." --Edsger Dijkstra
My goal for all of the classes I teach is to make mathematics relevant and personal to my students. There is no good in learning a subject that one cannot see the importance of, and so I strive to make the mathematics we learn in the classroom applicable to students' lives. Mathematics is a language, and an art form, but it is only through teaching mathematics as such that I can allow students to see this.
Furthermore, it is my hope that students will develop not only competence with the material, but also an ability to achieve the eight Mathematical Practice Standards laid out by the Common Core initiative. Upon leaving my class, students will understand problems and persevere when faced with a challenge, employ logic and reasoning to achieve a solution, justify and critique their own responses and those of their peers, model real life situations with mathematics, strategically use tools to solve problems, attend to precision when describing a solution, utilize the structure of mathematical object to determine strategies for working with them, and utilize patterns to assist in solving problems.