Positive and negative influence

The most positive influence I had in math was my brother. Sorry, you were expecting a special teacher or activity but, it was my brother. I wanted to be like him and well lets just say he was the math God! He went to math conventions and competitions with his school and I wanted to be that smart. I did have fun with a few math lessons in school though. I did have a teacher that would give us treats to use as counters and after the lesson we could have them for a snack.  
I do not really remember a negative influence aside from many of my friends did not like math as much as I did and they often got bad grades as a result. As school went on I had to make new friends in math because I took pre-algebra and algebra way before my friends did. 

Assessments

As I mentioned previously, math has change over the years. Students today are not taught math the same way I was taught as a child. We did not worry about a high stakes, high pressure test that you prepare for the entire year. Our assessments were based on classroom observations, homework, tests and the big test for me was the SAT test. There was not pressure for this and really the only preparations for the test was how to bubble in our answers. So really the only thing making this test "the big" test is that it was for all subjects and was taken all together in times section.

NCTM Importance

Today more than ever, students need NCTM. Teachers need to incorporate all content and process standards involved. Today students are face with the common core and standardized testing that forces students to use critical thinking and reasoning with their work. Today we strive for the correct answers but, what is important is that we understand the process and can go back and evaluate a mistake and fix where we went wrong. If students learn to read, write and communicate math, they will succeed.

Process Standard Encounter

The process standard that I would encounter most as a child was problem solving. We did do any others NCTM process standards that I can recall. I do remember spending computer lab time playing math games yet we still did not need to know why or how. I learned to understand the common sense and logic behind math but, I can honestly say this did not come from school or a teacher.
I decided as a child I wanted to be a math teacher so I could teach kids how fun math can be and how if you try to simplify the big picture and use logic, math is not so scary after all. 

My Favorite NCTM Content Standards

I will confess, math was my favorite subject so choosing a favorite content is not very easy. I have narrowed it down to two and that is the best I can do. The first content standard is number and operations. I chose this as a favorite because it means the basics and different ways to calculate. Without this anything else would be hard to compute.
The second favorite content standard is algebra. The reason for my choice is the critical thinking involved. Algebra relates to not only x-4=12 (solve for x) it also involves patterns and reasoning. I love solving problems and algebra involves logic which is right up my alley.

Math Today vs. Yesterday

Back in the olden days when I was in school math was not like it is today. Back then it did not mater if we understood why 5x5=25, as long as we knew it did. For the most part math was a way to work on memorizing. Today the important thing in math is to know why and how instead of the actual answer which is the opposite of they way I was taught.
Today, NCTM standards make the process of learning math thorough. Students need to learn to solve an algorithm and also need to understand and be able to explain their answers. Students today are helped to round and calculate math in there heads. When I was taught math, I was required to have scratch paper to show my work even if it was easy enough to do in my head. After all, the importance when I was young was to know the proper steps to take.