Hello fellow mathletes and welcome to my blog where I will be blogging about my experiences learning and learning to teach junior/intermediate math. Math has never been my strong suit and I was pretty apprehensive about what to expect from this course, but the first two weeks have demonstrated to me new ways of thinking about math. For starters, this week’s reading showed that your strength in math isn’t necessarily related to your ability to teach it and there are other important aspects of math worth knowing like making connections, representing the same thing in different ways, making real world applications and arriving at the same answer in multiple ways rather than the traditional straight line methods of just plugging in numbers and following a formula to arrive at an answer.
One of the biggest eye openers for me was the idea of open math problems. In an open math problem the learner is presented with a pretty abstract idea/question and needs to come up with their own set of questions about the problem. The answer is that there really isn’t an answer but it forces the learner to think about the problem in different ways in order to come up with questions that would shed light on how to arrive at an answer.
It was evident from class this week that the overwhelming majority of us learned very traditional algorithms for solving math problems growing up. I think it’s pretty safe to say that the same majority had varying degrees of ‘ah ha’ moments when learning some alternative algorithms that were shown this week and I expect we will have many more as this course progresses.
Overall, it’s been an eye opening first couple weeks so far and it’s at least made me question some of my previous ideas about how evil math can be so hopefully things will keep trending up.
A simple example of arriving at the same answer using multiple algorithms. The first shows a left to right method, which can be considered a more logical approach since that's the way the brain wants to interpret the information presented. The second method shows the more traditional algorithm of adding from right to left. This way can be problematic, especially when the numbers get more complicated.
