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.
Hey Adam !
ReplyDeleteI totally agree, after learning some of these alternate algorithms my opinion on math has changed. Considering that our opinion on math has changed, I wonder if some future teachers will still consider teaching tradition methods as an alternate option in their classes? As time changes we always find better ways to do things but does that mean the old ways should be forgotten about?
Hey Adam,
ReplyDeleteI think it was comforting to know that so many of us felt the same towards teaching math and what this course would be like. When Pat showed us that new way to perform addition and subtraction problems, my mind was blown! I think from there many of us in the class opened our minds to the idea that math is not as concrete as we were taught(in that problems were to be solved on specific way). It is interesting that this week Pat mentioned that the curriculum was last updated in 2005, and with math teaching practices changing you'd think there would be more incentive to update the curriculum.
Hey Adam,
ReplyDeleteI can totaly relate to you in regards to math not being my strong subject as well. In elementary and even highschool I just felt like I could never get the right answer. Now, looking back it seems like we were taught math in all the wrong ways. There should not be an emphasis on solving the solution one way, there are mutliple ways and mutliple answers. This new way of thinking as a result of Pat is extremely refreshing. This type of teaching and attitude towards asking questions and having open ended problems, I feel is extremely beneficial. I think it will be interesting to see where we all stand at the end of this course, and how we will further this type of math teaching to our future students. Can't wait to read more.
Cheers, Courtney