Monday, October 8, 2012
Week 7
While perusing Blogs for Educators, I came across something in the Zeno Math Powered article that caught my attention. It was the issue of whether or not students should be taught numerous ways to solve an equation. On one hand, it is nice to be able to have options for solving and for students to be able to pick which one work best for them, but on the other hand it can get confusing and sometimes being more concrete is better. However, if there is only one way to solve an equation, students will just be practicing how to do something and not the why. Often times, especially with math, explanations for why something needs to be solved a certain way can be crucial to figuring it out. Overall, an interesting perspective...
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This is an interesting perspective - something I have never thought of in regards to teaching. When I was in grade school and was taught multiple ways of solving a difficult math problem, I would often get confused and put all the steps from the different ways together and not be able to solve it. However, if I thoroughly understood the problem, I appreciated knowing multiple ways to solve it so that I could find the answer to the problem one way, and then check my answer by solving it another way. Like you said, I think the most important thing a math teacher can do is explain WHY math problems must be solved the way they do.
ReplyDeleteI can appreciate the perspective of getting more confused when learning multiple ways to solve a problem. Even when taking Math for Elementary Education sometimes learning all of the different ways to teach a type of problem was confusing. However, I think that it is important to teach these different ways because students learn in so many different ways. What may be an easier method for one student may be more difficult for another and vice versa.
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