Thursday, March 27, 2008

New Insights and Their Implications

What did you learn from your peers, from the instructor, and/or the readings, about elementary school students, and/or about yourself, and the teaching and learning of math and what are their implications to teaching and learning mathematics?

While we have begun our foray into writing the lesson plan for understanding, I have learned a lot about myself. This lesson is very difficult for me to write because I want to fall back into my comfort zone and the way I have always been taught. In writing this lesson, I know it is more beneficial to my students and their learning to use the approach that we have learned thus far in class. While old habits die hard, new and improved ideas are popping out of my head. I am using and adapting the ways that I was taught into my new way of thinking.

Kami and I are working together to create a lesson for the order of operations. I distinctly remember my teacher writing the order on the board, making us copy it, and then telling us we had to memorize it. We were to use what we memorized (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally) to complete different problems in assignments and test now and in the future. She never explained why we had to use them and why specifically in that order. It was just something we were expected to know. In our lesson, we have realized that we need to let students discover the order (Thanks Dr. Reins) on their own and also the importance of knowing why they have to do it. We have looked into a variety of sources and our just now discovering the why's. Hopefully our students will not have to wait ten or more years to discover this.

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