New Insights and Their Implications

Prior to taking this course I considered myself good at math. I have always succeeded in it and have always understood how to get the answer. This summer I took both math concepts 1 and 2 and aced it with very little effort. Since I have been in this class I have realized that I am good at plugging in numbers but not good at understanding why I did what I did. I have been deprived of exercising my critical thinking skills. I have had some of the same problems in this class that I had in math concepts and could not figure out how to come up with the answer without following procedural steps. My implications for teaching and learning math are to first try and understand the problems as a whole for myself and then allow my students to come up with their own techniques for solving problems and to provide them with that foundation that I was never introduced to.