New Insights and Their Implications

          Starting this class off the first  couple of days I was a bit intimidated at how we were going to be learning to teach math. The style of progressive learning and teaching the understanding of mathematics rather than the memorization of formulas is foreign to me. However, after working through and completing the scale factors and areas assignment I can see how this style of teaching math is much more beneficial for students. In our math content courses, I struggled with the concept of similar shapes and their ratios, after going through an assignment that dealt with the same concepts I was surprised to see at how well I was able to learn and understand the math behind scale factors, similar shapes, ratios, and so on. The math became much more clear to me and I was also able to reflect on how I thought about it before and what mistakes I made in my previous thinking. I am still slightly uncomfortable with the style of teaching math this way, but experiencing it as a student has opened my mind up to seeing the many benefits it has.