New Insights and Their Implications

I find that the new insights that we are learning in math methods to be really beneficial towards our future teaching. It almost seems ridiculous that as we were students in elementary school, we were just given a problem and a formula to solve it. Since that was the scenario, we never actually learned the process of how to solve the problem on our own. Then when we were given a story problem and didn't have a formula right in front of us, we were lost and confused on what to do. This is not good teaching at all. If we want our students to really succeed, then we need to teach them how to find a way to their real solutions. I find it really impressive and cool that a 7th grader made up her own way to solve (addition of fractions-I believe it was) and especially that it worked for more than just her problem. I hope I can teach my students to use their own methods to solve new problems in their own creative thinking.