Week 3: Chapters 6-7, Questions #6 and #7 What else struck you about chapters 6 – 7?

What else struck you about chapters 6 – 7?

What will you add to, change about, or remove from your teaching practice based on what you learned in chapters 6 – 7?

Comments

 

There were actual two things that struck me from chapters 6-7 first of all.  High achievers are often high achievers in the U.S. system because they are procedural fast.  Also, often these students have not learned to think deeply about ideas, explain their work, or see mathematics from a different perspective because they have never been asked to do so.  What that says to me is that students can memorize the process of doing something and become successful at in school and in life.  I worked at a local high school where they did everything on calculators.  For a student to be successful in the math classes, all they had to do was be efficient on the calculators.  I would ask the students questions like what are you solving for.  On a graph what would that look like.  Most students weren't capable of explaining this to me.  They just understood the process and not what they were actual doing.  They were solving for the answer.  

The other one that I really liked was that everyone is at different level, but what makes the class good is that everybody's different levels, so everybody's constantly teaching each other and helping each other out.  With grouping this is so successful.

I will keep doing what I am currently doing.  I teach the students on the calculator for their Hiset test.  I also teach them how to do the process by hand because on an aptitude test or the Accuplacer test the students can not use a calculator.