Sept 23 Reading

 "You must be smart" is something I hear all the time whenever I tell people I'm doing a math undergrad. This relation between doing math and being intelligent is so deeply woven into societal views. Therefore, someone who cannot do math would think that they're less intelligent and just quit math as it is not for them. Just as highlighted in the article, a lot of my high school math teachers weren't even experts in the math field but just science teachers filling in the role of a math teacher and just teaching us how to get by without a deeper understanding of the topics. I firmly believe that, math at a high school and even at a university level isn't about learning mathematical concepts and solving mathematical problems, but about learning how to solve problems mathematically. Whether the problem is within your everyday life, or even something more involved with math. Math teaches you how to systematically solve problems in a step by step basis which can only be taught through the progressive way of teaching outlined in the article credited to Dewey and later math curriculums. Comparing student rankings from North American countries to countries like Korea isn't a great comparison, as Korea's dominance in children's test scores isn't coming from a place of curiosity or intelligence but from a place of labor and pressure. The culture in Korea isn't just "try your best", but it's "be the best" so students are always competing with each other and with students with wealthy and powerful backgrounds. The pressure is so immense that they either have to perform, or just disappear. So, yes the scores might be high, but it is not due to the curriculum as students are studying 12 hours a day and not to understand content, but to cram as many possible test questions into their brains as possible.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Group Art Project Write Up

Image
  EDCP 342 Group Project Group members: Pla Sey, Leo Lee, Jarrad Fjelstad. The art piece is Little Wire Quadrics by Amanda Taylor Lipnicki. We first needed to figure out what materials we needed. Rebuilding the pieces using a wire base felt obvious, but instead of copper wire, we used aluminum wire as we thought it would be easier to manipulate and solidify. To connect pieces together, we used magnets and silicon tape. It still took some time to get used to the materials: Pla thought of interesting ways to spin and form the wire: Leo eventually managed to create a hyperboloid: Then we quickly followed that with a paraboloid and cone: We had to pay close attention to the orientation and position of the magnets:   Though small, the magnets were powerful, and it was a challenge keeping them separated for use: Taping tiny magnets to wire was tedious and often ineffective, so we abandoned them and decided to try just using the tape: The tape was sticky enough for the pieces to han...
Read more

September 14 Reading

Skemp's article touches upon a topic that I struggle with to this very day, yet it doesn't provide a sure answer. For as long as I taught and wanted to teach, there was always a divide between relational and instrumental teaching (even though I did not know it by these names). Do I just teach the student the most optimal and efficient way to solve a problem in the shortest time possible? Or do I go through the gritty process of having them understand the concept behind the solution to a problem? There are clear benefits to both ways of learning, and I agree with Skemp's point that the goals of the teacher and student are important when considering this, but in a school setting with so many students, how would one decide what approach to take? The article mentions that difficulty in assessing relational learning contributes to why teachers might prefer instrumental understanding for a particular subject. This brings up the question of how one would actually assess relational...
Read more