There are few ideas that catch my eyes while reding the Skemp’s paper “Relational Understanding and Instrumental Understanding.” When I first saw the French term, faux amis in his article, not only I did not fully understand his intention using that term, but also I had never realized that there are two different approaches to both teaching and learning mathematics. The first thing that made me stop reading the paper was the Mr. Peter Burney’s story. When he asked students to find the area of a field with two different units, they did not convert one unit into the other and got the wrong answer. This is one of the issues that I, as a math tutor, have seen over and over; I have encountered many students forgetting to change both dimensions in the same unit. Of course, there are few students doing excellent job on solving problems due to the repetitive work. However, when they are given other problems with a twist, most of them looked at them closely for a few seconds and then gave up....
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