David's EDCP 342A Blog

What made you to decide to become a math teacher? - Mathemetics is the universal subject that anyone with different cultural backgrounds can understand and learn how the materials work by "analyzing" notations. - I decided to be a math teacher, not only because I love helping others in need with the skills that I have developed, but also I like to help children to see the world more broadly with mathematics. For example, the climate change is the topic that we often encounter nowadays. We, as math teachers, can bring the topic into the classrooms and study how mathematics can be employed to track carbon or green house gas emission and what kind of diets - meat consumtions, vegeterianism, or veganism - would help to reduce those GHGs. Since I studied Combined Major in Science - Biology, Chemistry, and Mathematics -, I am confident that I can combine various scientific topics that are crucial to our lives with mathematics.

What convinces (or doesn't convince) you in the authors' argument? -        “The development of students’ thinking is directly connected to their ability to operate with mental images. The use of representations to develop students’ understanding is related to their ability to operate with the representations.” -        I, myself, use lots of visualizations or mental images as much as possible when trying to learn and absorb new mathematical materials. I cannot imagine how I would understand or solve advanced math questions without mental representation. What kinds of mathematical representations are included and excluded in this article? -        Graphs, pictorial representations, enactive representations (geoboard as manipulative aid), modeling, drawing, imagining, mapping, numerals, algebraic equations, tables, diagrams, and charts. Can you think of an example ...

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....

NICE TO SEE YOU ALL GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR STUDIES :)