Jun EDCP 342A Math Pedagogy

1. Something(s) that really reached me as a math learner (at any age) - The math to me was something to hate. It was one of my subjects that I spent the most time with but there was a coercion and pressure within my family that thought the mathematics was one the most important subject living life in our future. The reason I hated mathematics was that the problems I dealt with was beyond my level of mathematics at the time and I had really no one to ask for help. Mother was trying to help but thought the subject was not something she could teach and Dad could help me but not in a very friendly way, being mad at me after failing to have me understand his solution. 2. Frustrations with math learning - The frustrations come after looking at math problems that I do not how to begin with. There needs to be a gradual process of developing ideas to actually solve the problems. But, sometimes those math problems in advanced mathematics had struck me with utter helplessness. 3. A Math ...

Three STOPS I had while reading this article were 1) when I took a guess of what distinguishes instrumental teaching from relational teaching and whether such distinction matches that of Skemp's own. I have gotten the idea of instrumental teaching from my experience of tutoring children of age 9 to 12. Whenever I taught them how to do 1 digit multiplication, sometimes I tell students that the result is just what it is (i.e. 8*8=64) but I know that the ideal explanation of such result would be by demonstrating the relation between addition and multiplication (that is, multiplication is adding a number by multiple times). 2) As I tried to reflect on my experience of instrumental teaching and relational teaching: I wondered if I focused too much on teaching students what to think instead of how to think 3) When I thought of the possibilities that not-so-well-thought-out relational teaching strategy might exhaust students' brain powers: I realized how important it is to teach stude...