Step 4: Learning for Understanding

As individuals who, ourselves, have been through many years of schooling, we inevitably bring to the classroom a plethora of experiences that might affect the way we understand and subsequently teach academic material to our students. A big emphasis of this program, therefore, involves reflecting on and evaluating those prior experiences such that we might be able to share the useful ones with our future students, and perhaps re-configure the less valuable ones.  The latter is most true for me in math. I will admit that I have very high self-proclaimed math anxiety, the roots of which I can trace back to somewhere around 9^th grade. Around this time I began to consider myself “not a math person;” yet despite this sense, I did just fine in math courses through high school. In college, however, my math self-esteem plummeted when I realized that my former strategies of memorizing and replicating previous problems would no longer suffice. Suddenly I questioned whether I had every truly learned math, and entering this program, I feared I did not have the math knowledge to adequately and accurately teach even my elementary students.

How lucky I am, therefore, to have Dr. Caroline Ebby as my Math Methods professor. Through this course so far, she has not only led me to reflect on the limitations of my previous mathematical knowledge, but also provided scaffolded ways to develop a more comprehensive understanding of basic mathematical concepts. Never has this been so clear as in our recent exploration of the fundamental meaning of our base-ten number system and it’s integral role in not only understanding place value, but also multiplication and all the algorithms that we were taught in order to “simplify” complex procedures. As it turns out, I believe I skipped directly to the algorithm stage of many mathematical procedures, and thus did not fully grasp their meaning. Dr. Ebby has helped me find the holes in my knowledge, and begin to fill them!

Furthermore, Dr. Ebby teaches with an emphasis on strategy, rather than solution and promotes math activities such as “number talks” which do the same. These short mental math activities prompt students to articulate how they got to their answer, and show them that there are many correct ways to reach a solution. I can only say that I wish I had learned math this way initially, and am grateful both personally to be developing these understandings now, and excited to be able to pass them along to my students.