Thursday, August 18, 2011

Chapter 2 - Reflection

Science is a process of figuring out and making sense. Mathematics is a science of concepts and processes that have a pattern of regularity and logical order.
These sentences on the first page of the chapter stopped me for some thoughts. It has never occur to me that mathematics could be that easy to understand. For one thing, I was never good with numbers. But I do realise, as I continued reading the chapter, that my perception of mathematics would affect the way that I would engage students in learning it, or worst, the environmental support that I may be able to offer them.

  • A learning theory is not a teaching strategy, but the theory informs teaching.
I wondered why as a student, I have never thought or tried to see mathematics from a different perspective. Like the recent trend of applying differentiated instructions in classroom, I realised that mathematics could also be instructed this way. As a learner, I was afraid of maths because I could never understand why some topics have to be done in a certain way, and whether by solving the problem in some other ways would I be penalised or faulted. In a metaphorical term, learning should never be a cup-filling process. Students are not empty cups waiting to be filled. Rather, they should be provided with supportive environment to discover learning, and be scaffolded. Students should be encouraged to explore the different ways a question can be solved, and to realised that it is okay to make mistakes.

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