The blog I have been following posted on September 21st. In this blog, Darren Kuropatwa asserts that the problem with math education is that too much emphasis is placed on content and not enough emphasis on skills. He says that the emphasis should be on "pattern recognition," since this is what explains science as well as the world around us. He challenges his readers to consider making patterns the focal point, and asks if that is not an important math skill. His reasoning is that math is essential to understanding the world. In essence, my understanding of what he is saying, is that the learning of these skills is key to being able to figure out "what to do when you don't know what to do."
I think that what he is saying is necessary to think about. Math patterns are found in all of science, whether it is gravity and the planets, relativity, momentum, chemistry or just the cycles of life and ecosystems. If a child can learn to recognize patterns around him it can serve to help him understand the system and concepts of math better. In turn this may serve to give students clues as to how to solve difficult math problems. I think this type of thinking would even help me as an educator. As an educator I need to realize that all the things I teach are interrelated in so many ways. If I can learn to see the connectedness of each subject, then I can find ways to correlate one idea in one subject to another idea in another. I think this may be something I will need to think about and learn to incorporate into my teaching skills. I hope that he will post more on this and maybe elaborate as to how to teach math patterns as a skill.
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Alexis found a great book that reminds me of your thoughts: Thinking BIG, Learning BIG: Connecting Science, Math, Literacy, and Language in Early Childhood by Marie Faust Evitt.
ReplyDeleteI am with you on math and patterns being everywhere. Math is often poorly taught because many elementary teachers don't have a deep understanding and because many secondary teachers of math are naturally good at math and don't understand how the less-math adept learn math.
There has been a theme this week through the blogs about conceptual vs. rote learning. This is an important concept for educators to continually re-evaluate.
The connection between the subject areas is vital to make. Another important connection is to connect the subject area to the students' lives.
Yes! I most wholeheartedly agree with the idea that math needs to be taught in a way that allows children to apply the concepts they are learning, rather than simply memorizing formulas and the ways of doing things. Jean-Jacques Rousseau even warned against what he referred to as "parroting", when a child repeats information only to please the teacher or in today's world, get the grade. I found the idea of focusing on patterns to be highly appropriate in the math field, because you're both right about the fact that people are constantly exposed to patterns in life. Even something as simple as the life cycle is a pattern that is repeated over and over again. I think it would be interesting if educators were to develop a math program whose initial focus was on patterning and from there they could track the children's learning in other subjects to see if it was effective or not.
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