I don't get to read enough blogs about math education these days - for some reason I stopped doing it a while back and I'm only now catching up on some great stuff out there. One blog I have been reading more recently is Math with Bad Drawings - a funny an satirical look at math education with some wonderful pedagogical sense-making. Recently, Ben Orlin (the author) wrote a piece about the "Church of the right answer." In it, he writes about an issue facing all math teachers around the world:
Here it was, out in the open: the subtext of practically every class I’ve ever taught. I’ve grown accustomed to yanking my side of the rope in an unspoken tug-of-war. The teacher emphasizes conceptual understanding. The students conspire to find shortcuts around it. So it always goes.
Students are so often focused on what the "right answer" is that they do not emphasize the path to get there.
This is something my department has been talking a lot about recently and trying to make sense of how the network our school is in (Expeditionary Learning) wants us to build in comprehension in our lessons. It usually involves making things a lot slower than the traditional class might look like, but the students end up with such a deeper level of knowledge it becomes worth it.
While reading Ben Orlin's post about this "church" I was reminded of an article I read in early January about "why the phrase 'math facts' is so dangerous." In it the author asserts (much like Orlin) that to memorize information is not to truly understand it and therefore it will not work in application to novel situations. The simple idea of memorizing multiplication tables is a good example. While knowing those can be useful at times, when dealing with larger numbers it breaks down, whereas if you understand place value and it's effect on operations you will be able to scale up your knowledge.
I fully support students gaining a deeper understanding and how that I can bring my own up to that level. Then maybe they'll understand the battle should really be won because "the right answer" is on one side by itself.
This is something my department has been talking a lot about recently and trying to make sense of how the network our school is in (Expeditionary Learning) wants us to build in comprehension in our lessons. It usually involves making things a lot slower than the traditional class might look like, but the students end up with such a deeper level of knowledge it becomes worth it.
While reading Ben Orlin's post about this "church" I was reminded of an article I read in early January about "why the phrase 'math facts' is so dangerous." In it the author asserts (much like Orlin) that to memorize information is not to truly understand it and therefore it will not work in application to novel situations. The simple idea of memorizing multiplication tables is a good example. While knowing those can be useful at times, when dealing with larger numbers it breaks down, whereas if you understand place value and it's effect on operations you will be able to scale up your knowledge.
I fully support students gaining a deeper understanding and how that I can bring my own up to that level. Then maybe they'll understand the battle should really be won because "the right answer" is on one side by itself.
Photo from http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2015/02/11/the-church-of-the-right-answer/
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