As a graduation requirement, I had the privilege of designing a forty-hour experiential learning project. I decided the best setting for my growth as a future educator would be in the college's tutoring center. Below is a journal entry documenting what I learned from this valuable journey.
Today in the tutoring center I helped a lady -- we’ll call her Linda. She is an older student at SUU, probably five or six years younger than my parents. She had a very loud and jittery personality, and most of the things she was saying were either assaults on her personal ability with math, complaints about the math tasks she’d been given, or negative stories about another tutor that had helped her before. It didn’t take long for me to realize that she had very low level grasp of the content they were covering, and it was odd to me what she did understand and what she didn’t. Several times I had to go back to things like adding fractions together and combining like terms that I knew she must have learned before to be able to take the class she was in. The strange thing was though, that after I had explained it, she would remember a very specific procedure she had been taught to use for those situations. I had been explaining the concepts, and she didn’t seem to be understanding at all, but then she had procedures for how to do them on a shelf somewhere in her brain. Because of this experience with Linda, I have become really aware of how important it is that we are not just teaching HOW to do the mathematical tasks, but WHY those things work, and what it means. I personally think Linda, while she did struggle with math in general, is a product of this kind of teaching. If all our students know at the end of the year is how to identify and use a procedure for a specified problem, we will have fundamentally failed. The understanding of elementary math concepts is vital to being able to understand future math concepts. If all they know are procedures, they will have missed the entire point of math. The point is developing skills in problem solving, abstract thinking, and using the logical part of your brain to analyze situations and come up with an approach.
July 9th, 2018
Today in the tutoring center I helped a lady -- we’ll call her Linda. She is an older student at SUU, probably five or six years younger than my parents. She had a very loud and jittery personality, and most of the things she was saying were either assaults on her personal ability with math, complaints about the math tasks she’d been given, or negative stories about another tutor that had helped her before. It didn’t take long for me to realize that she had very low level grasp of the content they were covering, and it was odd to me what she did understand and what she didn’t. Several times I had to go back to things like adding fractions together and combining like terms that I knew she must have learned before to be able to take the class she was in. The strange thing was though, that after I had explained it, she would remember a very specific procedure she had been taught to use for those situations. I had been explaining the concepts, and she didn’t seem to be understanding at all, but then she had procedures for how to do them on a shelf somewhere in her brain. Because of this experience with Linda, I have become really aware of how important it is that we are not just teaching HOW to do the mathematical tasks, but WHY those things work, and what it means. I personally think Linda, while she did struggle with math in general, is a product of this kind of teaching. If all our students know at the end of the year is how to identify and use a procedure for a specified problem, we will have fundamentally failed. The understanding of elementary math concepts is vital to being able to understand future math concepts. If all they know are procedures, they will have missed the entire point of math. The point is developing skills in problem solving, abstract thinking, and using the logical part of your brain to analyze situations and come up with an approach.
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