I thought the way he taught the class was brilliant. I want to steal his method for my own class. He is teaching math as one would teach a language. It's a good idea, since at the elementary level, math is essentially a language. He needs to communicate the language (add, multiply, x, negative, dot dot dot...) and syntax (brackets, order of operations.)
I recently had a friend, an experienced language teacher, teach me some Japanese. He started as this math teacher started, without any introduction. "Watashi Wa James". (My name is James). In math, the teacher began "this is one. one, two, three." The Japanese teacher does not start by saying "watashi wa means 'my name is'", and the math teacher does not begin by saying "these are points on a number line." Some concepts are best learned by immersing yourself in them until they feel natural. This is the way we all learn language as children, it's the way language is taught to adults, and I feel that it works very well as a way of teaching elementary math.
No comments:
Post a Comment