Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Self Reflection on Maths tutorials

For the past 3 tutorials, I had been learning new things after every Maths tutorial. Mr Tan had been throwing many questions that were quite provoking and challenging to my thinking towards to what I was taught in school as a student. It kept me wondering that as a student, I accepted what was being told and didn't ask any questions to my teachers. Unlike here in the class, Mr Tan had been bombarding questions, ideas and suggestions so that it kept the whole class think and don't accept anything that were told in class.

I learned that emphasized on the concepts is more important rather than getting the final answer. Simple yet important key concepts in real numbers, place value, addition, subtracting, multiplying and dividing of negative numbers and HCF and LCM. I agree with the rationale of going down to the level same as the students so as to understand what difficulties they face when the teachers teach maths in class so that we can better explain and ensure that the students will able to have a meaningful learning.

I agree with the notion of infusing meaning and use real world context into lessons. For example, we did spend an amount of time trying to make sense of how we can teach the operations with negative numbers. It is good if we are in ideal situation. In reality, there are many constraints that the teacher is facing and sometimes, it is near impossible to use this kind of approach for all topics. However, teachers need to find ways to ensure some meanings are being taught to ensure clarity and understanding in lesson.

Firdaus

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