Math 201 Part 1 Essay

633 Words2 Pages

Ellyce Uy
MATH335 201
*500+ words
Introduction and Part One

The introduction is about the author, a university mathematics teacher, and his deciding to teach elementary kids at Maalot, his overestimating of the ease it would be and the surprises and lessons he learned in his experience. Chapter one talks about the fundamentals and basics of mathematics, what math material should be taught in elementary school, and the profoundness and beauty of “simple” mathematics. Chapter one highlights what mathematics is, how it orders, generalizes and represents, why math is beautiful, whole numbers, meaning and calculation, and the decimal system. The most important and novel points that stood out to be from this section will be described below.
One is that elementary mathematics isn’t simple at all. It actually has depth. Mathematics and its fundamental ideas can be learned …show more content…

Mathematics anxiety arises when one or a few stages are unheedingly skipped. The student hears something meaningless and does not understand why he or she does not understand, and then anxiety is born. The teacher is also perplexed because he or she cannot identify the source of the confusion or difficulty. The notion I get from reading this section is that mathematics is made up of various simple basic concepts. As the level of math gets higher, the basic concepts accumulate. If an outsider were to have no experience in math, and were to look at, for instance, level 8 of math, it would have no meaning to him. We would have to teach him levels 1-7 in that order first. Apart from teaching concepts in order and steps, a common mistake to avoid is teaching two ideas (or more) at once. Concepts should be taught separately. Oftentimes, when breaking a problem into bits, the learner can figure out the rest on his or her

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