My name is Kyle King. I love to watch movies and to play basketball. I like to watch just about all sports, which is why I love the Olympics. I am a bit of a college basketball junkie. I love mathematics, and I plan to teach math at a middle school or a high school. I love math because it can be seen in the world everyday.
I think that literacy is the ability to read and to write and to understand the world around you. I think that literacy plays a huge role in math. I think that a lot of confusion in math that students have stems from their inability to "read mathematics." We show kids an equation and expect them to be able to read it and understand what the end goal of the equation is.When I was first beginning to learn Algebra, the teacher put an equation such as 2x + 5 = 11 on the board. The teacher asked us to "solve for x." Many of us were unsure why letters were introduced in a math problem. It seemed to us that letters should stay in Language Arts and English classes, and numbers should stay in Mathematics. We were unsure how to read the equation, so it made it difficult for us to understand what the teacher wanted us to do.
There is a short video on YouTube that touches on the importance of literacy in mathematics:
Hi Kyle,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your first posting. I especially liked how you emphasized that many texts in mathematics are numeric/symbolic (I would add visual too), and not just linguistic. It reminded me of this article published in the Mathematics Teacher:
Rubenstein, R. N., & Thompson, D. R. (2001). Learning mathematical symbolism: Challenges and instructional strategies. Mathematics Teacher, 94, 265-271.
"Literacy instruction" in your discipline, then, might include teaching symbolism. The article is obviously not required reading, but if you want to choose something like that for your self-selected article later, I thought you might be interested in that topic, given the content of this posting.
Thanks again, and I look forward to reading more of your ideas as the semester continues.