Wednesday 14 August 2013

Reflection Day 1 (12/8/2013)

Math! A topic that I always hated.

I was not looking forward to the first day of the Math module though. I expected to see a lecturer coming in and throwing us lots of Math problems to solve and go " all smart" thinking that he knows it all.

But....
My impression started to change as soon as I entered class today. There he is, my lecturer Dr Yeap Ban Har standing in front of the class, opening his lecturer for that evening. Dr Yeap starts to give out tangrams and I started to create a rectangle with different quantity from the tangrams.

I started to participate and start thinking that it is not bad after all. I love the way Dr. Yeap drives the interest in all of us and how he drives us through the Math lessons for the day. I gained better understanding that Math has no short cuts. It requires understanding and even the simplest Math problem can be solve in various of ways and methods.

I always love how Dr. Yeap gave concrete examples by drawing it out with diagrams to help us who are visual learners. The way he prompted us with lots of questions really made us think.

Yes I agree when Dr. Yeap mentioned that in order to get children to be able to understand Math concepts, we as educators have to teach by role modeling. We have to scaffold and give children enough opportunities to explore.

Today's lesson has indeed impacted me in ways on how I can teach children simple Math problems. We do not need formulas nor do we need brains to do Math as quoted by Dr. Yeap, "Even computers have no brains". I am able to look at Math problems for young children from a different angle and indeed today's lesson has given me an opportunity to look at the problems from the children's perspective and able to gain new knowledge on how to be able to scaffold and guide  children in loving Math!

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