Erika's Math Blog

1. Something That Reached Me As A Math Learner My two strongest memories of being really excited about math come from very different ages. The first comes from pre-school, when I was about 3 or 4 years old. I went to a montessori preschool, and numbers and math were my favourite things to explore. There was an exercise called the thousand chain that involved laying a thousand beads in the hallway a (grouped into ones, tens, hundreds), and I remember being so excited when I completed it. The second memory comes from high school, when I discovered the youtube videos of ViHart. She used math to make beautiful art and music, and explain mind-bending concepts along the way, and I found it utterly fascinating. 2. Frustrations With Math Learning My biggest frustration with math learning came in University when I took a group theory course. The subject didn't come easily to me, and my professor didn't teach in a way that reached me, and it was the first time I felt lost and stresse...

Overall I really liked this article, and found a lot in it that resonated with my own experience learning mathematics. In high school I had an incredible math teacher that definitely subscribed the the "relational understanding" view of mathematics. However, in grade 12 AP calculus he was gone for a semester and our replacement teacher taught in a much more "instrumental understanding" way. I struggled more in that semester than ever before in math, much like the anecdote in the article about the seven-year-old who had extreme difficulty with an "instrumental understanding" approach to mathematics. As I was reading the article, several pieces stood out to me. I really enjoyed the metaphor of faux amis and the idea that there are not just two different approaches to math, but in fact two different mathematics. While I'm not sure I agree completely with Skemp on this, I think it's a valuable way to think about the two different ways that math is ta...