Chapter 3 blog

I enjoy the examples the book gives to illustrate a point because they are in the form of stories (I always love stories more than boring, pedantic lectures). I also have a couple of stories to tell regarding how we as teachers should work on or reconceptualize the students' existing knowledge to make transfer of learning more fluent.

When I was introducing division of fractions, I saw a child with a puzzled look on his face all the time I was teaching it. He gets the math part (the way you get the reciprocal and so on) but he doesn't understand why 1/2 divided by 1/4 is 2. When I asked him why it didn't make sense to him, he said that he was always taught that division meant that your answer always had to be smaller than the number you started with (e.g., 10 divided by 2 is 5). Boy, did we draw a lot of pies that day...

Another story is one coming from my physics class. Newton's first law of motion says that an object will tend to stay in its original state unless acted upon by a force. When asked to explain why a ball rolling across the top of the pool table stops, one student explained that it stops because there is no force causing it to keep on moving --- obviously in direct violation of the first law. We did a lot of reconceptualizing that day!