[bjohnson]

#3020

As a math student, I remember being taught rules and completing math problems simply as a computation. I gathered from my math teachers that you needed to memorize specific rules or at least have access to them and plug in and compute. The end result was to make sure you got the right answer, and if you did not you got the realization that you were good or bad at math. At those times, I was fortunate to be good at math. As I became a teacher of mathematics, I did not realize that some of the strategies that I have used as a math student came back out as a teaching tool to my math students. It was a struggle at first to feel defeated that all of my math students were not picking up the material right away after the lessons I taught. At this moment, I realized that not all students in math were like me. Giving light to the generation of students, the math needed to be explored and creative for the students. The mentality of getting the wrong answer and simply leaving it at that was not going to be the end of that math problem. The discussion of the steps to solving the problem and addressing those became a teachable moment. Students were able to address their own strategies and reflect on them.