Republic of Mathematics blog

Posts Tagged ‘teaching

Avoiding the low road in learning mathematics

Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: April 9, 2011

I wrote recently about cognitive theft in mathematics, an act that teachers – including parents – often carry out that short circuits a student’s possibility of working through a problem themselves. x There’s another side to cognitive theft – an act of omission – in which students themselves often engage. Students often take away their […]

What constructivist mathematics is not …

Posted by: Gary Ernest Davis on: November 5, 2010

Over at Parenting is Political, @northTOmom has written a recent post:  THIS MATH DEPRESSES ME. Part of what concerns @northTOmom is what she identifies as “constructivist” math. Here is what she writes: “So why do I object to constructivist math? One reason is that it is, by-design, non-incremental or “spiral”: its textbooks jump around from […]