Teach the Skills that Students Will Use for the Rest of their Lives
Reasoning Skills are More Important than Students Memorizing Formulas
It was a Friday and the second to the last period of the day. The students and me included were thinking about the weekend; I was already thinking about home. The section used a method that required a little more mathematics to solve the problem. It would take more than several days to learn the technique described in the textbook.
But, I didn’t want to waste an opportunity to teach them a different way and have them think and reason while deriving the answer.
I was teaching the section on areas of parallelograms on Friday to my Geometry students. They were having a difficult time remembering how to find the area of the parallelogram. They did remember the area of a triangle (A=(1/2)bh) and the rectangle (A=bh).
The textbook method wanted the students to find the h of the parallelogram by extending a side of the parallelogram using the equation of the line and finding the intersection point; from there, use the distance formula to find the lengths of the base and height.
There is only one answer to the problem, but there is more than one way to solve the problem. Sometimes we get fixated on the way the textbook shows it; The good part about it is you can always return to the textbook method.
To move the conversation along and get the students to think, I told them since they already know the area of a triangle and rectangle to find the area of the parallelogram. It is more important for the students to think than memorize the formula and arrive at the correct answer.
The idea was simple. If you had a total area and subtracted known areas of the total area, what remains is the area of the given figure. Even though most of the students in the class will not be studying mathematics or science in college, it is essential to teach them how to reason. The majority won’t be going to college immediately after high school.
Final Thoughts
There were two skills the students could extract from the lesson. The first skill is a skill that students entering Mathematics or Science need to master to get to the next level. The second skill is reasoning skills.
Regardless of whether they go to college, every student will use it for the rest of their lives. I thought it was more important to teach them reasoning skills.
The first-year teacher version of me would have gone through the textbook method regardless of the students having difficulty remembering mathematical concepts and formulas. The current version teacher in me taught them reasoning skills.
I taught my students the more valuable of the two skills they will use after high school.
I write about my experiences as a high school teacher, writing, and anything that comes to mind. Sometimes I write about satire and fiction short stories.
Don Sabado
Teacher | Author | Writer
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