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Parental Involvement in Conceptual Understanding in Mathematics
It never fails. Every year I get new students that have only ever been taught mathematics from a methodological/procedural perspective. They fight me. Then they either leave honors for regular, or they hop on board. Recently a parent asked how to help his son acquire conceptual understanding. I was taken back. I had never been asked that by a parent. Usually they just ask about my availability outside of class and a list of tutors. What resources do I suggest he use to help his son make the big switch? Any suggestions? I know where I got my perspective. It was a slow process that was a product of my exposure to the history of mathematics, but this father can't exactly take that road.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by William Carey on -
I'm curious what you (and your parents) mean by conceptual understanding - can you maybe talk through what that looks like a bit?
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Permalink Reply by Andrew Elizalde on -
At Veritas School I offer a six part series of workshops to parents spread across the first semester. Each session is scheduled for 7:00-8:30 PM in a classroom. The series is titled "Reinforcing the Fundamentals of Mathematics at Home". Individual sessions are: (1) A Classical Christian Perspective on Teaching and Learning Mathematics; Counting Strategies and Place Value; (2)Addition: Combining Like Terms and Composing Units of Higher Value; (3) Subtraction: Decomposing Units of Higher Value, Integers, Identities, and Inverses; (4) Multiplication: Area Models, etc.; (5) Division: By Chunking, etc.; (6) Fractions and Bar Models.
In short, I have found that the best way to help parents help their students is to begin by reteaching the mathematics to the parents while modeling CCE pedagogy. -
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