“It’s uncomfortable to focus so intensely on what you’re bad at,”
When my wife was learning to play the piano, her teacher used to say "if you're going to make a mistake, make it loud so we can hear it and fix it." I make my students do math in pen for the same reason -- instead of silently making the same mistake over and over again, it gets made once, analyzed (by the students), and fixed. This bothered the students at first, but they've come around and become much more thoughtful about what they write.
“Teaching chess is really about teaching the habits that go along with thinking,” Spiegel explained to me one morning when I visited her classroom. “Like how to understand your mistakes and how to be more aware of your thought processes.”
> " I saw Spiegel trying to teach her students grit, curiosity, self-control, and optimism."
Which is really what teaching is about. I think most teachers know this, and we get a fairly healthy dose of it in professional development every week. I'm a math teacher, but the training I get during the school year isn't in math, it's in things like "accountable talk". It sounds like the teacher in this article is particularly gifted and practiced.
This isn't just for classroom teachers. The same concepts matter for parenting and in the workplace.
YES @ math in pen! I decided to do that on my own, and it was always seen as just a weird quirk by anyone who ever saw it. Awesome to hear a math teacher endorse it!
It's funny how 'speed' is an important concept in any kind of learning, be it math, music or sports. You need to sync and align your perception with your actions to be able to reflect. Some time putting yourself in a frictionful context helps to avoid skipping steps.
Similar to people with scarce computing resources[1], they had to learn slowly, properly enough to know what they do clearly to avoid high costs.
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When my wife was learning to play the piano, her teacher used to say "if you're going to make a mistake, make it loud so we can hear it and fix it." I make my students do math in pen for the same reason -- instead of silently making the same mistake over and over again, it gets made once, analyzed (by the students), and fixed. This bothered the students at first, but they've come around and become much more thoughtful about what they write.
Which is really what teaching is about. I think most teachers know this, and we get a fairly healthy dose of it in professional development every week. I'm a math teacher, but the training I get during the school year isn't in math, it's in things like "accountable talk". It sounds like the teacher in this article is particularly gifted and practiced.
This isn't just for classroom teachers. The same concepts matter for parenting and in the workplace.
YES @ math in pen! I decided to do that on my own, and it was always seen as just a weird quirk by anyone who ever saw it. Awesome to hear a math teacher endorse it!
It's funny how 'speed' is an important concept in any kind of learning, be it math, music or sports. You need to sync and align your perception with your actions to be able to reflect. Some time putting yourself in a frictionful context helps to avoid skipping steps.
Similar to people with scarce computing resources[1], they had to learn slowly, properly enough to know what they do clearly to avoid high costs.
[1] cultures of once-a-week-compiling