Math Thinker

Years ago, I worked with a science teacher to teach a which encouraged students to examine and then draw magnified images of natural objects such as sea urchin shells, pinecones, leaves, etc. I introduced the students to drawing by referencing lessons I adapted from Mona Brookes’ Teaching Children How to Draw.

I discovered this book when I was in teacher training in New York, and it was funny after reading the book I found myself drawing all sorts of mundane things… the seat back in front of me on the bus, the window view outside my apartment window. I suddenly felt empowered to draw just about anything because the Brookes method taught me how to visualize the basic shapes in everything I saw. I suspect this is the general method taught for drawing anyway.

I believe that we really should teach and encourage children to draw anything and everything because it allows them to both internalize and then begin to analyze what they see. The same holds true for constructing visuals for understanding Mathematics and Math concepts. As a student, I think I was on the tail end of educational pedagogy that made us sit in our seats and listen rather than experiment and explore. I was forced to memorize formulas without really understanding how they worked. Perhaps this is why I loved Geometry once I discovered it because here was a Math where we had to ‘prove things’

As a student in a middle school Algebra or Pre Algebra course I think I would have been too impatient and impulsive to see the value in proving simple things such as the Multiplicative Inverse property, but perhaps proving why rule like this worked would have helped me internalize these crucial concepts more so that I could apply them more readily in the more complex Math courses.