After teaching Math for a number of years, I realized that many students seem to think that learning math is much harder than it really is, which hurt their chances of actually making the effort needed to learn math! In other words, it became a self-fulfilling prophesy, and math actually did become hard to learn. […]
The Mastery Technique Read More »
Angela Duckworth has done extensive research about what it truly takes to succeed, and she’s discovered that the “grit” characteristic has a greater influence than any other. Here’s an article from Edutopia on how to teach Grit to our students: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/true-grit-measure-teach-success-vicki-davis How gritty are YOU? You can take the 1-minute self-quiz on Dr. Duckworth’s own
Do you know about Grit? Read More »
The first three steps of the Mastery Technique are about action: learning, applying, practicing. This fourth step is about mindset: are you striving towards mastery when you do the first three steps, or are you just going through the motions? Striving for Mastery is what takes place in your mind as you practice the knowledge,
Step 4: Strive for Mastery Read More »
This step really solidifies the previous two steps of “learn the facts” and “follow the rules.” Nothing really is learned without practice, and “skills” combines facts and rules into problem solving situations. It is important to remember that the best athletes in the world don’t sit on their past performances and championship glories. They practice,
Step 3: Practice the Skills Read More »
This sounds a bit rigid, doesn’t it? Following rules? Don’t we want to encourage folks to be creative and think outside the box? Yet when we’re learning math, (which really is a science that was discovered rather than invented), the rules are the entire foundation! If you start with the rules, you can discern further
Step 2: Follow the Rules Read More »
As discussed yesterday, the Mastery Technique is a simple 12-word process to help any student build a foundation to learn Math. It can be applied at any level of math, and I’ve even used very successfully it at the graduate school level when I was studying matrices and linear algebra. Step 1 is “Learn the
Step 1: Learn the Facts Read More »
We can do this using a geometric picture, and then a little analytic geometry (plus algebra) to get the final formula.
Proving the Pythagorean Theorem Read More »