How To Teach Mathematics
I once asked a math major what integration meant. The question must have caught her by surprise since she stopped, looked at me and said “I don’t really know, but I did get all A’s in Calculus.”
Math teachers are notorious about introducing a concept with abstraction before explaining the relation it has with real life. Take the first day of a typical college Analytical Geometry class; the teacher introduces the class by drawing a graph on the board and asking, “Is that a relation or a function?” Relations and functions have different properties and the question is legitimate, but ‘you lost your audience professor’ – except for the top 3%. This is because most of the students have no concrete concept of functional or non-functional graphs. First, explain what function vs. relation means and then let the class try and create both.
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