Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists to Episode 194: The Truth About Mental Math – It’s Not Just In Your Head
Back in episode 176, I gave a preview of Pam Harris’ book Developing Mathematical Reasoning: Avoiding the Trap of Algorithms. That book has officially been published, if you try to order it on Amazon it says it’s still a pre-order and won’t arrive until May 31st, so I’ll link up where you can purchase the book through the publisher, Corwin. To celebrate the release of her book, I’m re-releasing the session she did recently at the Virtual Math Summit. If you didn’t get to watch it or you want to share it with colleagues, it will be available for 1 week and I’ll link it up on the show notes page as well.
Developing Mathematical Reasoning: Avoiding the Trap of Algorithms is full of ways to you guessed it: develop mathematical reasoning. This is often what some people consider doing mental math. As I was going through the book, one of the “tips” caught my attention so I thought I’d share it with you. One thing I’ve noticed is that many teachers believe that having students do mental math means having students do the math in their heads…no paper & pencil is allowed. So here’s a tip from Pam:
“TIP
When asking people math questions to determine how they are thinking about the problem, have paper and pen/pencil handy. Do not make people keep all their thinking in their head. Allow them to write to keep track of the relationships they are using. To paraphrase Cathy Fosnot, mathematical reasoning is not about doing it all in your head, it’s about doing it with your head (Fosnot & Uittenbogaard, 2007). It’s perfectly acceptable to keep track of your mental thinking.”
Mental Math isn’t meant to be only done in our minds…I love this part “..is not about doing it all in your head, it’s about doing it with your head.”
As you are working with students on building their thinking strategies around mathematical operations, allow them to write things down. Written symbols is just a notation device…it doesn’t mean a student is or isn’t using an algorithm. We often think that if a student is doing Mental Math they are doing strategies. But there are lots of people who do the algorithm in their mind when asked to do mental math. That’s they way I was and so was Pam. We did the algorithm in our heads because we didn’t have any other way to think about it. It didn’t matter if it was mental math or paper/pencil math all we had was the procedures of the algorithms.
So the goal isn’t to have them do it all in their head…the goal is to help students build their thinking strategies by Developing Mathematical Reasoning, so they can use those strategies on paper/pencil or in their head.
Remember, I’ll add links to the previous podcast I did about Pam Harris’ book, her Virtual Math Summit session that we will have out for a week.
Until next week, my fellow Recovering Traditionalists, keep letting your students explore math, keep questioning, and most importantly, keep Building Math Minds.
Subscribe and Review in iTunes
Other Ways to Listen To This Episode
Pin This To Pinterest for Later
