Blog #5

In Warrington's article, she points out a lot of advantages to constructivism. She talks about how the students are encouraged to think deeply about the math concepts. With this they learn to invent their own methods of solving problems. In the very beginning, they learned to make rules for solving the simple fractions. This helped them solve the harder questions. Another advantage is that the students got involved. They all worked together to solve the problem given to them. This helped build unity in the classroom. The students also learned to find mathematical relationships. When they were solving a question, they noticed that you can double the fraction so the numbers are more simple to work with. They, in essence, learned to construct their own relationships of fractions.

Although there some advantages, there are a couple of flaws with this method of teaching. One of the biggest is that it can take a long time to solve a question. For example, the students tried to solve 4 2/5 divided by 1/3. After a long time of thinking and working on it, they finally found the solution, but this process wastes valuable time. Another disadvantage with constructivism, is that the students have disagreements. Some of these disagreements take a long time to resolve and they can also waste class time. Not all of the material needed to be covered, can be with a constructivism. Although there are a lot of advantages to constructive learning, there are some disadvantages that need to be looked at also.

Blog #4

Constructivism is a term used in von Glasersfeld article. He talks about constructing knowledge instead of obtaining it. He does this to emphasize the importance of us building it ourselves. The more knowledge we build, the better we understand it and the more we will want to learn. To construct knowledge, we need someone to help us build a base, being a teacher. With their help, students can learn to create their own scaffolding of knowledge.

One thing that I would like to do in with constructivism in my math teaching, is giving the students hands on activities. They learn basic concepts, but they are the ones that put it into action. In my jr. high we were taught what geometric shapes were the strongest and then used that knowledge to build a bridge. By doing that, I learned by myself what worked best and I constructed my own knowledge on how to do things. It gives the students a chance to experience things by themselves and have fun. This is a constructive outlook, because you give the students a basis of how to do something and then they decided how they are going to build off of their knowledge.