Alyson:

“Mathematical thinking needs to be based, not on the symbols that are used, but on the ideas that the symbols come to represent” (Booker, 2002).This quote jumped at me while doing the readings this week. This is the first time I’ve thought about the symbols we use in maths being more than just a shorthand for something. Booker presents mathematical symbols as concepts that you learn from experiences with them, rather than having a specific meaning that you can give a name to. While the article focused around elementary maths and things that you would expect students to learn in primary school, such as the concept of zero and how to use the place value system, this is often not explained to children properly and so can become a big issue in high school.It was also illuminating to read this week that there are proportionately more dyslexic people in English-speaking countries because of the way our language is put together. Combining difficulties with our complicated sound-phoneme system with mathematical jargon and symbols is a problem for many students. It is also a good point that in maths we tend to not use unnecessary wording, and hence every word is important, which makes it different from any other sort of reading. Because we use as few words as possible, maths books are full fo dense sentences that need to be carefully read a few times, then broken down into more manageable pieces in order to construct meaning from them.In the vein of last week’s readings, this week’s readings also included the problems with prepositions and other issues with word problems. The interesting thing in the first reading was comparing English word problems with the same problem in Mandarin. English confuses students by having the algebra not correlate with the words. For example, expressing “There are 6 times as many men as women” should be m=6w, but many students will read and then write w=6m (reversal error). In Mandarin they don’t have this problem, because the words tell them: “Male members are female members 6 times”.