In his article Benny's Conception of Rules and Answers in IPI Mathematics, S.H. Erlwanger explores the learning and understanding of Benny, a sixth grader who has the most success in his IPI mathematics class. Throughout the article, Erlwanger argues how important a student-teacher relationship is. The IPI program prevents the teacher from getting directly involved in her student's learning. The students work with note cards that give them examples and rules of how to do a problem and then exercises to practice what they have learned. The teacher acts only as a supervisor, not as a teacher. If a student approaches her with a question, the teacher can help the student understand the concept that they are learning. However, she has no other gauge for how her students are doing. This lack of teacher involvement causes students to teach themselves mathematics and to acquire their own relational understanding. As seen through Benny, students can then make up their own rules of mathematics and never learn correct principles. IPI is detrimental to learning because the students in the program do not have the proper foundation for the rest of their mathematical career.
Teachers are very important for a child's learning and they always will be. In classrooms today, I have seen that students learn better when the teacher takes an individual interest in each class member. Instead of teaching to a large classroom, it feels as if he is teaching directly to you. I have seen that these types of teachers are easier to approach than those that don't act like they care about the individual's learning. When grading homework or tests, a teacher can see where her students are still confused or what they understand. However, the IPI program does not have a way to check a students understanding.
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Thanks for your thoughts. Your writing has a nice flow and is easy to read. Succinct as well, which is very kind of you. I feel that the last sentence of your first paragraph would have fit better at the beginning of the paragraph. It explains how Erlwanger feels about the IPI program. Having this at the beginning might make the point of the rest of the paragraph easier to follow. Also, Erlwanger discussed more arguments against the IPI program then just the lack of teacher supervision. Maybe the paragraph would have been more thorough and strong if it included more of the problems he discussed. Good job though!
ReplyDeleteI thought that you had some very compelling arguments to support the need for a teacher-student relationship. And I agreed with everything you said. The closest thing that I could think of as a critique of your entry was that you may have been able to add another argument to why the relationship is important. I'm not sure you need this argument though, since you have supported the argument in so many different ways, but the argument is that teachers are able to teach any given topic in many different ways. Independant study makes it difficult for students to look at any topic from more than one point of view.
ReplyDeleteI like that you chose a topic sentence, that clearly you talked about in the first paragraph, and you supported it well in your paragraph's body. YOu did a good job at tieing everything back to your topic sentence and sticking to that topic in its entirety.
ReplyDeleteI would probably only add to this to make it a little stronger. Although your explanation was correct, you left out a few of the other problems Erlwanger stated in his paper. I think having more of these included could have strengthened the message you were sending out on the topic. One main reason for this is mostly, that it would help the correct ideas you were already sharing seem more valid, because it wouldn't be a single minded idea. Fantastic job though on your writing!
Your first sentence did a nice job summarizing the article and the student-teacher relationship is a key part of the article. Nice job.
ReplyDeleteI think another key aspect of the article is the importance of relational understanding. You can have a teacher that lectures the same way a student might read and go through the IPI program. Both of these cases can be detrimental if the student has no conceptual understanding. Part of the teacher's role is to make sure students gain a solid relational understanding.