Medium – Brett Berry
“We are not computers. We are not machines. We do not think procedurally. That’s why the “old way” of teaching math is not the best way. The traditional way involves rote memorization and algorithms performed on paper. They require little to no understanding of why the algorithm works. It simply works. In some situations this is great. If I were to program a computer, I would use algorithms and procedural instructions because that is how a computer thinks. It’s not how humans think though. We have an advantage that computers don’t. We think strategically. We optimize for the easiest solution. We’re adaptive. We can think about a problem forwards, backwards, in chunks, from the middle out. We can rearrange terms, regroup, combine and split it apart. We can round up and down, and back again. We find patterns and draw connections.”(more)