Blog Post #1 Justin F

As I was reading this chapter of Buehl I saw how they connected this importance of prior knowledge to reading and understanding to how math classrooms and curriculums operate. I think it shows the most devastating part of learning math in our school system and shows why so many people in this country seem to hate math. A lot of people say they "don't get math" or "math isn't for them", when in reality math is for everyone, it's an important basis of understanding the world around us and despite peoples claims otherwise, we use it everyday to some extent. So why is it that so many people have this view of math and are so adverse to learning it so defeatist about learning it? Well it all comes down to conceptual knowledge, conceptual knowledge is required to be able to build off and learn more in that discipline. It's not just knowing how to do something but instead why you can do that, not just plugging numbers into an equation but understanding what each variables mean and why you get the answer you do. So when you're just getting by and just trying to figure out how to solve a given problem you have to learn all these different "special circumstances" instead of understanding why they differ from what you've already learned. Lots of math classes come with periods where the teacher needs to refresh everyone on how you do certain things as they relate to what the teacher is instructing, this knowledge doesn't stick and requires coverage every time its brought up because the students don't actually understand what they're doing. If they learn the conceptual knowledge of these things it would stick with them more and allow them to apply that knowledge to new concepts in the class.

Another aspect of this comes from students not seeing real life applications. A lot of these problems consist of a person, for example, wanting to know the length of a shadow from an object. My question is, when are kids going to actually want to know that? Or another example is wanting to know how to divvy up a pizza using fractions which is definitely more usable in real life but people don't typically calculate exact portions of pizza each person gets. I definitely think that some problems do work well with the scenarios they choose but others make math just seem like something to do rather than a tool to use in life. I think giving real life scenarios in problems would help kids understand this and would encourage them to want to learn more and would help their conceptual understanding too.

Comments

  1. Klarissa GuillenOctober 9, 2026 at 9:39 PM

    Hey Justin!
    This is interesting that you mention applying any kind of real-life scenario into math and you're right. I dont know if you've seen those memes that make fun of math word problems of people having like 50 watermelons and then someone else eating 10 so how many or left? My brain went straight there while reading your post. But I think what I resonated with the most is the fact that you said, "A lot of people say they "don't get math" or "math isn't for them", when in reality math is for everyone, it's an important basis of understanding the world around us and despite peoples claims otherwise, we use it everyday to some extent". This is very true and can be applied to any classroom and in any content. I think he biggest message I got from your post is no matter what you teach, you must help provide and build/support the connection the content can give your students and thats a great way of thinking to have!

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  2. Aresha AhmedOctober 12, 2026 at 1:24 PM

    Hi Justin, thank you for your thoughts.
    When learning math we need to understand that it is a new language. The best way that we can learn is through examples and to your point we do need to include real life scenarios to help students conceptualize math better.

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