From Answer-Getters to Problem Solvers

It often surprises people when they find out that, although I'm now a math educator, I never really liked mathematics when I was a student. It wasn't that I was bad at math. I just never found any joy in the subject. My teachers demonstrated procedures that made it easy to arrive at solutions, and my classmates and I practiced those procedures until we had them memorized. Then we took tests to show how well we could follow the steps and arrive at correct solutions. For us, math was all about answer-getting.

Answer-getting is a narrow view of what it means to engage in mathematics. It encourages methodologies that focus on direct teaching of procedures and the use of mnemonic devices and other tricks for students to remember steps for performing calculations. Students in classrooms that focus on answer-getting are typically passive learners complying with prescribed approaches. Feedback often comes in the form of documenting correct and incorrect answers and mistakes in the procedures.

A Task in Three Acts