Talk in the classroom
Clare Lee’s 3rd chapter offers insight into effective classroom practices for using talk in the classroom. The strongest focus in this chapter seems to be on the teacher’s ability to scaffold learning without mediating every conversation and without rephrasing or rewriting students expressions of mathematical concepts. Lee gives good clear examples of the benefits of holding back, and really shows the importance of building students usage up progressively. The analogy to speaking French for the first time in France is one I related to well and gives me an enthusiasm to help break down any shy or tentative usage in students by creating a similar classroom atmosphere that Lee aspires to.
Frank Tapson tackles the roots of defining mathematical terms in his article The Language of Mathematics. Without Elucid’s definitions of lines and points it would be difficult to use these terms to define shapes. In the classroom then it becomes important to look a little into the meanings of words to avoid confusion for students. Tapson poses the situation of drawing a variety of quadrilaterals but using only a square, and the test and marking difficulties a teacher might face without exploring such meanings. He concludes with an excellent flow chart for quadrilaterals.
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