A Math Concept Doesn’t Need Different Explanations
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If a student needs five different explanations before one finally “clicks,” the problem may not be the explanations.
The problem is probably that the student has lots of missing prerequisites that are preventing them from understanding the concept.
Here’s an example.
Say you’re teaching slope, but your student is really shaky on fractions.
Well, you can keep finding clever ways around fractions so that they don’t actually have to know fractions to do the problems, but now they only understand the easy cases when the slope is an integer.
They don’t really know slope yet.
And if you pretend that they do and just say, “All right, you got it.
Let’s keep on moving on,” well, it’s gonna cause a lot of problems later.
So in this situation, what you gotta do is you gotta go back, you gotta find and fix those missing skills, and then keep building from there.
This teaser is distilled from the following posts, if you want to dive deeper:
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