Error Analysis

I am really glad we spent so much time looking at errors from samples of students' work. This helps me, as a future teacher see what errors students make. This also helps because its a good way to see what needs to be explained more thoroughly and how to present the material so it makes sense to the students. I felt like some of the errors were easy to spot, while others were more tricky to spot; so I'm glad there was a variety of error problems presented to class.

This helped me because it showed me what students really struggle with. Being a special education major, I have no doubt that more likely than not several of my future students will struggle with mathematics. Doing the errors, will help me because it is a nice introduction of common errors students may make. This way, when I am teaching math and a student makes a mistake, it won't be my first time correcting math errors.

I thought the most beneficial part of the error problems, was learning how to help students learn the material and to prevent them from making the same error in the future. More likely than not, students forgot to do a step in solving the problem or didn't do the step correctly (ex: instead of adding, they multiplied) so when we were reviewing the error problems, we discussed how we can teach them why its one way instead of the other. The reason discussed in class were more than "just because" or memorize how to do a certain type of problem. I thought this was interesting because, when I was going through grade school, I didn't learn the reason behind why you did specific types of problems, I just memorized the formulas. I believe if I was taught the reasons why we do something, I would have understood more and actually enjoyed going to math class. Overall, I believe this was a very beneficial activity because we can directly relate it to the real life classroom.