So – two similar posts on twitter this morning just a few minutes apart:
David Coffey here:
and
Keith Devlin here:
I struggled with the balance between answer getting and mathematical thinking just this morning with my older son. I had him working through an example problem in the “angle-angle similarity” section from Art of Problem Solving’s Geometry book. This is a topic that he’d not seen before, but he seemed to be able to work through the first couple of sample problems reasonably well. The problem we recorded gave him a little more difficulty, though – particularly when it came to identifying how two similar triangles would match up.
I’m not satisfied with how I interacted with him in this problem and that dissatisfaction has been nagging at me all morning. I’m not sure what specific thing I should have done better, but I definitely wish I had found a better balance between the answer getting part of this problem and the math ideas.