Blog 1: Response to Richard Skemp's Article

As I was reading through Richard Skemp’s article, titled Relational Understanding and Instrumental Understanding, some key points raised in his article made me think about my past experiences as a student as I recall my learning techniques during early or secondary classes. Firstly, the fact that Skemp points out the exact issue that I am regretfully of committing – this instrumental way of learning and understanding – in most of my math classes, as a way for me to speed up the learning process. Secondly, I cannot agree more on the points he covered on relational understanding, and how it is a basis for other new concepts and topics. On this point, I realize that the units covered in math classes have all tied to each other in a sequential way. So, it may be harder to learn and understand a new topic without fully understanding the previous topic really well, and on why we study this. For example, we learned the area of a shape by first learning measurement. Thirdly, as Skemp may not have addressed, however important relational understanding is for students, I think that relational understanding of teaching may only be appropriate for certain classes, such as the academic, gifted, IB, or AP classes. Surely it is worthwhile to teach students in applied classes and engage them with relational understanding, as a way to find their potentials, but I think teachers should teach this way one step at a time. By first engaging the students in the materials they are learning, and once they are “hooked” on a particular topic, teachers should then dwell deeper into the reasons and to seek new topics which covers that as a basis.

Overall, I agree with how Skemp stands on this issue because teachers should provide students with a relational understanding of concepts. This is particularly important once students study at post-secondary schools or even doing research for their post-graduate studies. That being said, finding the right class to teach these kind of lessons is something else that I would like to explore.