Learning and Doing Mathematics

by John Mason (Editor), Jenny Houssart

Learning and Doing MathematicsSecond EditionJohn Mason, formerly Professor of Mathematical Education at the Open UniversityLearning and Doing is for anyone keen to develop learning skills or to enhance their problem-solving powers. It will help you develop your own strategies by recognising blockages and then using the techniques of generalizing and specializing to identify routes to a solution. Examples are varied. Many are mathematical in flavour, but they are accessible to anyone with an interest in the subject and the methods proposed apply across the curriculum and indeed to everyday situations in modern life. Developed at the Open University, all the material is tried and tested. Professor Mason's style is relaxed and colloquial - accessible to all, whether a teacher wanting to use it for examples and fresh ways to inspire, or a parent or student wanted to boost their learning and broaden their mathematical thinking. Contents: Specializing Generalizing Specializing and Generalizing Together Convincing Yourself and Others When is an Argument Valid? Further Food for Thought Five Interludes are presented between the chapter - to provoke practical mathematical thinking, and have some fun.Reviews of the First Edition"An excellent resource...an impressive, carefully chosen array of examples...I will certainly recommend it." John Baylis, The Mathematical Gazette"Fresh, lively and energetic...we should buy [his] books before they are banned."Ralph Schwarzenberger, Mathematics Teaching

Genres: Mathematics, Teaching

92 pages, Paperback

First published September 5, 1988

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

John Mason, Professor, The Open University, is well known for many books including Thinking Mathematically with Leone Burton and Kaye Stacey and Learning and Doing Mathematics. More recently he has published Practitioner Research Using the Discipline of Noticing. He has a wealth of experience of helping practitioners to develop their own practice, and to turn that into research.

Reviews

[Matt Butler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got some useful things from this book, and made several notes. However, I don't think I was quite the target audience, it felt like it was for undergraduate maths students. Still quite a quick read and the interlude sections were interesting too. You definitely can't just read this, you need to work through at least some of the exercises.