하영광

There are children who say, "I understand," during class, but whose pencils stop moving when asked to solve problems on their own. Hello. I am Ha Young-kwang, an elementary math teacher. I place more importance on whether a child can recall and apply what they have learned on their own, rather than simply listening to my explanations. That is why my classes do not move on to the next problem immediately after finishing the explanation. "Why does it work like this?" "What should we look at first here?" "Why did you choose this method?" Sometimes, I have the child take on the role of the teacher. "This time, you explain it to me." It becomes clear immediately when they try to explain it themselves. Whether they truly understand it, have merely memorized the solution method, or where their thinking stops. It is similar when they get a problem wrong. Rather than just checking the answer and ending there, we look together to see how far they thought correctly and where they went wrong. I also ask them again what they should look at first for the next problem. There are children who want to be good at math but keep getting stuck. They feel like they understand the explanation, but they find it difficult to start on their own, and if the problem changes even slightly, they don't know how to apply what they've learned. After making a few mistakes, they sometimes say, "I don't know," before even looking at the problem. I do not want to part ways with these children simply because we have finished the curriculum. I believe that before solving a few more difficult problems, they need the experience of overcoming their block and saying, "Ah, I understand now," and the experience of saying, "I solved this," and the experience of having accomplished it on their own. As such experiences accumulate little by little, even the child who used to give up the moment they saw a problem begins to look at it one more time. I will conduct classes where what is learned remains within the child, rather than classes focused on solving many problems quickly. I am teaching them so that even after class ends, when they open a problem on their own, they can say, "I'll give it a try."