A Problem Solving Approach to Mathematics for Elementary School Teachers (11th edition)

Because I am interested in education, I tutor English, math and statistics, and have also graded papers as an at home scorer in these areas. I have worked in computer labs, and helped students with technical material. To hone my educational skills in mathematics, I recently took a class in Math for Elementary School Teachers, and was able to enhance my knowledge in this area. The textbook we used for the class was "A Problem Solving Approach to Mathematics for Elementary School Teachers (11th edition)" by Rick Billstein, Shlomo Libeskind and Johnny W. Lott. Since I spent a goodly amount of time interacting with the text, I thought I would review the book. The book has fourteen chapters and covers everything from Number Theory to Geometry.

I was under the illusion that since I already had taken a lot of math in college prior to taking a class for teachers that the information would be mostly review. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself challenged with the math as well as the understanding of developmental issues involved in teaching. I put my knowledge of psychology as well as math to work and still learned quite a bit of new material as well on how to convey concepts to students.

The book covered problem solving, number systems, set theory, algebra, plane and solid geometry, graphs, statistics and analysis of data. There was information on whole numbers, real numbers, and rational numbers. Besides all the math content, the book discussed grade level expectations for understanding various topics. In addition to the exercises related to understanding the concepts, there were also problems in the book related to what the expectation for depth of understanding should be at different grade levels.

I especially liked learning about different number systems prior to ours such as the Egyptian and that of the Aztecs. Since I have studied psychology I also found interesting the ideas related to the age or grade level at which a person would understand certain concept and to what depth. I would definitely recommend this book as an aid in learning this topic.

Later, in a speech class, I made use of what I had learned about Mayan mathematics to choose their early knowledge of math as my topic for our group cultural project on the Mayas.

Reader's Choice

There is an online version of the book which is the one I used as wells as a hard copy text. I chose the online version because it was less expensive overall and also because I had free access to it and didn't have to pay for it until a few weeks after the class started. The online version that I had was put out by Pearson Education and there were extra features such as online homework and tests.

It is up to you as to which version will distract you (or your cat) less.

Extras

Some of the nice features of the Billstein book were the inclusion of diversity such as giving explicit information about the counting systems of the Aztecs and the Egyptians. There were also some interesting tidbits about women in math. For example, in talking about tessellations, geometrical designs created by a recurring geometrical figure in which all the space is covered, the text mentioned that a woman without formal training had discovered in the latter part of the last century two tesselations that mathematicians had not know about previously. I got so interested in tessellations that I read up some on it myself by googling it on the web.

This is a review of a book for Math for Elementary School Teachers. There are other books on the topic but I thought this one was quite good.

I became interested in tessellations when reading the text and looked up so more information about them on the web.

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What helped you to learn math as a youngster?