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© 2014 Pacific Crest
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D
emonstrate Your Understanding
Apply it and show you know in context!
1. Pick an interesting reading from the appendix of this book and fill out a Reading Log to demonstrate
how well you can apply the Reading Methodology when reading mathematical content.
2. Read an article that presents a mathematical display (e.g.,
Sports Illustrated
on “Money Ball”) and
produce a Reading Log based on that article.
3. Look through your shelves at the textbooks you own, choose one that contains mathematics, and
select a chapter. Read a section of the chapter and produce a Reading Log based on that reading.
H
ardest Problem
How hard
can
it be? Can you still use what you’ve learned?
From this and the previous two readings, make a list of what was difficult to read and why. For each
issue or difficulty, share a strategy for understanding the mathematics and demonstrating that you
have understood the mathematics in the reading. Identify the steps and components of the Reading
Methodology and the Reading Log that will help with each strategy. With the help of your classmates,
identify three techniques or practices that will strengthen that aspect of the reading performance.
T
roubleshooting
Find the error and correct it!
Identify the error and provide a correction:
Jonas had to read chapter 3 in his precalc text over the weekend. His goal was simply to get it
finished and learn enough to pass the kind of simple quiz his instructor was likely to give. He
figured that if he started at the beginning of the chapter and read all 25 pages in the chapter, that
would be good enough. As he read through it, he repeatedly encountered terms that were only
slightly familiar, but he knew that someone was bound to ask for explanations in class, so he only
underlined some of those terms. It seemed to him that a lot of the chapter was a repeat of previous
content, so he skimmed the sections that looked like things he already knew. If that content really
was
new, he’d find that out when it came time for doing the homework problems. Since their TAwas
patient, that was good enough. Therefore, he focused on what kinds of examples were given — they
were angles and relationships between sides and angles of triangles. Jonas knew he’d been good at
geometry and how different could it be if all the examples here were triangles again? He figured
that “Trigonometric Identities” were just another name for stuff he’d seen before in Geometry. After
thinking for a moment, he was able to recall the equation for the area of a triangle and how to figure
out if triangles were equivalent. No sweat and no need to follow the step-by-step examples either. 25
pages of reading was suddenly a lot more like 15 and who would say no to that?
M
aking it Matter
Solving problems in your life
●
In looking through reading for your other courses, identify what appears to be difficult to understand
and fill out a Reading Log for that reading. This will allow you to teach yourself through using the
Reading Methodology.
●
Sift through the media available to you (hint: there are probably more than 100 different magazines in
your local library) and find reading content that is very challenging, mathematically. If you need, find
additional resources on the internet to help you clarify and understand the mathematics used in the
article. Produce a Reading Log of the reading to illustrate the learning that you produced for yourself.
1.3 Learning to Read Mathematics