Response for Skemp's Artical

Relative math is useful and instrumental math is result-oriented.

     The first thing that made me stop and think was when the definitions of Relational meaning and Instrumental meaning for mathematics came up, as someone who has studied math for many years I had a sense of the difference but never thought it was possible to separate it so clearly with two words, and the second was when he was talking about the advantages of these two ways of thinking, it reminded me of the way I learned math in junior and senior high school, which was very result oriented, meaning that my teachers had been teaching us in a kind of instrumental math way, and for some of the deeper problems, my teachers left us with the words at that time, “These are the concepts that college will teach you ”, but we did get good grades through instrumental math. 

     The third thing he said at the end made me think about how we can make math more enjoyable for students instead of scary when they hear about it, which leads to his closing point about whether math ought not to be used for relational mathematics only. My view is that every term or concept in math is necessarily relevant, like a tutor I did for a 10th grade student recently, when they were learning about the greatest common factor and the least common Multiple, they first introduced what prime is and factors are, and then explained many different ways to solve them. I think this kind of math already has a little bit of relevance, but in the end, students will only choose the method they like the most to solve the problem, and won't think about the reasons why, so sometimes instrumental math is needed for students who aren't that interested in math or just need to finish the course, but I still think that if you want to get students interested in math, you need to get them interested in elementary school or lower grades through relevance math and fun math.