On Being Stuck

Being stuck in math feels like one of those universal experiences not just for students, but more so teachers too. I liked that the author treats being stuck as a way to move forward, as counterintuitive as it is, but the part that made me think the most is the idea of freshly re-entering a question. Whenever I got stuck, I would be stubborn a bit longer and try to figure it, and then proceed to giving up and searching online for the answer. However, it’s a pretty interesting take to deal with getting stuck as re-entering the question by rereading with different interpretations. In the spoken language of English, we put emphasis on different words of the sentence to change the meaning of the sentence. For example, if I see the sentence “jeez, I sure hope that my practicum school is nearby,” I can emphasize on the jeez to highlight my frustration, I can emphasize on the I sure hope to sound sarcastic, and I can emphasize on the nearby to hope that John is nice enough to place me in at a school close to me. Different emphasizes (is that the plural..?) will change the meaning of a sentence, and I think that is how we should treat math problems too. It’s not about repeating the sentence, it’s about re-interpreting the sentence until it makes more sense.

The second stop is at the leap frog problem, which literally made me stop and think. I really liked that the author highlighted their thought process in this whole endeavour. I actually felt like I was stuck just the way they are, yet I found a lot of comfort in seeing that we struggled with the same thing. There are a lot of “why” throughout the question, so I thought it was interesting to see using “why” as a way to lead to the solution, rather than being frustrated at the solution.