What we learn to do we learn by doing

The title was attributed to Aristotle in today's Daily Ray of Hope from the Sierra Club, which included the photo shown here.I'm not quite sure what the duck is learning, but it's nice to have an illustration.

It's strange that so many math teachers think "doing" means doing drills, rather than doing something to make the math they are learning make sense, as in "doing math."

I've been having a lovely time reading lots of books published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, particulary their series, Focus on Reasoning and Sense-making, the Navigation series, to help incorporate the new Core Standards in lessons, maybe using textbooks that don't really get the concept of reasoning, and the new series, Developing Essential Understanding.

Reading these has led me on to other discoveries of my own, since they often use math that I haven't used very often, like polar coordinates, matrices or graph theory. 

I'm enjoying my little break here learning about learning. But I hope I soon have students with whom I can practice what I've learned (learn teaching by teaching!)