Produced by Charles Wells.  Home.   Website Contents     Website Index    

Back to Useful Behaviors head

Posted 29 January 2007

DOING MATH: Self-monitoring

Pay attention to what works and what does not work when you are trying to do math.  Ideally you should install in your brain a kind of Watcher who watches what you do without being judgmental.  Math Ed people call this self-monitoring.   Self-monitoring enables you to discover both functional and dysfunctional behavior.

It takes work to succeed at self-monitoring in an area where you have not practiced it.  When you practice self-monitoring successfully while doing math then in the long run you will learn more about doing math than you will with any other practice suggested on abstractmath.org.  That is because this website is a compendium of things known to help people struggling with abstract math.  When you watch yourself doing math, you are learning about YOUR difficulties, not about other people’s difficulties.

I cannot tell you much about how to install the Watcher.  All I can say is: Be aware of the usefulness of watching yourself work!

Self-monitoring is a great help in other aspects of life besides math!  Typically, people do it in certain types of activity and not in others (different for different people).   Sometimes people avoid thinking about or grappling with problems that they have in certain areas of life, with the result that they don’t solve their problems in that area.

Give worked example