Benny’s Rules: The Problem with IPI Mathematics

From Benny’s Conception of Rules and Answers in IPI Mathematics, I found Benny to have a thorough frustration stemming from his view of what mathematics was. What I found most illustrative of this is when we are told that he said, “I am going to look up fractions, and I am going to find out who did the rules, and how they are kept.” The rules and their inflexibility in his view of mathematics is certainly not the stance I would my students to adopt. Perhaps what is lacking the most in the method of instruction referred to in this article is the discussion with peers and teachers. I believe without this, the study of math can very easily become what I had become for Benny: a fixed set of rules applied to a variety of problems to arrive at the right answer. It seems to me that the effective teacher-student interaction is key to developing an attitude of relational understanding which I believe the joy in math comes from.