## Wednesday, May 6, 2015

### Never be complacent of your math problem solving skills

If you want to become a legendary successful learner/student, there is one golden rule to abide by:

Never become complacent with what you have accomplished in the past. Always persuade and inspire your inner self to explore new ideas and venture into new territories so to develop 21st century competencies and become a critical thinker and problem solver.

Math educators have to chime in and guide students all the way through but how do teachers are able to do so?

According to (Shellard & Moyer, 2002):

There are three critical components to effective mathematics instruction:

1. Teaching for conceptual understanding

2. Developing children’s procedural literacy

3. Promoting strategic competence through meaningful problem-solving investigations

Therefore, feeding students with the right and intriguing math problems wouldn't go amiss.

This particular problem (Prove that $\sin 10^{\circ}>\dfrac{1}{6}$) is particularly useful because it helps to expand students' horizons in their problem solving skills, or at least offer the opportunity to do so.

I have shown how we could approach this problem on my previous two blog posts (Prove that $\sin 10^{\circ}>\dfrac{1}{6}$)(small-angle-approximation) that it could be solved by the method of proving by contradiction and also by using the small angle approximation formula.

And the list of methods one could use to prove this problem doesn't end there. There are at least three more credible ways to attack this problem!

Two of them revolve around calculus method, and the other is from trigonometric method.

Are you eager to take your learning journey to the next level? Are you motivated and energetic enough to take out a pen and a paper to start working on the problem using the proposed calculus and trigonometric method?

I would like to hear from you (whether that means you are a math educator or a student), that if you want more hint by commenting on this blog post. Keep plugging until you could smell and actually taste success.