This was the scenario; adult student about early 40's, family man, been from Afghanistan for 5 years and before this had been deployed in Middle East and had been a G-Force specialist, now sit in my Mathematics class - Basic College Mathematics. He showed poor performance in fraction and its manipulation especially long-hand computation of fraction operation. His reason, which was valid to me, was that in the military he trained to access the calculator for fast computation that is vital to his work. The curriculum is set up for long-hand computation on fraction operation. I need to engage him on this topic and if only long-hand computation would discourage him, I opted not to test him on this but on his experience background of applying fraction. I assigned for him a class presentation in which he would show how the four operations of fraction would play out.
He presented to class a carrier plane C130 on-flight total weight in pounds, the ratio of soldier weight without ammunition, soldier weight with 400-pounds ammunition, the ratio of ammunition to get on-board, divided the allotted soldier ammunition over 4500 soldiers, computed the ideal weight of the carrier plane at a certain altitude by subtracting ratios, and figuring out what fatal event would happen when calculations are not precise.
As facilitator of learning, the above example showed a better measure of understanding over the knowing of long-hand computation, a real-life meaningful application of subject matter that illustrated how learning could take place.
