The first thing is that we can connect the concept of Faux Amis with mathematics. In mathematics the word understanding has two different meanings which are relational understanding and instrumental understanding. It depends on a person how he or she takes it. There are all kind of students in the classrooms, some of them want to understand concepts instrumentally because they just don't want to know all the explanation behind the concept. Whereas others want to get the depth-in knowledge of the concept.
Secondly, after reading the examples of instrumental understanding, it made me think that most of the time I had been taught in the instrumental way. Only the formulas were given to solve the problems. After that I came to realise that why in school I liked some teacher's style of teaching more than other. Some of them teach relationally which was easy to understand, on the other hand, some just gave the formulas to solve the problems. In the end, there is a difference between learning the formula and understanding the formula. If you learn the formula, you may think that you have understand the formula, but in fact you haven't understand it. By learning formula you will only be able to solve similar type of questions.
According to me, instrumental understanding do have some advantages over relational understanding. As it is written in the article, there are some topics those are difficult to understand relationally. Otherwise, teachers should try their best to teach students relationally.
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