After reading this article, issues that I ran into during my practicum were voiced. I was tasked with teaching the equations of lines, but ran into difficulties quickly. I thought that I would have been able to just share my knowledge with my students. However, I ran into needing to know a bunch of different forms of the lines. For example, I needed to teach that "General Form of a line is 0 = Ax +By +C where A B C are all integers and A is non-negative."
I marked tests and found that many students did not exactly follow these rules, and felt bad that I had to take marks away for these mistakes. I am happy that I now know that these rules were arbitrary, and this exemplifies why there was so much friction between me and this issue.
The most annoying aspect of this experience is that students were so busy learning these arbitrary rules, that they did not understand the necessary concepts of lines being a relationship between x and y. Students would remove x and y just in order to make the equation look more like General Form.
When I teach my classes, I am going to focus on necessary knowledge and prioritize it. After students understand necessary concepts, I will teach them the arbitrary rules.
