[Alberta's Child]

Maybe my situation was unique, but I found that mathematics was a terrible subject to learn in a classroom. The only way I could learn it well was through direct application of the material I learned.

If you sat me down in an Algebra II class and taught me the material directly, then gave me 10 problems to do for homework, I might get half of them right at best. But if you gave me one homework problem and told me I had to write a program in BASIC or Pascal to solve that problem and user-input variations of it, I'd get the best grade in the class by a wide margin.

[elpadre]

there were no computers in my teaching days. But where word problems were involved they were real applications. And sure some struggled, but they were the ones you spent more time with, one on one. In those days most kids wanted to learn.