Posted on 02/27/2016 3:20:58 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
To me the biggest problem with teaching math today is that few teachers know math themselves. Past the basics/early elementary school, it appears that most people who know math have opted for something other than teaching as a career; by high school qualified math teachers are few and far between. People who can teach high school math can usually command a much higher salary doing something else in the private sector, and as long as union work rules require the math teachers be paid on the same scale as gym teachers makes it unattractive indeed.
I say the parents are better off with no education, then having their kids indoctrinated.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
then or than?
See # 21; many teaching “methods” today are designed to accommodate the teachers who primarily come from the bottom of their college classes. In my experience, parents are expected to teach their children today because teachers are ignorant/uneducated. When children routinely are assigned homework that hasn’t been covered yet in class, and steered towards websites for extra help, it is very clear that the teachers don’t know the material - the parents or a website will provide the teaching.
I’ve posted on other threads that if your child is not in an “honors” track (”average” from thirty years ago), then he/she has already been written off and will receive no education at all. The schools determine who has involved parents, and focus on those students.
The public school system should be dismantled.
lol than.
Typing too fast! Believe it or not, I used to tutor, developed my own reading and spelling (phonics) program. I’m blaming old age as well lol.
I’ve found khan academy a great resource in understanding math. As a youth I found calculus hard to get but now I’m determined to understand it. Learning algebra again now. Makes thinking clearly easier. Maybe thats why liberal educators don’t want young people to learn math...logical thinking will make them question liberal ideas
Math should be taught by rote. Kids in the first or second grade should have to memorize addition tables up to 100. By third or fourth grade, it should be multiplication tables. By memory. No more of this “memorization is bad” nonsense. Start with the basics and build on them. And quit trying to be so clever about how you teach the basics.
^ This. You don’t learn how to play the piano by visualizing it, you learn by rote memorization and muscle memory. I amaze people with my ability to do math in my head, why can I do this? I can do this because my fourth grade teach made us do our tables until we wanted to puke. I still see those tables in my head to this day but now I see the elegance in those numbers. I’m 58.
I teach 4th grade math to 61 kids in a rural district. The kids are split between 3 classes. I used to teach in an urban district for 10 years. From the first day of school, I have my students learning their multiplication facts. When they complain that it is too hard, I tell them that I had to learn them in the third grade. I don’t teach any of the “gimmicks” that I have seen, such as the lattice method for double digit multiplication, I always stick to the traditional algorithms. That way, when they move on to middle and high school, they can understand how the formulas and patterns ought to work together, and not rely on trying to remember some trick that they were taught several years before. What’s amazing is that my students’ grandparents can help them with their homework, but their parents have a difficult time because of all of the quacky methods that were taught to them when they were in school. Very few parents can help their kids with fractions, measurement conversations, or elapsed time.
As far as standardized testing goes, I always tell parents and my students that the people that are making the tests aren’t trying to see if the student knows the material, they are trying to see if they can trick the student into choosing the wrong answer. This leads to teachers having to spend valuable instruction time teaching students what kind of tricks to look for, instead of actually teaching them the math skill. As a teacher, this is what disgusts me the most about the educational system.
The only goal in math education should be to teach kids to get the right answer, the quickest and most efficient way possible. The world doesn’t give a flying flip if they enjoy it or it makes them feel good or if they come up with creative ways to get the wrong answer. All that matters is getting it right.
If I had kids in elementary school today (assuming I can’t afford private school or homeschooling) I would buy a Saxon math program and drill them at home. Teach them basic math facts and make them memorize them.
I worked for a while on the side for one of the tutoring companies, helping kids to improve ACT scores. I saw some intelligent high school kids that couldn’t multiply 6 x 7 or estimate 10% of something without a calculator. If a kid doesn’t know that 6 x 7 = 42 without thinking about it or using a calculator by the time they are in middle school they will never be proficient in math.
New math was a more analytical approach to mathematics which focused less on traditional process approach of the past. New math was a great success for me, I loved the new math approach. The new math approach was much more rigorous, and many students and parents could not handle the change. In old math you learned how to find the square root of 1.732, in new math you learned to develop a method to find the square root of 1.732. The problem with new math is that not everyone is cut out to be a mathematician, scientist, and/or an engineer.
RE: “to see if they can trick the student into choosing the wrong answer.”
This is a great insight, that the Education Establishment wants to trick kids into picking the wrong answer.
For me, Common Core is systemically perverse and that’s why it should be eliminated.
Math is taught in the most ridiculous ways. The entire curriculum of math needs to be rethought. It shouldn’t take 4 years to teach the entire series of math.
My mom taught piano.
You did not "discover the beauty or patterns of music" on your own because left on your own, you won't do it.
But if you do your drills and practice then one day you will "see" the beauty of the music. She used to call it "the click" and few things made her happier then when she could say that one of her students had heard the click.
Math is very much related to music. While those teachers like to think they would have discovered the joy of math on their own almost none of them would have. They had to do the drills, learn the patterns and then one day they heard the click.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.