I was watching a German documentary on employers testing German 17-year olds for apprentice positions. They had ten simple math problems (what’s three-quarters of an hour for example). And out of ten German kids who took the simple quiz...only two got seven or more right.
I think math teachers in general...are failing to get across math skills....period. Kids are unable to grasp how a simple formula can be used in a business or job situation. They are simply memorizing enough math formulas to pass a test, and nothing else.
I think the better skill here....around the eighth grade...is two entire years of business math.
You’re right.
A big part of the problem are teachers’ colleges and programs. They focus incessantly upon “methods” and have stopped worrying about results.
A big part of their push on “methods” is to try to make students “understand” math - which is pretty humorous, because it is very apparent that most elementary and secondary teachers don’t understand, much less know, math. Many teachers are downright scared of math - and they pass this on to some kids as well.
Kids aren’t dumb - they might be uneducated, but they’re not dumb. They can smell a teacher who doesn’t know what s/he is teaching a mile away - and tune out very quickly.
The thing that positively infuriates me, tho, is how much money we piss down a hole in the ground on these idiotic new textbooks for math. There is NOTHING new in K-12 mathematics in the last 100 years other than perhaps synthetic division. That’s it. Absent loss or destruction of a book, there is NO need for a new math book in any school in this country. None. We should identify a good, solid math textbook for every grade (or every couple of grades) and then make it standard. So what if some idiotic PhD in a teacher’s college doesn’t like the textbook five years from now? They’re not teaching kids. They’re just scribbling jargon for a paper, which is utterly inconsequential to teaching children math.
What is the problem with math teaching? I was terrible at math. I grew up in NYC and went to an elite public high school and then to CCNY before open admissions - but I was still terrible at advanced math and couldn’t get through calculus, although I had been good in algebra.
Then when I was in my 20s, I took a class on teaching math to children. Somehow, everything opened up at that moment. The professor (who was teaching teachers) was Montessori-trained, if that gives you a hint.
There’s something wrong about the way the subject is taught in the US.
We use RightStart Math in our homeschool. It teaches for understanding. It leads the kids through developing their own algorithm before it tells them the easiest algorithm to use. That way they aren’t memorizing a formula but they truly understand what they are doing even if they took the long way around the first time. They don’t put pencil to paper for a “worksheet” until they understand what they are doing.