Reply to At what point do we pull the plug?

Forum Index » Advanced Academic Programs (AAP)

Reply to "At what point do we pull the plug?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, it's really quite early for your son to feel so overwhelmed by math. The beginning stuff should be review. Have you sat down with him and gone over the material they have covered, to see what exactly is bothering him?[/quote]

OP here - DC got very frustrated with homework and got most of the problems wrong. This has not been the case in the past. MS itself has been a bit of a transition, so this has just compounded it. Unfortunately, I can’t really help as this level of math is many years behind me in memory. The teacher is being supportive and believes they are in the right place and urged patience.[/quote]
Sorry if this is awkward.. but I have to wonder how is it possible that an adult cannot really help due to the math being "many years beyond"? They haven't started doing any remotely complicated algebra, and are likely doing basic word problems with variables, which should be... solvable for adults with common sense. Genuinely curious as to what topics and problems are assigned that it is beyond you and your child, because something doesn't make sense here. If you can give specific examples, we can help point you in the right direction in terms of what you or your child should study and/or how they should think about the problems.[/quote]

One of the books that really did change my life was Liping Ma's "Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics". She asked a short series of questions covering relatively basic math to elementary school teachers selected as being highly interested in the subject. US teachers did badly. For example, half of them couldn't divide by fractions. Only one out of twenty-six or so could come up with a mathematically correct example illustrating the concept of division by fractions, and it wasn't even a good example. This suggests to me is that these "basic math" problems are, in fact, a *lot* more difficult than us mathy people realize. And also that the math instruction of anyone who grew up in the US is not likely to have been very good.[/quote]
Very true, this is why it's so important to carefully teach kids the ideas and concepts in elementary school. Right now we have an alarming number of students who are taking things like calculus in high school but struggle with basic algebraic operations, or even very fundamental things such as fractions. This suggests that they mainly memorized their way through math and did not really understand things. How do we fix this? I don't really know, because most teachers who teach elementary (or even middle) school don't really understand the ideas, they just teach procedural steps. This then propagates to the students, some of whom then become future teachers.[/quote]
It can be that they don't memorize enough. With little direct instruction, learning multiple algorithms but mastering none, and limited homework, many kids are not solid enough on their facts and procedures.[/quote]
No, this is not an issue. The whole purpose of school is to memorize and regurgitate on tests. Schools heavily focus on following procedural steps and repetition of calculations. The kids have it down for the test but they have not really understood it, which is why they get in trouble later. Some have trouble in algebra class, some at later points, some during calculus, and some make it all the way to college but find out that their first year engineering classes are very different and require thinking and problem solving vs recalling facts. Trust me, this is not a memorization issue, it's an understanding issue.[/quote]

Let's summarize the main criticisms of USA math education:

1. Too much rote memorization that doesn't teach conceptual understanding.

2. Too much conceptual teaching that parents don't understand, instead of rote memorization that builds fluency. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics