Bad math teacher

Should have done it on Sunday night, so your daughter could go into school, visibly tired, to prove the teacher wrong.

Even though it’s more about the vagaries of English and future tenses.

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#christwhatanasshole

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I help him fully understand the concepts so he can work out the correct answers himself. This is the way parental involvement when kids are doing their homework is supposed to work. Parents doing kid’s homework = cheating.

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I always check it, and might say “look at #3 and #4 again”.

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I don’t really agree with the first explanation. Seems to be clutching at straws. The commutative nature of multiplication is taught and understood very early on. Using mental calculation systems based on the logic and structure of the numbers (e.g. 7 x11 example in the reference) is as likely to require commutation as not, so children should be encouraged to think flexibly when it is appropriate. The student saved themselves a second-or-so and some pencil lead by recognising the commutative nature of the problem. I’d say it was good answer. The argument that ignoring the commutative nature of multiplication logically prepares them for understanding the structure of division problems is very weak.

The second matrix explanation is more convincing. The Row-Column order convention is indeed essential for future mathematics involving matrices (but admittedly not for this particular question). Provided it had been taught as an important concept, the teacher was perhaps correct to mark it down for not implicitly recognising/using the convention.

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I had no idea you self-identified as a bear! Not that I’m judging, you understand.

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In theory, I understand it. In reality, you’re teaching children to answer by rote. The intended result of the strategy will not be obtained, i.e. deep knowledge.

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I always thought it was the opposite: yellow-orange is a yellowy shade of orange, and orange-yellow an orangey shade of yellow. Like, the first color in each is an adjective. Granted, my experience is from a box of Crayolas, not an art class.

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English primary school, 1970(?).

Teacher - "Name a fish beginning with ‘A’ "

Me - “Angler fish!”

Teacher - “No, an angler catches fish.”

Me - “Archer fish!”

Teacher “No, an archer is someone who fires arrows”

Me (to self) - “Adults are stupid, I’m not going to grow up!”

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:koala: :koala: :koala: :koala:
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:koala: :koala: :koala: :koala:

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Not if the arrow quits first, Mrs. Fletcher!

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Otherwise known as commutativity.

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Yes, you are correct. I forgot about the adjective function.

The teacher is working off a curriculum that presents the idea that multiplication, when first introduced, is always of the form (multiples) of (thing), or m x t. So by that definition, it’s technically incorrect to say that 5 x 3 = 5 + 5 + 5, since 3 is the thing being multiplied.

That’s just ridiculous! I remember when I first learned division, we learned the different words (divisor, dividend, quotient) for the different parts of an elementary division equation, but we never learned the corresponding terms for multiplication (according to wikipedia, they’re “multiplicand” and “multiplier”) because multiplication is commutative. That’s one of the first things you learn: multiplication and addition are commutative, while subtraction and division aren’t.

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Wow, that’s a very specific class.

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That’s the problem right there!

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With that teacher I would have just gotten a phone call from the school at 10am telling me to come pick her up.

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I remember sometime in those early grades being told that I was, not ahead of the curriculum, but actually wrong when I said something along the lines that 1-2=-1. I, apparently, was supposed to say that you can’t do that.

It is a poor response from a teacher to do things like that. I lost an enormous amount of respect for that teacher in that moment as kid-me decided that she didn’t understand subtraction; adult-me isn’t sure I was wrong.

There are plenty of ways of dealing with students with atypically large knowledge that don’t involve telling them that they are wrong.

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I thought you were a libertarian, they usually hate Common Core. Learn to fit my god damn stereotypes! You confuse me Mister, you confuse me.

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My “sat on by the teacher” moment was when we had to memorize Robert Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” As I was memorizing it my mom pointed out that some people think that it is about suicide, which I thought was an interesting interpretation. When I pointed this out to my teacher, she was “NO it is NOT. It is about stopping by the woods on a snowy evening.” because she was NOT ready to talk about suicide with third graders. She completely shut me down when I tried to expound on that premise.

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