I ask my students to show their work; it is primarily so that I know they didn’t cheat, but secondarily so that I know they didn’t just guess. At my level I don’t really care which method they use to get their answers, but in K-12 “math” is mainly a suite of algorithms, and it is reasonable for students to be able to show they have mastered the algorithms. While there are big differences between curricula from one school to another (or one decade to another), the algorithms don’t change all that much.
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yes, female. Die Eins, die Zwei, die Drei, …
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Just the number 69.
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To be honest, most subjects aren’t taught well. I had a rant recently about how badly PE (physical education) is taught.
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PE isn’t even what I’d call “taught” most of the time. I had one year of taking weightlifting (regular gym weight room exercises, not powerlifting) that involved actual instruction and information. Oh, and one semester of yoga that I always fell asleep during because it was right after lunch. Most of the time, though, PE was just giving the kids a chance to run around, burn off excess energy, and stay in halfway decent shape. You had to join JV/varsity to get anything like proper coaching.
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I used to. When I was 5 or 6, I thought (well, knew intuitively, because nobody would have taught me this) that numbers had genders and personalities. It was helpful, because when I would add two numbers, it was like there was a little drama going on (9 was male and overbearing, 6 was more compliant, 15 - actually, I think only the single digits had personalities now that I think of it).
I realized this was “weird” when I tried to explain it to someone, so I stopped talking about it, and eventually it went away. Might have been a form of synesthesia that I grew out of, as kids are said to do.
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Oh boy - you haven’t seen a Common Core elementary textbook lately. Don’t get me wrong; there are some good things in Common Core math. But they took a great idea from research and warped it. Researchers like Constance Kamii said to let students use their own ideas to create strategies for adding multi-digit numbers (and other operations) before or instead of teaching the standard algorithm. The Common Core textbooks have turned that into the idea of directly teaching several different strategies, all of which end up with the same answer, and only teaching the standard algorithm at the very end. But kids are supposed to memorize these other strategies even if they don’t make sense to them. It steams me - I’m a math educator, and the most important thing to me is that math makes sense.
If you want to see an example of this, check out one textbook series.
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I used to feel very sad for grocery products that no one wanted. I’d see the off-brand danish languish on the shelves until they were thrown away, because everyone wanted Entenmann’s instead. Sort of the packaged-food version of those Sarah MacLachlan SPCA commercials.
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I have, actually; I was a co-PI on this. Maybe you are confusing curricula with standards? There are, and have been for several years, several math curricula which de-emphasize algorithms to the point where students are probably being damaged. There are others which are somewhat better. All of these, good and bad, are in the process of being adapted to the Common Core, which specifies minimal sets of achievements for various grade levels, but it doesn’t mandate teaching strategies; unfortunately, these bad texts were around long before anyone mentioned the common core.
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Right. The goal of common core is to be able to say that if a kid has passed a certain grade s/he will have a grasp on a certain set of skills and that this is true for the whole country and not just a district. The standards don’t dictate how to teach skills or what content to read, except to say that reading should be done in all subject areas and not just Reading class.
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I don’t necessarily disagree with either of these sentiments – in my experience the jaw-droppingly brain-dead things I’ve seen in my own children’s education tend to come from a county/state school-board level – but in practical terms it amounts to the same thing. When I say that we need evidence-based education, we need it at all levels: the design of the curriculum, the implementation, the adoption, the funding…
… silly politics and “common sense” can destroy things at all levels.
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What are you talking about??? 9 is wise, not overbearing.
Those even numbers, though, have always made me a little uncomfortable. Seriously.
(Then again, I’m the kind of person who always likes to make sure the gas pump ends at a palindromic number, so perhaps I can’t be trusted on this.)
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Hey, I apply numbers to gendered shapes all the time! Heeeyyyyy, here all weekend folks, try the veal.
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If you believe in panpsychism like I usually do, on some level there is fundamental consciousness present in/associated with those off-brand danishes worthy of empathic communion with.
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Or you were channeling the consciousness of numbers!
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