I love math, and I couldn't have loved my 3 students any more, but I could never reach any of them on that subject. The more I tried the more confused they got. So professionals had to be called in. Kumon didn't appear, to me, to have any rocket science behind it. But it did work, by and by.
This was in our paper a few days ago … on teaching math...and the need for specialized math teachers.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-11-21/math-anxiety-elementary-teacher
I think one of the best math stories is the story of discovery of Neptune.
It depends upon what kind of pie, some are better than others and get eaten faster.
Yup. A minute and a half. While the first boy and a half is eating a pie and a half the other boy and a half is also eating a pie and a half. The times do not add.
Yes, just one clock for everybody. Horatio is not involved in the time.
Last year, my son was cooking something for his aging parents that required bourbon, maybe sauce for beef stroganoff. He needed to scale up the recipe, which he did and then asked me to check his numbers.
We both scaled up the bourbon along with everything else.
Now, I kind of liked the result, but limiting the amount of sauce in a single serving. The rest of my family thought that Horatio should have been kept out of the bourbon.
Nice article. Dr. Willingham hit the key issues and had a suggestion or two that might actually work. A real issue, though, is finding people with real math knowledge who want to work in elementary education.
The two solutions posted for Bills's problem are illustrative of algorithm vs fundamental understanding. Solving the problem as an engineering professor might is applying an algorithm. We're looking at rates: pies per boy and pies per minute. That dictates the equation and everything else is algorithmic.
The visual solution, on the other hand, illustrates a fundamental understanding of the process represented in the problem. Boys and pies are doubled, but there's only one clock. There's no computation involved in the solution.
If this problem appeared on an international exam, and students had to show the work that led to their answers, I wonder which solution would be preferred.