The individual who is the father in the following message is a very successful businessman. His firm handles from one to three million dollars worth of business every week of the year. He also runs cattle on roughly 10,000 acres. He is a member of his local school board. He is no dummy.
His wife put this message on Facebook today. The math teacher attended the same high school as the father and the student.
"Here’s a funny. Tyler “helped” Juley with her math homework and they missed 27 of 30 problems! "
We must be careful as land surveyors to make sure we truly know the answers to our own questions. The education we have received may not provide us with the correct tools. We must learn what we need to know and then, somehow, learn it on our own
Not surprised by that. Probably "new math" problems. I couldn't help my kids with math homework, because of that.
Constructing homework problems that can only be interpreted one way, and making sure what the test maker things is the answer really is the answer, is a skill that not all teachers have developed. Not that questions with a single numerical answer are always the best kind of questions to ask.
My sister has reached out to me a few times to help my nephew with his algebra and trig and it's kind of funny in a way because he's confused in the exact same way I was when I was his age.
The teacher shows you one of the 50 ways to solve a given math problem and then moves on, simply telling the class "there are 49 more ways to skin this cat and all of them are acceptable".
Never being shown any of these other 49 ways the student simply starts to approach math problems from the literal perspective that it must be solved the one way they were shown.
What does the teacher turn around and do on the test then? Show the student a bunch of problems that aren't like the ones they did in the homework and expects them to pull one of these other 49 methods out of their rear end.
Naturally this frustrates and pisses off the student and ultimately makes them hate math.
I often felt the same way when a test problem couldn't be solved quite the same way as the homework problems.
There is a difference between blindly following an example, no matter the subject, and LEARNING how to solve some sort of similar problem. That is why there is a delay between taking the first licensing examination and the ultimate one that allows you to provide services to the public on one's own.
True, but if you just started learning a skill 3 weeks ago, it isn't right to give a test that includes ideas not taught.
There's more to it than that; every class gets 1 hour which I think is completely stupid. Not all subjects are equally difficult.
This specific teacher follows the guidance of HIS teacher at the same school. Middle school and high school math students are assigned 50 problems for homework for every day of lecture, due the following day. Forget about sports activities, club activities, whatever. Just turn in the 50 solved problems the next day OR ELSE.
Geez. 50 problems a day? In my opinion, that's ridiculous. Five to ten well chosen problems should be adequate for virtually any math class. In classes in Discrete Math, where such problems as how to allocate 435 representatives among the states (what to do with fractions of a representative) come up, often one problem started in class and finished at home is enough.
Jaime Escalante aside, if the goals of your lesson are clear, a few practice problems will suffice.
I have been corrected by Mrs. Cow.
Young Juley is in the Fourth Grade. So only 30 homework problems per night.
It turns out the assignment dealt with how to divide a decimal number by a decimal number. Say, 0.40 divided by 0,20. The concept is to learn, in this case, to multiply both the top and bottom by 10 to have 4 divided by 2 which is obviously 2. In the old days, we called it sliding the decimal to the right enough times to get integers divided by integers.
As a youngster, I viewed becoming good at math as being similar to becoming a magician. Math is simplified by learning "tricks".
That's the way I learned. Mechanics first and whys in later, higher courses. If you never learn the whys, the mechanics still work.
It's great to see non-calculator work. Gives texture to the process.
The math profession is filled with liars.
First, they tell us the square root of four is two.
Second, much later, they tell us the square root of four might be two or it might be negative two.
Then they teach us the cube root of eight is two.
Eventually, they invent this imaginary number known as "i"
Next thing you know, they tell you there are three cube roots of eight and two is only one of them.
AAAAAAAAAAAARGH
Not liars. Tellers of half-truths. Or in the case of 8, third-truths.
Something that came back to bite the math profession (casting a wide net) is middle school text books that carefully avoid examples that are too hard for poor little middle schoolers to think about. Elementary schoolers get taught how to do division that results in a quotient and remainder. Middle schoolers get taught how to do division involving negative numbers. Maybe they even get taught how to give the result of a problem involving a negative number as a quotient and remainder. But they always avoid any examples where the student has to decide if the remainder is positive or negative.
Fast-forward from the 1930s to the 1960s when IBM engineers are designing System/360. Of course, they were never taught what to do with potentially negative remainders, so the System/360, and all successor systems, allow negative remainders. And Intel picked up the same idea, probably from IBM.
