Teacher conferences. I loved going to them. Typically, the teacher would say something about how they each were doing fine academically. Then he/she would start talking about how they tend to overwhelm their classmates, either at recess or during other free time. Sort of the "doesn't play well with others" speech. What they were really doing was encouraging their classmates to challenge themselves to do more and work harder, so the teacher wouldn't waste so much time on remedial training.
My wife, being a teacher, was not nearly so thrilled about teacher conferences. The parents who really needed to be present never came. If they did, it was to accuse the school of conspiring to mistreat their darling children.
Indeed. I never was very good with numbers.
<div>i used this one today...and oldie but a goodie...</div><div>
4/3 of all people have trouble with fractions.....
..Thank you, please tip your servers, ......Elvis has left the building!
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Stranded, I was all set to argue with you, but by the end I didn't disagree. I would add that except maybe for the remedial kids, the teacher shouldn't be "teaching" any of the ways to solve the problem they should be a guide to help the students figure out some of the ways themselves.
Mathematics, when taught to people who won't be applying it in a rote manner latter in life is best when it's approached as a vehicle to teach problem solving skills. For those that go on to need to use math in creative manner (ex. mathemticians, scientists, computer scientists, cutting edge emgineers...) the benifits are obvious, but for others, including surveyors, the ability to logically approach a problem and deal with the frustrations of not immediately knowing an answer are more important.
The new new math was designed with this approach in mind, and it looks great on paper, but then it was implemented by teachers and administrators who don't have the background to really understand it and aren't provided the teaining, so in the end you get material that was intended to spark creativity and problem solving skills crammed into the old way of teaching resulting in no improvement.
My problem with any form of so-called new math (that has been around for nearly 60 years now) is that, if I know the answer, I want to put it down and move onto the next question. That is no longer a satisfactory answer. They want you to think through the entire process of getting from Step A to Step M and write it all down to prove you know what you are doing. The closest I ever came to actually doing that in practice is when I was writing programs decades ago to have the computer cycle through repetitive processes to provide a series of answers or, at least, a final answer. It reminded me a bit of when I took Latin in high school. I suddenly needed to know information about the language and how it works, which was something we had never spent time on in English class. In Latin we had to worry about cases and declensions and other things like gender that we had never touched on in our English classes.
What seemed simple suddenly became complex.
I had a professor who would write out an equation that filled up all forty feet of the chalk board at the front of the lecture hall. Then, he would say, "This obviously can be simplified to be expressed as this." That took up about two feet of the forty. The A+ students are all nodding their heads while the rest of us are scratching ours.
Give this one a try. It's pretty common in many elementary classrooms.
My 3rd grader has to show all her work for multiplication. So she loves to draw and makes groups of various items. Chickens cows dogs circles and whatever comes to her mind. She always finds a way to have fun with math. Even correcting me . I was doing a problem from work and had stacked bearings and distances on my scratch paper. I was simply computing the interior angles of the bearings on a old plat. At the bottom i had added them up and written down she didn’t realize i had converted the DMS to dec then back again. Man she gave me the talk as any 9 year old would do if there daddy couldn’t add. I had to explain to her that those numbers had to be changed around. Before adding etc. But she had been checking my work as I was cooking and well thats when it wend down hill for me. And she was so sure of herself she was letting me have it even made up songs. The old man cant add today he cant see blah blah blah. I am so mistreated lol
Loved the video. I was taught cancelation 9 for checking addition. Not in school. But a after school job at an old hardware store. A bad ice storm hit the area and we functioned by no power and a customer showed me that trick as i had blundered a long order of items when adding them up.
