Teaching Maths

[poliphilo]

A new report, commissioned by the Tories, is recommending that children be taught maths until they're 18.  I so disagree.

Firstly, because lots of people are number blind and it's cruel to keep them slaving away. ( I'm one. Thanks to some very good teaching I passed my "O" level at the second attempt, dropped the subject with a sigh of relief and promptly went back to counting on my fingers.) 

Secondly because these days we've got calculators. 

Leave maths to those with an aptitude for it (like Ailz). 

Comments

[calizen.livejournal.com]

In my work as a freelance transcriber, I did a group interaction meeting with a person deemed a master teacher in math and 4 inner city math teachers. An eyeopener here was that the people teaching math had been thrown into the classroom with this assignment and didn't like math themselves. That said volumes to me. But this teacher was amazing in her ability to visually explain the intricacies of mathematics, at least in the area that she was teaching, which was fractions and later seguing into decimals. I hate math, but it made me realize that a lot of this was from being taught math by teachers who didn't understand it in the most droning, boring way possible. At the end of typing for her I finally knew what a Prime Number was and how one set up .02 from a graph of 100 squares, 50 years late.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

One of my friends, after graduating from MIT with a degree in mathematics, spent two years as an inner-city high school math teacher.

She liked her students fine. She liked the subject fine. It didn't bother her when one of her students pulled a knife on her -- she looked at him over the top of her glasses, and told him to put the knife away, or she would take it from him and not give it back until after school, so he put it away.

No, she left after two years because she was annoyed by the bureaucracy and red tape she had to deal with, but even more so, because she couldn't stand her fellow teachers in the math department. She couldn't believe that anyone could reach adulthood with so little knowledge of math, let alone a college graduate -- and to have these people, who were UNUSUALLY ignorant of math, being math teachers? It drove her nuts.

She asked me once to describe what calculus was. I said I sucked at calculus and had never gotten better than a C at it, but, well, in general, it was something kinda like taking a formula that would draw a curve, and coming up with a second formula that either told you how steep the curve was at every place on the curve, which was differentiation, or would tell you, if you filled up the area under the curve, how much space that was, and that was integration.

She said that I was pretty close to correct, and that meant that I knew more calculus than the calculus teacher at her school.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Oh -- and I'm NOT a college graduate.