It's actually kinda funny. There's an endless search for an effortless way to learn math. There is no such thing. Learning math requires work.
Just like there is no way to get strong without hard work.
Fashion is exactly it. I feel like they experiment on them rather than use established methods.
This doesn’t need to be robotic, it still give a lot of room for personalization. I find he’s really right, especially since in my country everyone want to do their own stuff in their own way. The ministry is guilty as well, because it produces an endless stream of contradictory directives, each based on theories made by pedagogists that never taught in the field.
I think this applies to most jobs really. Research and practice are different things, and even when the same person does both it's good to keep them at least somewhat separate.
I (almost always) kinda want my doctor or mechanic to follow what's known to work, rather than try out new things. On my own software projects, experimental techniques seem to cause issues a lot more often than standard "best practice" sort of techniques and I try to keep them away from important production system. Etc etc.
Nonsense. There is a search for more effective ways to teach math. And there most definitely are differences in effectiveness, so no reason to believe that any given way is optimal.
> Just like there is no way to get strong without hard work.
There are, however, lots of ways to spend a lot of hard work for little gain.
- The scores don't effectively measure learning.
- The need to prepare students for tests undermines the ability to try different teaching approaches.
- Scores don't change overall but the distribution of scores change.
- The distribution of scores don't change but the demographics of the students in a given part of the distribution change.
- There are confounding factors such as budget or classroom size.
In my 16 years of education, I saw a consistent 1:1 correlation with learning the material and doing correspondingly well on the tests. That consistency included myself - when I learned the material, I'd ace the test. When I didn't learn it, I failed the test. There wasn't any magical "learned but didn't test well" going on.
Consider anxiety disorders. There’s a crystal clear, fully scientifically proven reason that some can know the material but fail to perform on a test. Think more. It helps.
What do "disorders" have to do with class? At best, being from a lower socio economic class could put you at risk for whichever disorders you have in mind, but they aren't synonymous. At least, not in my mind.
I don't assume such people don't exist. But I'm not buying there are enough people to significantly alter overall student test results. There'd have to be a couple in every class, and I've never encountered one.
As an example: do you consider solving 579×46 quickly a "math problem"? I will solve it (relatively) quickly, since I was thought how to solve that exact problem algorithmicaly.
But if you hadn't thaught that algorithm (you could argue that nowadays we have calculators for this) then it would probably take you a bit longer to derive some form of this algorithm. But it doesn't necessarily imply that you're bad at math, just that you have not practiced this exact task before.
In my experience, doing really well in tests requires more adaption to the tasks of the tests than actual understanding. Most tests are limited on time, and stress does not exactly help you to deal creatively with completely new tasks.
Note that I don't want to say that teaching algorithms is bad. It surely helps to do some basic calculation without having to think much about it. I just want to point out that the tests are often testing a specific understanding of math, and different teaching methods often also differ in their goal of what they want students to learn well.
It's second or third grade material. It's reasonable to expect teachers to teach it and kids to learn it. It's easy to create tests for it.
I don't think that ability necessarily has a great deal in common with understanding mathematics or the ability to do higher level math.
As a result it provides vanishingly poor outcomes which keep the US below the OECD average, in spite of some of the highest per-student spending in the world.
Education is highly politicised, managed by school boards which seem to attract religious kooks and other low-quality authoritarians with eccentric ideas, and which does almost everything it can to discourage good teachers and other suspiciously well-educated and competent individuals from joining or staying in the profession.
Widespread poverty in the US population doesn't help.
Changing how math is taught won't address the essential dysfunctional broken futility of the system as a whole.
All the attempts to gamify learning math, or teach it by passively watching TV, suggest otherwise.
> more effective
Sesame Street is probably the most inefficient way to teach arithmetic ever devised. A kid can watch 1000 hours of it, and barely be able to count to 10.
We know how to effectively teach math. Present the concepts, follow up with the student working through progressively harder problems.
> And there most definitely are differences in effectiveness
Since the needle hasn't moved on results, we've likely found the optimal method.
Learn playing! Gamify!
But people DO NOT LIKE MATHS despite them needing it. I am a professor of the thing and am not ashamed to own it. It is what it is.
Like cleanin your room, doing your bed or... shaving!
Saying people simply don't like math because their eyes glaze over in math class is like saying people don't like stories because they're bored by Great Expectations.
Sounds about right!
The problem (at least one of the problems) is, kids are different. You see these kids are struggling with the traditional approach. You devise a non-traditional approach to help them. And it actually works! For them...
But some kids who would have done fine on the traditional approach now are struggling. Is that a net win? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on how many kids are in each group and how bad they're struggling.