WWTBAM Bored

I finally got around to starting tutoring in the local community association's youth program.

It's a dumb time for me to be starting, what with the Missus due a month from today, but I've been meaning to for a couple of years.

I'm spending an hour a week helping middle schoolers with their math homework at the local school. The local school happens to be one of the elite math and science schools in the city (it's got "Math", "Science" and "Academy" in the name of the school), which means I'm working with the bright, motivated kids.

Which is good for me since I've got no teaching experience, I'm just good at math. I helped a sixth-grader today with his algebra one homework - the fact that he was taking it impressed me.

I thought it was just laziness that caused him to do one-digit arithmetic operations on his calculator, and I called him out on it every time.

They have a homework hour, and he was trying to finish with enough time left for a chess game before they had to leave.

Nobody else wanted help with their math homework, or any other homework for that matter, so I spent the last 20 minutes chatting with the woman who runs the program and then playing some really annoying game called "catchphrase" (the game play is fine, but it continually makes these annoying beeps, the only possible purpose of which is to stress you out). The program coordinator said that one of the extra-bonus things she wants to do with these kids is get them to learn their multiplication tables.

Again, these are NOT dumb kids, they're supposed to be some of the smartest in the whole city. Do we REALLY not make kids learn their times tables by heart? How do we expect them to do mental math later?

ToLiveIsToFly wrote: Again, these are NOT dumb kids, they're supposed to be some of the smartest in the whole city. Do we REALLY not make kids learn their times tables by heart? How do we expect them to do mental math later?

My kids had to learn their times tables. It part of the content stadards for 3rd grade.

ToLiveIsToFly wrote: Again, these are NOT dumb kids, they're supposed to be some of the smartest in the whole city. Do we REALLY not make kids learn their times tables by heart? How do we expect them to do mental math later?

I don't know what's in any official educational standards these days, but I think the general opinion is that any forced, rote memorization is bad.

And, obviously, we don't expect mental math. I remember an "expose" posted on YouTube of the current algorithms that are taught for long division, in place of the classic technique we were all taught, back in the day. They are truly byzantine.

MarleysGh0st wrote:I don't know what's in any official educational standards these days, but I think the general opinion is that any forced, rote memorization is bad.

Like how to spell words, the days of the week, etc?

ToLiveIsToFly wrote:

MarleysGh0st wrote:I don't know what's in any official educational standards these days, but I think the general opinion is that any forced, rote memorization is bad.

Like how to spell words, the days of the week, etc?

Sure! Those rules just lead to oppression by our Spelling Police!

Here's the YouTube link I was thinking of, titled "Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth". 357,945 views since it was posted in January.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI

ToLiveIsToFly wrote:I finally got around to starting tutoring in the local community association's youth program.

Good for you. I've done this in the past and it can be very rewarding.

ToLiveIsToFly wrote:How do we expect them to do mental math later?

I'm not sure we do - one of my pet peeves is a fast-food worker who can't make change in his or her head but has to wait for the cash register to tell him or her how much. And woe betide someone who offers up a penny after the almighty register has spoken.

One of my managers at work has kids in grade school now, and she says they are teaching them addition where they add up the columns from left to right instead of the right to left I had learned (and I assume everyone else before me had learned), because that method has supposedly been deemed superior. She says her kids can add up problems the new way much faster than she can the old way.....

lb13

MarleysGh0st wrote:Here's the YouTube link I was thinking of, titled "Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth". 357,945 views since it was posted in January.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI

Wow. I watched that video for the first time last night, and I wrote a long rant about it, which appears to be gone now (I think I must have hit preview rather than submit).

But the gist of it is that I'm not sure I buy what she has to say. The argument feels mostly like "This is the way I learned it, and I turned out ok, so it must be better." It reminds me a bit of this:
http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp

I learned to multiply and divide on paper the same way she did, and those are certainly the algorithms I feel most comfortable with.

But it wouldn't surprise me if the ones from the second book she lambasted (what's it called? "Everyday Math"?) work better than the ones we learned.

The first EM algorithm for multiplication (break 26 x 31 down into 6 x 1 + 20 x 1 + 6 x 30 + 20 x 30) takes about as much time on paper as her preferred one does, and it has the advantage of showing you why it works (assuming you're familiar with the distributive property). Plus, at least for me, it leads to a couple of ways to do it in my head (in my head, I think "3 x 26 = 78, so 30 x 26 = 780, so 31 x 26 = 780 + 26 = 806")

I suspect the algorithm she and I learned for long division is faster and more efficient, but only when dividing by a one-digit number. Consider instead 1475 divided by 37. Long division says that because 37 is greater than both 1 and 14, we start by dividing 37 into 147. I bet there are a fair number of us who could come up with 37 x 4 = 148 in our heads, but a kid who's just learning long division probably couldn't, which means he'd have to guess what number to stick above the 7. And if he guesses 4 instead of 3, there's going to be a lot of crossing out. My third grade teacher taught me the same algorithm that the woman from the video learned, but I noticed at the time that the textbook used the same method as "Everyday Math". I wonder if anybody else ever looked at anything in the textbook except homework, and I wonder if it confused them?

She excoriates one of the books for coming out and saying that a lot of kids are never going to master division on paper, and that you shouldn't spend a ton of time trying to force it. You know what? It's true. Everyone in my class learned the same method the video lady learned, and I know from helping kids with their homework in later years that about half of them failed to master it.

I'd actually argue that spending some time on coming up with accurate estimates for problems like that in your head would be pretty valuable.

I have no idea what the "trip around the world" and "trip around America" curricula are. But spending a bunch of time teaching kids the right way to use a calculator? I suspect that's pretty valuable.

Back in my math camp days (yeah, I know, but it's true), calculators were in that sweet spot between luxury item and staple. Which meant for us that the rich kids had fancy calculators that did trig functions and logarithms. (And parentheses - more than anything else, I think I wished I had a calculator that did parentheses. Now I use one of those RPN calculators where you don't need them, and nobody ever asks to borrow it.) The rest of us had to look up sines and cosines and logs in a big ugly table. I had a teacher tell me repeatedly that I was getting something extra by learning the hard way that the calculator kids would never pick up, and that I'd be thankful for it later. I'm not.