Welp, since I seem to have the place to myself, may I turn your attention to a blog post from over a year ago, about teaching math. (I've been doing some internet surfing on the topic since that study came out.) It highlights the unfortunate ways that politcs manage to barge their way into the math education debate.
The comments are just as good. Allow me to quote the following, which is yet another example of someone reading my mind and typing it all out.
In general, it is my impression that the real problem lying at the root of the 'fuzzy math' push is that the people we currently task with teaching math at this level, for the most part, do not seem to actually like math. They find multiplication tables "boring", and memorization of course is just "rote", and so on. These descriptions we always hear of "standard" math aren't coming from 8 year olds, they're coming from teachers! In other words, our math teachers don't like the subject of math. That's fine (it's their right and all), but it's also obviously a bad policy result, and has two effects:
-It makes them *bad* teachers. They hate what they have to teach so don't do it well; as well, they can't help but convey their disdain for the subject to the students, if only inadvertently.
-It causes them (understandably, actually) to try to alter what math is. Since the subject of math is boring for them, why not just change it? It would be more fun to teach if math were different than it is. So, they set about making math different. That's what this is about.
Teachers do not want to teach math, so they clamor to teach something else. They have invented that "something else" to teach in lieu of math, something that they find more interesting and exciting to be teaching in a classroom.... 'fuzzy math' policies are all about making teachers happy and allowing them to have more fun in the classroom, not about successfully teaching students math - which they do not actually seem to want to do.
Amen, brother.
The comments are just as good. Allow me to quote the following, which is yet another example of someone reading my mind and typing it all out.
In general, it is my impression that the real problem lying at the root of the 'fuzzy math' push is that the people we currently task with teaching math at this level, for the most part, do not seem to actually like math. They find multiplication tables "boring", and memorization of course is just "rote", and so on. These descriptions we always hear of "standard" math aren't coming from 8 year olds, they're coming from teachers! In other words, our math teachers don't like the subject of math. That's fine (it's their right and all), but it's also obviously a bad policy result, and has two effects:
-It makes them *bad* teachers. They hate what they have to teach so don't do it well; as well, they can't help but convey their disdain for the subject to the students, if only inadvertently.
-It causes them (understandably, actually) to try to alter what math is. Since the subject of math is boring for them, why not just change it? It would be more fun to teach if math were different than it is. So, they set about making math different. That's what this is about.
Teachers do not want to teach math, so they clamor to teach something else. They have invented that "something else" to teach in lieu of math, something that they find more interesting and exciting to be teaching in a classroom.... 'fuzzy math' policies are all about making teachers happy and allowing them to have more fun in the classroom, not about successfully teaching students math - which they do not actually seem to want to do.
Amen, brother.
posted by Matt | 4:10 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home