Dan Meyers:
Recall a time when you really loved something…and you recommended it wholeheartedly to someone you really love, …and the person hated it. …That is the… state in which I’ve spent the last six years. I teach high school math.
Watching this video caused me considerable agony.
I’ve spent the last, oh, seven or eight years tutoring one of my nieces in math. She finally graduated from high school last week, and I am getting some small part of the credit.
Problem: I know for a fact that almost none of my effort ended up inside her head. I helped her pass, but I didn’t know how to help her learn.
Here, Dan Meyer explains what I did wrong, and what I could have done instead.
Too late now, and my niece will be very very lucky if she finds a way to rewire the neural pathways I helped tangle.
Gah.
Not entirely my fault; one problem I ran into consistently was that my vocabulary for talking about math, which in my experience is the one in use by people who actually use math, has been deprecated in primary and secondary education in favor of a bunch of touchy feely crap.
Along the same lines, whenever my niece learned a temporary heuristic, she clung to it fiercely, refusing to move on to a more efficient, more general technique. For instance, in school she learned to do multiplication with grids of boxes. It was years before she moved on to simply working the problem with numbers, and I think to this day she doesn’t really understand why the numbers work.
Then there were multiple choice math exams. Read that again: multiple choice math exams. My niece got very good at working the problem backwards, discarding the bad answers to get the right one.
And finally: Fucking. Graphing. Calculators. If I had my way, any teacher who allows any kind of calculator in the classroom or with homework before, oh, trigonometry, deserves to be fired with no pension, and possibly put on the child abuse registry. I am not remotely kidding. Horribly crippling. It was like watching someone with a sore ankle being confined to a wheelchair in third grade instead of being given proper exercise, and watching their legs wither over the next nine years.
In eleventh grade, the text book was teaching matrix calculations because there was a specific algorithm programmed into the preferred calculator (a TI something or other). No understanding of matrices required, none at all. Hell, I don’t understand them, not really, and although teaching her tweaked my own understanding of just about everything else, the presentation in this chapter did nothing even for me.