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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Gr 3 math teacher comes to me, kid is multiplying stuff like 71x83 incorrectly, but getting correct answer every time. He’s doing tens then ones, instead of ones then tens. She cannot understand how this can work, because she has never actually understood multiplication.

*Eye Twitch* had almost this exact thing happen at a Parent/Teacher conference for my eldest (9) involving fractions/division.

My wife (a teacher) has colleagues who mark their students' work incorrect for doing this kind of thing. Or worse, their parents will teach them some sensical method of doing math, and the teachers will mark them wrong because they're not doing it in the nonsensical curriculum-prescribed way.

My pre-calculus teacher gave me zero on a bunch of questions because I did the derivatives in my head and just wrote down the correct answers. This wasn't even made clear on the test but she had wanted me to write down every single step in the derivation.

Or worse, their parents will teach them some sensical method of doing math, and the teachers will mark them wrong because they're not doing it in the nonsensical curriculum-prescribed way.

Yup, that's pretty much what had happened in my case. I used to do things with my kid when he was around 6 or 7 where I'd be like "We need 8, 6-foot lengths to build this project, the store sells bar-stock in 12 foot pieces, how many do we need to buy?" and if he could figure it out he'd get an ice cream or something. Skip forward a couple years and he's trying to argue with his 3rd grade teacher about how fractions work.

I did the same thing as a child. It frustrated my teachers to no end that I could do the problems up for discussion in my head before the lesson had begun, and it frustrated me that they never let me.

Little dude had apparently "disrupted class" by insisting that "the irregular fraction" on the board wasn't a fraction at all but a "division problem" which granted, arguing with the teacher was disruptive, but he wasn't wrong.

After the teachers stopped actually looking at my notebooks and started to just "randomly" ask students (read: using some trivially simple to deduce pattern) to do homework problems on the whiteboard I just stopped doing most homework and would simply do the problem either on the fly or while waiting for the previous student to finish.

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