19 Replies to “Destroying the Confidence of Math Students, One Child at a Time”

  3. So sad. I am a baby boomer and adding, subtraction and multiplying, dividing comes with ease due to the ‘rote’ learning. So easy, and so convenient. It funny that the math prof in the interview used 9×7=63 as an example, it’s same example when I asked a young 20 something engineer what the answer was and he wanted to use his calculator. And when I tried to help a kid with his math, I found the technique in his book so stupid. Man, just memorize the times table and get on with it. I am sure the immigrants are taught the old way and that is why they can run math circles around home grown kids.

  5. Two little words: Home schooling.
    They can go to “school” as well, for playtime and babysitting while Mummy and Daddy work to pay their taxes, but if you want Junior to learn what pi is and what it’s for, sometime before grade 10 anyway, Junior is going to be learning it at home.
    That ain’t jazz, that’s the way it is my friends.
    Why is this? Because most teachers were LIBERAL ARTS MAJORS in school, is why. And female.
    What do you get when you set a middle aged woman who graduated with a BA in English Lit to teaching math? You get an arts-and-crafts project where the kids colour in numbers or make pie charts from construction paper. Because the teacher can’t calculate 20% off regular price at Tommy Hilfiger even with a calculator, doesn’t see why she should have to, and more than that doesn’t want to.
    But can the school board hire a retired engineer to teach math to the little skulls full of mush? NO!!!! Because regulations require Certification, which takes about two years of pointless waste motion, most of which is designed to weed out any applicant who isn’t a female Liberal Arts major.
    Teach Johnny at home and avoid the life-long innumeracy.

  7. Obviously that should read, Pi. Great way to ruin a joke. I can do math but I can’t type.

  8. By the way, its not just math. I briefly taught the Princeton Review for the MCAT and did some tutoring in the 1990’s. This was for Medical College Admission Test takers, usually the top 10% of keeners in school, the ambitious smart ones with money.
    Most of those paying for 1 to 1 tutoring were doing so because they had never been taught how to read a textbook. Furthermore their general reading comprehension was horrible. These were kids who made it into university and already had a year or two under their belts.
    The really scary part is, the MCAT isn’t information intensive. Most of its difficulty is in READING the freakin’ questions and understanding what has been asked. They give you the answer in the question more than half the time. When they don’t its to see if you’re smart enough to figure it out in 30 seconds or blow it off, circle “C” and move on to the next question.
    They’re trying to weed out the ones who can’t read and can’t count. Plain and simple.
    One often sees this reading issue in the ret@rded children we get tr0lling on here. You write something and they can’t understand how it pertains to the subject at hand, because they literally can’t read and comprehend what you wrote. ET seems to bring this out the most, because she writes some pretty air tight logic and the poor things get all upsetted. Default to schoolyard taunting is therefore the usual outcome, because they just can’t read fast enough to defend their position.
    Thank God for medical residency, that’s all I can say. Kids finally get taught by grown-ups who have a clue what they’re doing before the kids hurt somebody.

  10. you would figure that with kids today having to always add 15% tax to everything, they would become adept at math. Not really, the debit machine takes what it wants from the account.
    Small segue, ever notice the debit machines at the restaurants prompt you for the tip ( $ or %)but if you punch the % they will take that as a percentage of the total bill AFTER taxes?

  11. Tin foil hat or not – There is a conscious effort to dumb down North American students on many levels, not simply the core curriculums our grandparents knew.
    It goes hand in hand with open borders, forced racial/ economic student integrations, the destruction of family values, Christianity, nationalism, capitalism et al.
    This is social engineering on a grand scale to serve the needs of many special interests small and large.

  12. This is the same crap you get in every math course, not just arithmetic. For example, calculus. Calculus is not a very difficult topic. The concept is very easy, and there are very easy techniques for doing it, but every math professor teaching it seems far more interested in teaching abstract concepts like limits and infinite summation (which have far more to do with algebra than calculus) rather than the simple procedures to get a correct answer.
    I can accept that Newton and Leibnitz were geniuses. I don’t need to relearn all the steps they took to arrive at the final product in order to do calculus. These abstractions should be left for the person actually trying to become a math professor, not somebody simply trying to calculate a specific answer.

  13. I laughed out loud at the chemical equations in the hence thing and now people on the bus are staring at me.
    The first two callers were idiots though.

  14. B.S. baffles brains and this New math is just that. It is the word New that counts. New ideas, new technology new I-phone or a new theory if it’s new it must be better thinking. It doesn’t matter if it works or not. If it’s new it must be better. To argue against it and want something simple that is known to work they counter with “but it’s not new.” Remember the controversy of WHOLE WORD vs. PHONICES teaching a few years back? It is the samething with this new math more BS from the academic elite theorists to baffle more young minds.

  15. Yestersdaysman >
    Good point, what’s new about universal fundamentals?
    I doubt math and physics has changed much at all since the Big Bang.
    It’s the teaching it to the young minds part that is new. Western kids also haven’t biologically changed over the centuries to not understand math as it has been successfully learned over centuries.
    The society and social expectations however has. Intelligent well informed western adults is not a primary goal anymore.

  16. I was rather dismayed that the least succinct speaker on that whole segment was the grade 5 school teacher. She only rarely spoke a full sentence or a coherent thought.

  17. At the risk of sounding crass, and slightly off-topic, the iPad is an amazing resource for games for drilling and learning. It seems like there’s a clever new cheap app every few days. I spent hours yesterday drilling Mandarin vocabulary with Speak and Learn Pro just because the stupid thing is so addictive. I also downloaded a couple free kiddy apps for learning the multiplication table – they seem fun too.
    I am more interested in the language learning software, but I did notice there seems to be a lack of apps illustrating STEM subjects at the college level, although the Khan Academy now has free downloadable apps. If my background in physics and chemistry were much better than it is, I would be interested in designing apps that targeted through cartoons and quizzes the basic scientific principles tested on the MCAT. However, the price of an iPad is a stumbling block, although there will probably be more second-hand ones on the market soon.

  18. Education: Our job is to produce socialists, sexologists, sodomites for big money. Its the three s’s not the three r’s anymore.

  19. Bittenger Arithmetic and Algebra texts with the student guides are the best IMO. They are cumulative with a review of pre-requisite skills and concepts with tons of practice problems for each skill and unit, with several detailed examples showing how the correct answer was arrived at as well as how to check your answer. Highly recommend. Very easy to comprehend.

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