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If you've ever had to help your child with math homework, you really appreciate their teachers, who do it every day. "Math anxiety" isn't something only kids experience.
Maybe you haven't seen an algebra formula in years, and weren't that comfortable with them when you were a student. Maybe you're a skilled mathematician, but don't know how to explain what you're doing to a child. Whatever the case, math homework can leave parents feeling every bit as frustrated as their children. Homework doesn't have to lead to unpleasantness, though.
What I've learned through my own experience—as a teacher, a researcher, from helping my own children, and now watching my daughter work as an elementary school mathematics teacher—is that communication is (excuse the pun) the common denominator when it comes to making math homework a positive experience.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), where I work, is dedicated to research. We support scientists across the country who study learning and education systems. But we're also teachers at heart. On lunch breaks in the past, a group of us gathered to help our NSF peers with their own questions about how to help their kids learn math.
Do Soylentils have better tips, things that have really helped their own kids learn math?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Saturday May 13 2017, @06:13AM
Interesting ideas - I look forward to the discussion. Some initial thoughts:
- For pure transmission of information, yes, you can be more efficient by omitting pauses, time spent drawing, etc.. However, to some extent, these pauses are needed and used by viewers to digest information they have already received. I can skim written material at a couple thousand words a minute, but I cannot understand anything new or difficult at that speed. Compress the material, and people who want to actually understand what is going on will press the pause button a lot.
- Anyway, for most kinds of learning, video is a stupid format. Of course the cool kids watch videos at double-speed - it's because most presenters blather on about stuff irrelevant to the topic they're supposed to be presenting. And anyway, there's no information gain in seeing the presenter. If you're going to compress things down to the essential, you're going to remove the presenter, boil the words down into carefully edited sentences designed to be clear and easily understandable, and include only the finished diagrams, and you have... wait for it... you have reinvented the book.
Finally, there is this little aside: "Excluding assignments and practical experience". Those are the key to any university-level education. If a student isn't spending at least twice the lecture time working on assignments, they're not getting the most out of the education. That's where most of the time goes, or should go.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.