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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13 2017, @07:34AM (2 children)
I have to disagree with you. Part of math - or indeed any subject - is rote memorization.
Why are you doing this? You say that "part of path" is rote memorization, but schools concentrate almost entirely on rote memorization. Your comment is therefore irrelevant. Our school system is an utter abomination and it always has been.
Of course you need to retain information to some degree, because otherwise you'd never learn anything. I don't know a single person who says otherwise, which is why I get tired of the 'But some memorization is required!' responses.
Part of what I see in "new-fangled" teaching methods are futile attempts to make the rote-learning parts magically disappear.
No such thing is happening. Instead, they pretend they're not doing rote memorization, but in reality, they are heavily relying on it. What is missing is a true, deep understanding of the subject. We are not encouraging people to be real academics, but mindless drones.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Saturday May 13 2017, @10:18AM (1 child)
When I help the neighbor's kids with math ( usually algebra ), I take over an old DOS laptop loaded with GWBasic, MathCad for DOS, Borland Eureka, and Borland C++ for DOS.
The kids always get hung up on word problems, and how to convert a word problem into equations - and what they even mean.
So, we start off talking about the word problem. What the unknowns are, and their relationship to each other.
Throwing all the arithmetic into the fray quickly derails the understanding I am trying to teach the kid... so I have the computer deal with it until I can get the kid seeing the larger picture of how to abstract some unknown number as a variable. In my experience, that has been the biggest hurdle of Algebra. Once I can get the kid knowing that "X" represents a number, but we don't know what that number is... I am pretty well on the way.
I start off pretty simple. Let X=10. Print X. Let X = X + 5. Print X. Then once the kid catches on, go from there.
When I get done, the kid can conceptualize the word problem into an equation.
I will use the MathCad for more intensive maths, such as calculus or linear algebra, just so we can concentrate on the math, not the arithmetic.
Otherwise, I fear the kid will get lost in the minutiae just as I got so lost in the minutiae of interpolation of logarithm and steam tables in my college thermodynamics classes that for years I did not see the big picture. Not until a computer shouldered the burden of all that arithmetic minutiae and let me focus on what was really going on.
There is no call for me to calculate square roots the long way. Just knowing what they are is what I need. Same with integration and differentiation. Knowing what and why I am doing this operation is what is important. I did analytic solutions in college to get a grade. I do calculus all the time, yet never have I had to resort to analytical methods anymore, as I never knew the exact equations to that which I was analyzing! It was streams of data. Knowing how to tell a computer what I wanted it to do with the streams of numbers I was feeding it was what was important. ( things like Simpson integration methods ).
Another thing - computers made it easier to show kids how statistics works and why we do things the way they are done. MathCad is really handy for that one, that I can show how discrete and continuous solutions both come up with the same answer. You know... the bell curve probability functions.
This new graphic apps stuff coming out is too good though. One can't peek under the cover to see whats going on behind the display. I much prefer the older stuff for trying to teach a kid. For the same reason I would teach using GWBasic instead of delving right into C++. I will fire up Borland C++ for DOS later just to show how one can write stuff for fitting into much larger stuff, but that's for way later when the kid is ready to tie the whole shebang together.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13 2017, @06:03PM
In my failed quest to get cisfemale programmers to precipitate out of the æther, which I have given up out of sheer frustration with third-wave feminism and their sexually abusive, homophobic white knights (not to be confused with their blatant transphobia and blind, right-wing-authoritarian-follower's reverence of the gender dichotomy wrapped up in oppression Olympics), QBasic and GWBasic were two that I considered: QBasic for being one of the first IDEs that I used (also Turbo Pascal), GWBasic for resembling TI-Basic on the TI-99/4A (not to be confused with the Basic interpreter on TI's graphing calculators). One co-worker even suggested that it might not be a bad idea to load up a TI-99/4A emulator and use that.
I settled with Ruby because it supported both. Perhaps in hindsight I should have done Python, but I knew Ruby at the time and not Python. (Also significant whitespace is against my religion.) Vim became our IDE, and irb became the line-mode equivalent of GWBasic/TI-Basic. I felt it worked very well. We even tangented into a few side-quests having to do with basic algebra, and I was left with the impression that my mentorship had helped at least put a dent in her math anxiety.
Unfortunately, my last student became infested with evil and is now a Deadite. If it's not obvious, I write bombastic comments to cover up for my own pain at the betrayal and abuse I've experienced at the hands of feminists. I have been crying a lot lately....