SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for chromas
Think you're bad at math? You may suffer from 'math trauma'
I teach people how to teach math, and I've been working in this field for 30 years. Across those decades, I've met many people who suffer from varying degrees of math trauma – a form of debilitating mental shutdown when it comes to doing mathematics.
When people share their stories with me, there are common themes. These include someone telling them they were "not good at math," panicking over timed math tests, or getting stuck on some math topic and struggling to move past it. The topics can be as broad as fractions or an entire class, such as Algebra or Geometry.
[...] One of the biggest challenges U.S. math educators face is helping the large number of elementary teachers who are dealing with math trauma. Imagine being tasked with teaching children mathematics when it is one of your greatest personal fears.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @04:29AM (2 children)
And yet, virtually every day I wind up undoing the damage that dates back to elementary school teachers teaching arithmetic incorrectly. If they're being trained in how to teach arithmetic at all, they should sue the colleges and get their money back, because it isn't working.
Basic arithmetic like you see in the elementary school isn't hard to get right, you just have to actually understand that students that age are typically dealing with the concrete and you have to actually understand where the arithmetic is going. I see no evidence to support the notion that it's common for those conditions to be taking place.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @08:49AM (1 child)
Education research is at the epicenter of all that is wrong with academia. It was EF Lindquist (developer of the ACT exam) who first published a stats 101 book for educators in which significance and hypothesis testing got confused and merged into one nonsensical procedure now referred to as NHST.[1] This efficient method for producing sciency sounding bs has since spread like wildfire throughout the academic community, gradually destroying every field it touches. Feynman even used education research as one of the prime examples of cargo cult science back in the 1970s.[2]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150213231408/http://www.jameslindlibrary.org/illustrating/records/statistical-analysis-in-educational-research/title_pages [archive.org]
[2] http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm [caltech.edu]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @02:59PM
I can't argue with that. My experience has been that the key to teaching math effectively is to make what you're doing clear and meaningful. If you make the material meaningful you're less likely to deal with unmotivated students. And if you make the material clear, then the students are more likely to be able to make their own meaningful connections to between the things that are going on and identify their own patterns.
I've been an English teacher and I'm personally convinced that the students I work with in math are mostly suffering from a lack of literacy. Being able to read the symbols and understand them is a huge component of being able to learn the material. Krashen has a huge point with regards to students having to comprehend what they're being presented with. I like Vygotsky was well, there's something inherently social about learning and you have to keep things in the Zone of Proximal Development to have the best chance of getting the material to stick with the students long enough for the students to own the material.