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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @12:19PM (6 children)
I have tutored also...
Most do not understand or "get" (came to realize) the fundamentals of math...
1) Addition is just counting up the number line (ruler)
2) subtraction is just down counting the number line (ruler)... or Addition with a counting sign (-)
3) Multiplication doing Addition repetitively.
4) Division doing Subtraction repetitively.
5) ... and so on
It is taught to slow and disjointed... it was assumed *ALL* will see the patterns. Yup, math is about patterns.
So in our language:
1) X + Y
2) X - Y --> X + -Y
3) X * Y --> S=0 : c=0 : while c D=0 : R=X : while R >= Y : R = R - Y : D++ : loop : print D, R
5) ...
Don't you see math as computer program too?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @02:56PM (1 child)
I never really realized this until more than ten years after I took multivariable calculus. I knew it in theory, but I never applied it to common mental math problems:
5%: take 10%, then divide by 2.
12%: take 10%, then add 1% two times.
142-59: subtract 60, then add 1; add 1 and subtract 1 from the initial problem (142-59 = 143-60).
39*39: 40*40 (forty, forty times), then subtract 40 (forty, thirty-nine times or thirty-nine, forty times), then subtract 39 (thirty-nine, thirty-nine times), which is also 40*40 -80 +1.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @03:27PM
You are VERY right... It is one of those things in early programming to find the fastest way to do something.
Had two programmer working on 80186 trying to figure out how to quickly (fewest clock steps) to calculate the the position of the curosr on a 24x80 screen.
So they where going to use MULT instruction to multiply by 80, and could not see how to speed it up. I looked a the Assemebler book (I was Z-80 ASM and IBM mini ASM knowledgeable.
80 is 16 (2^4) * 5 (2^2 + 1)...
Save ACC
Shift left twice (x 4)
Add saved back to ACC (+ 1)
shift left 4 tiems (x 16)
If i remember right 12 clocks total. The MULT function 5 to setup and 2 per 1, so X * 80 = 165 clocks.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday November 05 2018, @03:22PM (2 children)
I've always seen mathematical induction over the integers as being a for-loop in a proof.
There's a remarkable correspondence between proofs and programs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @04:35PM (1 child)
And there should be a lot of similarity, proofs are what you do if you need to know that the program is correct over whatever set of inputs you need to run it on. For many programs that's overkill, but if you're wanting to make sure that your plane doesn't kill people from above, that's the kind of thing you do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @11:03PM
And even if you do!! Military need those.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:56PM
That's not the problem for me.
More or less, yes.
The problem for me is when the teachers get lazy / sloppy and start skipping over steps in those patterns. Disjointed? Yep. Assume? Yep. I don't know about "too slow" though. I think part of the reason they skip over steps is to save time and go faster.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?