Saturday, June 20, 2009

Teaching Students to Hate Mathematics

S dM sends this link.

An excerpt....





My elder son, Kevin, is a math major. And he likes math. Fortunately, he largely lives (as I do, also) inside his own head. So it didn't really matter how he was taught. Also, to be fair, he had some pretty good math teachers in middle school and high school.

But I hear SO many kids say that they don't like math, or that they "can't do" math. Fact is, they couldn't possibly know.



Max Marty said...

Where the heck do you dig up these things? This paper made my day! It gets an A+ for the best feel-good paper I've read in awhile. It really helps with all that built-up insecurity about my seemingly sub-par intelligence that math-class helped entrench throughout school :D

Dr. Sanford Aranoff said...

These complaints about math are due to teaching math as how-to-do, rather than understanding basic principles. See "Teaching and Helping Students Think and Do Better" on amazon.

K Ackermann said...

I wanted to be a rock star, but I ended up writing scientific software for a living.

The reason? I was better at math than music.

Ironically, this was not discovered until after I finished high school. There was virtually no applied math in school.

What's better: memorizing PI, or learning how to derive it from first principles?

Understanding that the surface area of a sphere increases by the square of the radius, and that gravity falls off by the inverse square of the radius perfectly illustrates in my head that gravity just gets smeared evenly around the sphere.

Little things like that can make a big difference at an early age.

Anonymous said...

I hear ya'. Math is one cruel war out there just waiting to be won. Your blog is one of the best feel-good blogs ever!

Anonymous said...

Many students don't like the Mathematic as a subject because they have no interest in it and I will say that they should give proper attention to it!
Mathematics Advice

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