Go, us.

You can't teach kids how to think about math when the focus is on mechanical mathematical operation.

When I work with him on his homework I have to undo a lot of stuff before we can make progress. Then he goes to school and they undo all the stuff we did at home. Rinse, repeat, it can really drive you insane.

Furthermore, he's already terrified about getting the wrong answer. He's so worried about doing it wrong that he is afraid to think. When he thinks he does just fine.

As I posted to a friend on Facebook:

arithmetic : Math :: spelling : English

It's a critical component, but it's not the entirety of the subject. But we drill, drill, drill it, and when people have trouble with it they say they're "bad at math". I know plenty of mathematicians (also have a math degree) that were horrible at arithmetic, but mathematics (whether for the particular person this meant some field of algebra or geometry or topology or whatever) itself was easy for them.

I tried to help my last girlfriend out with this. She is a teacher and a severe mathphobic person. It was incredibly frustrating, because she did get higher concepts when they were separate from numbers, but introduce numbers and her mind would shutdown. This attitude will be passed on to her (future) children and her students if she's not careful.

An hour before that, I was talking with another brother why 'oh, I don't need help with that because we are no longer on that chapter' is a horrible way to think about math, especially at a grade school level where you are building up the core foundation.

Second, look for "normal" books filled with words instead of numbers that talk about math and read those. When I was homeschooling my oldest son, I spent about four years picking up books of that sort. I got a lot of them off the clearance table for as little as a dollar. After I finally got my husband on board with my plan, I handed the stack of books to my son and said "Here, read these." For the next few months, there were no tests, no quizes, no written work of any kind. I periodically asked if he was still reading them. He periodically gave me a book back that he had finished. After six weeks, he began bouncing into my presence joyously announcing "I finally understand why you can't divide by zero! I knew it was a rule, but I never understood why!"

Third, look for fun ways to explore math. There are entertaining math books like "The Number Devil" that are a fun read and will likely introduce you to new concepts if you do not have a strong math background. I also bought games for my sons to play instead of doing arithmetic drill.

Last, don't let anyone intimidate you with jargon or with their failure to explain it effectively. (Write them off as "stupid" and move on. :-p) My oldest is still incredibly bitter about learning that "x" in algebra is basically the same thing as the empty space in basic arithmetic, it is just easier to move it around and lets you have more than one "empty space" by giving it a name. So that let's you have two or more mystery numbers instead of just one.

After I explained to him that X was the same as the empty space in more familiar problems, he realized he had been doing algebra in his head for years while playing video games in order to infer, for example, how many hit points of damage a particular attack did so he would know how many hits it took to kill something. He is still bitter at the system convincing him algebra was hard and something he could not do when he had been doing it competently for years.

Also, consider jumping in at the top end and working backwards. I read about half of "A tour of the calculus" with my son to help win him over and convince him math is your friend. Think of it this way: Just because you can't spell doesn't mean you won't fall in love with writing poetry. Once you are thrilling to the pursuit of writing a good poem, you will have motive to look up the correct spelling and spelling might start sticking.

Last, if you went through the standard algebra-geometry-trig track and have baggage about that, consider pursuing a statistics track. There are some very approachable stats books for laymen, such as "How to lie with statistics," and it shouldn't trip your "oh, god, I hate math and am bad at it" switch if you haven't previously been exposed to stats. Statistics is very serious math, yet many people do not realize that. I think the first chapter or two of "The cartoon guide to statistics" is the rough equivalent of my entire college intro to stats class. It is a deep subject, yet we hear statistics every day in the news, so it can feel a lot more approachable and familiar and relevant for some people.

I have no idea what your point is.

But let me use this as an opening to suggest that men with math challenges are not being routinely encouraged to give up on challenging careers and go spend their days with small kids. In fact, men who want to spend their days with small kids face the challenge that people look askance at them and assume they have nefarious motives and are probably child molesters. So I don't think women who are bad at math being actively encouraged to go teach elementary school is evidence that women are overall inherently worse at math than men. I think it just means that when we don't readily get something, people cluck at us about how nature designed us to spend our days with small children and why don't we go do that in some capacity.

My ex husband sucked at math. I tutored him when he took college math classes. He got really frustrated sometimes and threw his pencil across the room. He did not give up and no one suggested that, well, maybe you should just go do something easy, like teach small children basic things in elementary school.

You are welcome to clarify if your remark is an ad hominem or not.

Have a good day.

Teachers being unhappy with being teacher is a problem. It's partly because teaching is often an available profession, mostly due to how many we need. There are other things to blame too: Education is bureaucratic and regimented, this makes teacher dislike the job. It's the legacy of reactions to failures in the past, an attempt to make sure that schools can't fail kids. Class sizes are way too big, often. A class of 15 9 year olds can learn more in 4 hours than a class 30 9 year olds can learn more in 8. But, we need babysitting. Teachers don't have high pay or a respected place in our society. Etc. Etc.

The reality is that it's hard to do this right. It's easy to blame. Even if you're right, it's not useful.

There were good and bad teachers in all of those. However, the good teachers may as well have not had existed in the inner city/ghetto schools. Their talents were 100% wasted, and those classrooms would have been far better served with a police officer in front of the classroom who was enabled to boot the dysfunctional future criminals from the classroom. With those students in class, there was no point in even calling it school. Call it daycare, or juvie, or whatever you like - learning wasn't much of the process though.

I find it hard to blame teachers when their job is primarily daycare, and they have zero tools available to them to deal with poorly performing and disruptive students who have no business being in the classroom.

tldr; Almost all the US education problems can directly be tied back to the parents. Full stop.

This goes for my private schooling as well. The college prep school I went to was probably more diverse than the inner city school - the only difference was the self-selection of the students and parents who attended. They also taught with about half the funds.

That said, there are tons of horrible teachers too. The problems go far deeper though, and until you solve the parenting problem you may as well shut the public school system down in many areas. No amount of epic-level teachers will be able to get anything done in those environments.

Well, that sounds like a way to make more future criminals. Maybe send the police officer to the parents instead. If the goal is to systematize the production of healthy, non-broken adults, we want to get those children more of a healthy environment, and less of an unhealthy one—send those police officers to watch the parents, and boot them out if they're making their child dysfunctional. (Really, if we had as many social workers as we had teachers, a lot of things about lower-class life could be fixed.)

tl:dr; Teacher's can only ever be a part of a solution to the complicated educational needs of our society. And given what we're willing to spend, they can't even be a particularly effective part in poorer parts of the country.

Ironically, Baltimore spends quite a lot ($15k/student) on schools. Apparently only NYC (among the top 100 districts) spends more.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-05-21/news/bs-md-ci-ce...

"In spite of what we're willing to spend..." would be a better phrasing.

But I'm anti-school in general (note: not anti-teacher), so the whole point of this side of the argument misses my interests.

You might be able to blame a teacher for a class to some effect. What I was referring to is blaming teacherdom for education. That's pointless. When a system consistently produces a result, that's the result being produced by the system. The teachers and students are part of that system, producing and being produced by it. It will continue, blame or no blame. It is just as pointless as blaming the students.

Following the money often works for discerning most dysfunctional systems.